Suburbs by Carl Abbott

Author:Carl Abbott [Abbott, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780197599266
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Artists have been well aware of scruffy edges. The Canadian painter Lawren Harris depicted self-built Toronto housing in a sort of suburban equivalent of the Ashcan school. John Steinbeck’s Monterey, California, had “Tortilla Flat,” the suburban fringe “where the streets are innocent of asphalt and the corners free of streetlights, and the old inhabitants of Monterey…live in old wooden houses set in weedy yards.” Richard Hugo’s poems returned repeatedly to his 1920s childhood in the Duwamish River neighborhoods on Seattle’s industrial south side. The narrator in his poem “What Thou Lovest Well, Remains American” describes a remembered cityscape of vacant lots overplatted in the 1930s, unpaved streets, and roses grown wild among scattered shacks—overgrown, ill-defined lots and shacks that feature as well in “Between the Bridges” and “West Marginal Way.”

Improvised housing in North American cities is not a thing of the past, although it has increasingly taken the form of an unpermitted conversion of a garage or basement into a small apartment rather than a new stand-alone structure. The house we bought in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1972 had been patriotically divided into upstairs and downstairs apartments to meet housing demand during World War II (we did not keep the bathtub in the kitchen). In tight Long Island or Los Angeles housing markets, unregulated conversions serve undocumented immigrants. When similar conversions are done to code by middle-class homeowners, they are auxiliary dwelling units and applauded as environmentally friendly infill.

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