The Golden Dream
The Golden Dream
Suburbia in the 1970s
Stephen Birmingham
Contents
The Suburban Dream
SOUTHWEST—AND A MOUNTAIN STATE
1. Blood and Money
2. The Casual Life
3. Wide Streets
MIDWEST
4. Connecticut on Lake Erie
5. Company Town
6. Small Town
7. Pointes and Points
SOUTH
8. The Country Club Set
9. Rules and Regulations
EAST
10. The Rockefellers on the Turnpike
11. Troubled Darien
12. The Lively Art of Commuting
13. Three Ryes
14. The Grandeur That Was
15. Nil Admirari
16. Summer Camps
WEST
17. “A Feeling of Separation”
CITY VS. SUBURB
18. The Price of Status
19. Swinging
20. The Vanishing Living Room and Other Phenomena
21. Back to the City?
Index
The Suburban Dream
They came to the suburbs in pursuit of a dream—the way, in the 1920s, people flocked in droves to Florida looking for a land of sun and space. They came in search of green grass and trees, away from the hassle, a place where children and pets could run and play unattended, where there was room for a garden, a terrace, a backyard swing, a swimming pool, a tennis court, or a gazebo. They came to escape the city’s dirt and noise and crime and traffic, and to escape the tyranny of rents and landlords. They came for the promise of better schools, lower taxes, less indifferent police, more convenient shopping, to find an amorphous quantity called “greater freedom,” and to leave behind the alleged anonymity of city living. Many came for racial reasons, to escape what seemed an “invasion” of blacks, or Puerto Ricans, or Jews, or Mexican-Americans. More than anything else, they came because the suburbs symbolized the Good Life, and one of the most important factors of the Good Life—in America, at least—has been to own a home of one’s own, or at least to own a part of it, and to be invited to join the country club. The suburbs symbolized “making it.” They came by the millions.
The flight to the suburbs began before the turn of the century, encouraged at first by the coach and ferry, then spurred by the development of the railroad and the automobile. By 1925, suburbanization had become as national trend. But it was not until the economically booming days of the 1960s that the trend became a roaring phenomenon. In the decade between 1960 and 1970, the twenty-five largest cities in the United States had, all together, gained about 710,000 in population. Their suburban areas, meanwhile, gained 8.9 million people—or twelve times more. The suburbs of New York, for example, now have more residents than the city itself—nearly nine million—making the New York suburbs themselves the largest “city” in the country.
The escapees to the suburbs have found many of the things they were looking for: the grass, the trees, the cleaner air, and so on. But they have also found other things which they did not bargain for. They have found spiraling taxes, soaring real estate prices, schools that often seem less than satisfactory. They have found drugs, and crime, and dirt and noise from the freeways. They have found zoning battles, bond-issue fights, dirty politics, corruption in government, water shortages, crab grass, red spider, and the Dutch elm disease. They have watched the encroachment of industry, of high-rises, of tract developers, and of shopping centers set amid acres of asphalt. They have watched the racial minorities they hoped to avoid follow them, and they have cursed at suburban rush-hour traffic jams. They have discovered the value of the spite fence, and they have discovered boredom. Most of all, they have also discovered that curious anomie, that sense of disorientation, that indefinable “feeling of separation,” which living in suburbia so often seems to convey.
SOUTHWEST—AND A MOUNTAIN STATE
1
Blood and Money
When the Keith Jacksons of Houston, Texas, became, like so many young Texans, suddenly petroleum rich, the first thing they felt they needed was “a good address!” In Houston, the only good address worth mentioning is River Oaks—a suburb that, because of its proximity to the city, is convenient for businessmen and that, because of the sheer opulence of its residences, is probably unmatched among American show-off communities.
Jackson, who was too busy to house-shop himself, dispatched his wife to drive around River Oaks and select a house she liked. In River Oaks, a zoning ordinance prevents owners from putting “For Sale” signs on properties, but that didn’t particularly worry the Jacksons, who figured that whether or not a house was actually for sale didn’t much matter, since the Jacksons were prepared to offer the owner of whatever house Mrs. Jackson fancied a price the owner couldn’t refuse. For several days, Mrs. Jackson prowled the shady, Spanish-moss-hung streets of River Oaks, peering through majestic gateways and down long drives, examining façades. Finally, she announced that she had found the house of her dreams. “It’s nice and big,” she explained, “and has beautiful grounds. There’s a pool, there are tennis courts, and there’s even a golf course.” When the Jacksons prepared to make their offer, however, they discovered that the place Mrs. Jackson had in mind was the River Oaks Country Club. The Jacksons weren’t able to buy the country club, but they did end up with quite a nice place—a two-million-dollar house which contains, among other things, a Steuben Glass staircase. At the time, a friend commented, “I didn’t know Steuben Glass made staircases.” “Neither did Steuben Glass,” replied the Jacksons, “until we ordered it.”
River Oaks relishes its tales of residential extravagance, and takes great civic pride in each new splurge. When, for example, the Kenneth Schnitzers—who are big in supermarkets—bought their house, Joan Schnitzer wanted a tennis court. But there was no room for one. So the Schnitzers simply bought the place next door, took an acre for their tennis court, and sold what was left. Mrs. Collier Hurley travels around town in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac that has a bar. When she travels to New York, for shopping, as she frequently does, she flies with her four poodles and a small freezer full of fresh, extra-thick lamb chops, which, she insists, are the only meat her dogs will eat. Mrs. Anthony Villa, who is famous locally for the size and number of the diamonds she wears, has a thing about pineapples, and so, when the Villas bought their River Oaks house, Mrs. Villa ordered an array of enormous ornamental pineapples placed on the rooftop. The place has become a landmark, and a neighbor giving directions to his house may say, “I live three doors down from the pineapple house.” When Earl Dow—who runs an expensive fast-food chain—bought his River Oaks house, he had it painted to match the colors of Neiman-Marcus shopping bags—chocolate brown and beige. And so it goes. Costly idiosyncrasies are applauded in River Oaks.
River Oaks likes nothing better than to entertain visiting royalty. Mr. and Mrs. Robert Herring have achieved something of a record in this category, since they have been host to four heads of state in the last two years, with a perhaps understandable emphasis on Arab leaders, and the Herrings spare no expense. At a party for King Hussein of Jordan, for example, Joanne Herring and her decorator turned one large room into a “shah’s discotheque”—an indoor Arabian Nights tent with lush pillows scattered about the zebra-patterned floor. Joanne Herring had assigned various Houston beauties to lounge, harem fashion, on the cushions when the king made his entrance, but somehow a cue was missed and when Hussein entered the tent, all the women were standing. “I thought you were all going to be lying around on the floor!” cried Mrs. Herring. “Quick! Get on the cushions.” The ladies complied, and a Mexican mariachi band—a Texas touch—struck
up a tune. On her cushion, a young Houston woman named Annie Owen found herself seated next to the king. She reached for a cigarette, and the king reached for his lighter. When Miss Owen admired the lighter—gold, embossed with the royal insignia—Hussein proved that he could be as extravagant as any Texan, and asked her to keep it. At first Miss Owen demurred, but he insisted. “If I don’t take the lighter, will you be insulted?” she asked. “I will,” replied the king. So Miss Owen kept the lighter. Though King Hussein’s visit at the Herrings’ lasted only thirty minutes—he had to dash on to a meeting with former U.N. ambassador George Bush—it was all considered worth it.
River Oaks loves its reputation for outrageousness. “Everything they say about us here is true,” is a comment the visitor hears frequently at local dinner parties, between discussions of the merits of Cavalier jets and the relative reliability of various Beechcraft agencies in the area. (In River Oaks, airplanes are compared with as much enthusiasm as automobiles are in Grosse Pointe, Detroit’s suburb.) River Oaks likes to boast that some of its leading society ladies are former call girls, and it is definitely chic here to have a past that is shady or worse. When someone makes it big in River Oaks, it is a cause for general rejoicing, another reminder that people get richer quicker in Texas, and spend their money more ebulliently, than anywhere else on earth. When a River Oaks girl named Sandra Hovas married Baron Enrico di Portanova, everyone applauded, and they applauded even more when she changed her name from Sandra to Alessandra. (“Remember, I’m the Baroness Alessandra di Portanova,” the baroness reminded society reporter Shelby Hodge at the King Hussein party.) Houston itself supports a wealthy and socially active gay community. At the Old Plantation—an expensive nightclub hard by River Oaks—men dance with men and women dance with women, and nobody thinks a thing about it. But within the confines of River Oaks, a firm line is drawn. Everyone wishing to buy a house in River Oaks must pass a screening committee, and one of the firmest rules is that no house can be purchased jointly by two gentlemen or two ladies. For years, no Jews were permitted to buy in River Oaks, though an exception was made in the case of the department store Sakowitzes. And there are still no blacks here, though there was a fuss stirred up a while back when it was rumored that Muhammad Ali was shopping for River Oaks property (he wasn’t, as it turned out).
River Oaks people also have a zesty, pioneer fondness for good old-fashioned bloodshed, and nothing is more welcomed than a spicy murder scandal. When socialite Joan Robinson Hill, the daughter of oilman Ash Robinson, was allegedly poisoned by her plastic surgeon husband, who was then, in turn, dispatched by a killer allegedly hired by her father, River Oaks couldn’t have liked the ensuing trial more. The killings later became the subject of a book called Blood and Money by Thomas Thompson, and River Oaks got excited all over again. Visitors were routinely driven past the house where Dr. Hill was murdered. “There—right in that doorway—is where the killer shot down John Hill.” Hill had never been convicted of killing his wife, but in the mind of River Oaks there was no question that he did it. “The minute I heard she was dead, I said to myself, ‘John did it,’” says one woman.
There was spirited talk, too, about the civil-court trial of millionaire Ash Robinson for, allegedly, having hired a gun to kill his son-in-law.
“There isn’t a juror in this town who would find against Ash Robinson,” said one woman. “Too many people in this town love old Ash. Too many people loved Joan and hated that creep husband of hers, and admire old Ash.”
In the event, Ash Robinson was cleared by the civil-court jury. But the case was a popular topic of dinner-table conversation in River Oaks, where they say, “Don’t we have the best old murders here? Don’t we have the best old time? Aren’t we somethin’?”
In addition to the splendid quality of local murders, River Oaks likes to boast of the splendid shopping. There is the sparkling new Galleria shopping center, for example, which contains, among other things, “the most beautiful branch of Neiman-Marcus.” Then there is Jamail’s, which can only be described as a supermarket for the super-rich. Jamail’s abounds in all sorts of costly delights, such as fresh fruits out of season and vegetables imported from all over the world, displayed and arranged as though for a Tiffany window. The live Maine lobsters may cost twelve dollars a pound, but Jamail’s will have them. “You can buy anything at Jamail’s,” they say, and an account at Jamail’s is as important to River Oaks as a Neiman’s charge plate. Jamail’s will prepare exotic hors d’oeuvres and deliver them to your party. Jamail’s will also prepare whole meals and cater parties from a menu of a hostess’s choosing. A number of River Oaks families, too busy to be bothered with cooking and tired of coping with the kitchen-staff problem, simply give Jamail’s carte blanche and have all their meals delivered to their homes on a daily basis.
Extravagances like having Jamail’s do your cooking are brushed aside in River Oaks as mere practicalities—a simple way of solving life’s little problems. In the same spirit, Mrs. Harvey Steinburger built a new house of “only” fourteen-thousand square feet because, she explained, “All the children are off and gone, and I needed a place for some of my pretty things.” Some of her pretty things included all the chandeliers from New York’s old Astor Hotel, one of which hangs ninety-two feet from her living room ceiling. And in the same spirit, elderly residents of River Oaks keep suites of rooms at Methodist Hospital on a permanent basis, “Just in case we should ever need them.” It’s merely practical.
Though, as in Phoenix, there is no downtown living in Houston, there have been attempts to spruce up older, run-down areas of the city outside River Oaks, and to make these once-fashionable neighborhoods fashionable again. Such efforts have met with a certain limited success. In the old Heights area of town, for example, there are many fine old Victorian mansions—with high-ceilinged rooms, bay windows, turrets and towers—built for an earlier generation of Houston rich. In recent years they had fallen into disrepair. Though no part of Houston is very “high,” the Heights houses had views of sorts, and several years ago, bright-eyed young designers and architects discovered that mansions in the Heights could be bought for a fraction of their original cost and, with a little money and imagination, stripped down and renovated to something approaching their original glory. Greenhouses and swimming pools were added and, all at once, the Heights became fashionable again. Or somewhat fashionable. The trouble was that as restoring old houses in the Heights became chic, the owners of old houses in the area became greedy. Real estate prices shot up to the point where decaying mansions are no longer much of a bargain. And so restoration projects in the Heights have come to a standstill, and the Heights remains partly a good address and partly not.
Older Houston families like to point out that though Houston’s oil fortunes are spectacular, there was wealth in Houston long before the petroleum industry. Lumber was once big business here, and second to that came cotton. Old Houston pre-oil families included the Garrows, the Clevelands, the Neuhauses, Carters, Dicksons, Myerses, and Autrys (cowboy actor Gene Autry is kin of the Houston Autrys). Nearly all these families’ in-town mansions are gone now. The sites of the old H. B. Rice house on Crawford Street and the James A. Baker house on Main Street are now parking lots, and the Italianate palace the James Butes built on Milam Street has given way to the Tenneco Building tower. But at least one in-town street has managed to retain much of what was its original suburban charm, and that is Courtlandt Place.
Courtlandt Place was planned as a walled, gated, limited-access street for the wealthy, who, by the turn of the century, were moving away from downtown’s Main Street and wanted something that at the time seemed very much like “country.” According to the rules drawn up by the founding fathers of the Courtlandt Improvement Company in 1906, the purpose of Courtlandt Place was to “create a district restricted to the erection of residences of good class and to surround such and the locality generally with conditions assuring as far as possible freedom from noise, dust, constant t
raffic and other annoyances incident to a populous city.” The founders of this idyllic enclave also decreed that “No business house or houses, sanitarium, hospital, saloon, place of public entertainment, livery stable, resort or dance hall or other place of business shall ever be erected on said lot, or any part thereof.” And they meant ever.
What were erected, instead, were large homes of brick and granite. Architects from the East were imported, as was then the fashion—including the firm of Warren and Wetmore, who designed New York’s Ritz-Carlton and Biltmore hotels, as well as 17 Courtlandt Place. Courtlandt Place houses were built with detailed interior paneling, dumbwaiters, wine and preserve cellars, vast kitchens with servants’ callboards, hand-cut crystal doorknobs. And since the Eastern architects didn’t know about the problem of Houston “gumbo”—the muddy ooze that runs off silty soil when it rains—most Courtlandt Place mansions were built with commodious, if occasionally damp, basements.
But as the suburbs grew, fashionable Houston began moving out to Memorial Drive and River Oaks. One by one, the old families moved away and by now most of the big houses have changed hands several times. An exception was the so-called Carter Complex, and three of four houses built for members of the Carter family are still family-owned. (Victor Carter III, a grandson of the original Courtlandt Place owner, Victor Carter II, recently renovated and moved into his grandfather’s old home.) At the same time, Courtlandt Place managed to find favor with new arrivals from out of town (one Louisiana couple thought Courtlandt Place reminiscent of New Orleans’s Vieux Carré), and so the stately flavor of the street was preserved.
In the early 1920s, residents of the newly developed subdivision of Montrose demanded easy access to downtown Houston, and the easiest access seemed to be straight through Courtlandt Place. Down came the brick wall that barred the way, and through came the traffic, carrying with it the cul-de-sac’s air of privacy. Better transportation to and from the city was called for, and along came the Montrose trolley, which ran down Hawthorne, turned left on Taft, and clanged to a stop at the east gates of Courtlandt Place. Peace and quiet vanished. But still Courtlandt Place held on, refusing to succumb to the growing city around it. Nearby streets filled with businesses and business traffic, and yet Courtlandt Place—now a suburb within a city—remained undaunted. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the neighboring streets filled with “hippies” and undesirables, but Courtlandt Place stood firm.