Many of America's suburbs are significant historic properties. Even though many preservationists think of suburbs as relatively recent developments and a new type of cultural landscape, built mostly since the end of World War II, Americans have, in fact, been extending their cities outward through suburban development since at least the middle of the nineteenth century. Although suburbs built since World War II were made possible by the automobile, accessibility to earlier suburbs was provided successively by the ferryboat, by the horse-drawn carriage, by the train, by the horse-drawn omnibus, by the electric street car and, after 1908, by the automobile. These earlier generations of American suburbs are generally called by the form of transportation that spawned them--the railroad suburbs from 1850 to the 1880s, the streetcar suburbs from the late 1880s to the 1920s, the early automobile suburbs from the 1920s to 1945, and the late automobile, or freeway suburbs, from 1945 to the present. Each era produced a distinctive suburban landscape.

The residential subdivision has been, and is, the building block of the suburban landscape. The residential subdivision traces its origins to the eighteenth-century suburbs of London and in the United States to the Romantic landscape movement of the beginning of the mid-nineteenth century. The two residential developments recognized as the design prototypes of the modern subdivision--siting single-family houses in a park-like setting with curved roads--were Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, designed by Alexander Jackson Davis and laid out in 1851 just west of New York City, and Riverside, Illinois, west of Chicago, designed by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted in 1868. Although available only to the wealthy, these developments of single-family houses on curving streets in a naturalistic setting captured an emerging American aspiration for residential life in a semi-rural environment, apart from the negative qualities of the city but close enough for daily contact with work in the city.

In the second half of the nineteenth-century, a suburban ideal crystallized among Americans led by the upper class elite. Even those of modest incomes would adopt the ideal in small, detached houses on narrow lots on rectilinear plats, served first by horse-drawn and later by electrical trolleys. Advances in transportation, from fixed-rail trolleys--first horse-drawn and then electrically driven--to the more mobile and faster automobile opened new land and lowered the cost of construction, making it possible for more and more Americans to live in a suburban environment. Thus, the suburban landscapes that developed around American cities after World War II, representing the fulfillment of the dream of home ownership and material well-being for a majority of Americans, were but the last in a succession of historic suburban landscapes.

Yet, the post-World War II suburbs, a part of the largest building boom in American history, represent a new form of suburban landscape in the extensive territory they occupied, the manner in which they were mass-produced, and the resulting dispersed pattern of settlement. (Muller, 45) In fact, they created the modern metropolitan area. Under the requirement that properties must be at least 50 years old to be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, these properties will become eligible for the Register in increasing numbers in the next few years, presenting a major challenge to National Register activities at the local, State, and federal levels.

This bulletin offers guidance to Federal agencies, State Historic Preservation Offices, Certified Local Governments, preservation professionals, and interested individuals in the successful preparation of nominations to the National Register of Historic Places and requests for determinations of eligibility for historic districts characterized as historic suburbs.

Defining Suburbs

Suburbanization is the process of land development on or near the edge of an existing city. In the United States, residential land use has led this process. As used in this bulletin, a historic suburb is defined as a homogeneous residential area built near the edge of the existing city from which residents commute daily to jobs in the central city. Jackson, in his book Crabgrass Frontier, has described the modern American suburb as follows: "Affluent and middle class Americans live in suburban areas that are far from their work places, in homes that they own, and in the center of yards that by urban standards elsewhere are enormous." Fishman, another historian of America's suburbanization, stresses that the suburb must be large enough and homogeneous enough to form a distinctive low density environment defined by the primacy of the single family house set in the greenery of an open parklike setting. (Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias, 5) These residential landscapes originated in the middle of the nineteenth century as part of a larger trend of the decentralization of the American city.

Before the advent of mechanized personal transportation, all but the most well-to-do city dwellers had to live within walking distance of their place of work. By reducing travel time, mechanized transportation such as the electric trolley and self-propelled automobile opened new land for development and permitted single-purpose residential areas to be built away from the central city. Farmland near the city was acquired, planned, and developed by developers as tracts or subdivisions intended for few or many houses. The subdivisions were designed to be residential landscapes separate from but connected to the city and to combine the open space and greenery of the country with an efficient layout of houses and transportation. At the same time, suburbs were often the only place to find new housing.

Two aspects of the definition of historic suburbs used in this bulletin differ from conventional definitions. Suburbs are usually considered to be incorporated or unincorporated communities of moderate density lying outside the legal limits of the central city. (Palen, 13) This bulletin defines a suburb as a largely homogeneous residential area built at the edge of the existing city at a lower density than the city, usually in units containing single-family houses on small parcels of land. Thus, historical suburban development is defined by its locational relationship, when constructed, to the existing built-up city, not to the legal city, and by the character of its landscape in contrast to that of the city. For example, many residential areas that were built as streetcar suburbs in the 1890s have since been incorporated into the central city. With the streetcars and the tracks that created them now gone and housing built at densities higher than that associated with suburbs today, these areas are thought today to be more urban than suburban in origin. Conversely, residential areas within many newer cities that grew in the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the Midwest and western United States, exhibit such suburban landscape characteristics as single-family houses, homogeneous residential neighborhoods, and curvilinear street patterns. In other words, the type of low-density residential developments built first as suburbs in eastern or older midwestern cities have come to typify residential developments within newer western cities. Los Angeles, which has been called the suburban metropolis, is the culmination of this process and is a city in which the single-family house in a subdivision is the building block of the entire city. (Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias, 155)

The second aspect is that as a trend, suburbanization has progressively cut across lines of social class and income from the wealthy to the working classes. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, advances in transportation have made suburban land and homes affordable to an increasingly broader spectrum of the American population, by both reducing commuting time and increasing the supply of land while reducing its cost. Although the suburbs of the upper class were distinguished by impressive houses set on the large landscaped lots, the aspiration for the freestanding house in a subdivision began to be pursued by middle--and even working-class--families very early and can be seen in developments of modest bungalows on small lots within gridded street patterns by the turn of the century. Suburban development affected nearly all socioeconomic groups, from the very wealthy to the working classes, although historically the middle class, especially after World War II, was the largest group to suburbanize.

The residential suburb is characterized by the subdivision of a relatively large parcel of land into smaller regularly sized parcels according to a plan that provides for a street system and utilities as well as the placement of individual dwellings. Geographer M. R. G. Conzen has suggested that the fabric of an urban landscape consists of three interlocking elements. The first is the overall land use pattern, which shows the specialized uses of land and space. The second is land plan, or town plan, which consists of the street system, the pattern of parcels or lots, and the building arrangement within this pattern. This is the framework of development of residential subdivisions. The third element is the building fabric, composed of three-dimensional buildings and structures on the land. These elements provide a means of thinking about a suburban subdivision and development and relating the processes and components to it.

The historic suburb can best be thought of as occurring in layers. The first layer establishes the land use, that is the activities that occur on the land. Second is the plan by which the land is divided and organized and provisions are made for a circulation network, including streets and pedestrian paths, and for utilities, including water, lighting, telephone, and sewerage disposal. The third layer consists of the building fabric, primarily in the form of dwellings, garages, community facilities, walls, and fences.

A HISTORIC CONTEXT APPROACH FOR EVALUATING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF AMERICAN SUBURBS

To qualify for the National Register, a property must represent a significant part of history, architecture, archeology, engineering or culture of an area, and it must have the characteristics that make it a good representative of properties associated with that aspect of the past. Historic suburbs are historic districts comprised of sites (including the overall plan, house lots, and community spaces), buildings (primarily houses), structures (including walls, streets and roads both serving the suburb and connecting it to the larger metropolitan area), and objects (signs, fountains, statuary, etc.). A residential suburban development is considered a historic district because it possesses a significant concentration, linkage, or continuity of sites, buildings, structures, or objects united historically or aesthetically by plan or physical development.

The eligibility of a historic suburb for listing in the National Register of Historic Places is evaluated according to the National Register Criteria for Evaluation. Eligible properties are those:

An eligible suburb must meet one of the above criteria and possess integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association. Special criteria considerations, identified by the letters A to G, also apply to cemeteries, birthplaces, or graves of historical figures, properties owned by religious institutions or used for religious purposes, structures, that have been moved from their original locations, reconstructed buildings, properties primarily commemorative in nature, and properties that have achieved significance within the past 50 years. Because of its relevance to the history of America's suburbs, this bulletin provides guidance for applying Criteria Consideration G whereby a property achieving significance within the past 50 years may be eligible for listing if it is of exceptional importance. Guidance for applying other criteria considerations can be found in National Register bulletin, How to Apply the National Register Criteria for Evaluation.

The National Register criteria are applied within the context of the history and development of a locality, State or the nation. National Register nominations must show that the historic suburb is

Historic contexts are those patterns, themes, or trends in history by which a historic property is understood and its meaning (and ultimately its significance) within history or prehistory is determined. For the purposes of the National Register program, a historic context is defined by theme, geographic area, and chronological period; identifies significant property types; and specifies registration requirements for National Register listing. National Register bulletin, How to Complete the National Register Multiple Property Documentation Form, provides guidelines for developing historic contexts.

If the property being evaluated represents an important aspect of the area’s history and possesses the requisite quality of integrity, then it qualifies for the National Register. Historic suburbs that introduced important trends or design principles for suburbanization that were adopted nationally or regionally or were particularly influential as prototypes for the design of subsequent suburbs may merit study for designation as National Historic Landmarks.

Although adapted to local and regional conditions, American suburbs manifest national trends related to urban and metropolitan development. This bulletin presents a national historic context on suburbanization that will provide the basis for interpreting the significance of suburbanization at the local, state, and national levels of evaluation and for identifying significant properties. The bulletin also suggests an outline for developing historic contexts on suburbanization for a particular State or locality.

Suburban Historic Context Themes and Trends - The evolution of the American suburb is an important aspect of city and urban planning in the United States. The history of suburbanization reflects the interplay of five major historic trends:

Demographically, suburbanization is the growth of population on the edge of cities. In the second half of the nineteenth century, American cities grew rapidly as they industrialized. The increasingly degraded conditions of the city, coupled with a growing demand for housing in an environment that melded nature with community created pressures for suburbanization. A succession of transportation advances, most notably the introduction of the electric streetcar in 1888 and the mass-produced automobile in 1910, allowed an increasingly broad spectrum of households to suburbanize. By the first decades of the twentieth century, suburbanization had become an important part of urban growth - generated primarily by streetcar suburbs. In 1910, the U.S. Census acknowledged this peripheral growth by recognizing 44 metropolitan districts, - areas which included central cities of more than 100,000 and surrounding jurisdictions within a 10-mile radius (Goldfield and Brownell, 289). In one sense, suburbs are responsible for a major event in American history - the emergence of the metropolitan area.

By the 1920s, which has been called the first suburban decade in the United States, suburban areas were growing at a faster rate than central cities - 33.2 percent in the decade compared to 24.2 percent. (Foster, 48) After World War II, the suburban population exploded. During the 1940s, core cities grew by an average of 14 percent while the suburbs grew by 36 percent. For the first time, the absolute growth of the population of suburbs outstripped that of core areas, an increase of 9 million people compared to an increase of 6 million (Judd and Swanstrom, 187). The gap increased in the 1950s when suburbs gained 19 million new residents compared to only 6 million gained by the core cities. This was the post-World War II suburban boom. By 1960 more metropolitan residents lived in the suburbs than in the central city, and by 1990 the majority of all Americans lived in suburban areas. Hence, the creation of the historic suburban landscape reflects national population trends and the urbanization of the United States.

Thus the process of creating suburban landscapes was initiated by a growing demand for housing located on the rural fringe of the city, away from its industrial pollution and urban stresses. The American ideal of suburban life, of living in single-family houses in a self-contained curvilinear parklike subdivision, was created by the wealthy who could afford to build and commute to the Romantic suburban models that fueled the aspirations of the middle and working classes. Their aspirations were increasingly met as advances in personal transportation - railroad to horsecar to streetcar to automobile - opened new fringe land for development. A last barrier to broad suburbanization came down in the 1930s with the passage of legislation creating the subsidized long-term low interest home mortgage that financed the great post-World War II suburban boom.

Geographic Zone - The geographical extent of suburbanization around cities has been defined by the limits of personal transportation in which people could commute daily to work in the city and within the suburban fringes. These geographical limits, the extent of the suburbs, expanded as personal transportation became more mobile and relatively less expensive. The extent and shape of the geographic zone is discussed in the section on transportation trends. In chronicling the geographic growth of the suburbs, the growth of American metropolitan areas is described.

Chronological Periods - The suburban trends combine into four major chronological periods of American suburbanization:

Within each period, a distinctive suburban landscape emerged with a unique combination of transportation systems, plan of residential development, housing types, and landscape design.

As each improvement in transportation allowed suburban development to extend outward, each suburb type created a new tier of development away from the city. Thinking of the succession of suburb types as a series of tree rings around the central city provides a useful analogy, if one recognizes that suburban development often took place unevenly at the margins of a city.

Property Types - Property types are classes of historic properties sharing certain attributes. Each historic context will have a specific set of property types associated with it. The basic property types associated with suburbanization--its physical building blocks--are the subdivision and the single family house on its suburban lot. Transportation facilities and related vehicles and structures are a second type of suburban property types. Other major property types include cultural and community structures and commercial developments.

The careful description and analysis of property types will determine the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction of properties associated with a particular aspect of a suburbanization historic context, the type of subdivisions and houses associated with the streetcar suburbs as contrasted with those of the early automobile suburbs, for example. It is also through the careful definition of property types that the integrity of individual properties can be evaluated.

This section is organized around the four major chronological periods of suburbanization and provides an introduction to suburbanization in the United States and a framework for beginning to place local metropolitan areas in a national historic context.

The suburban developments that established what would become the model for the modern subdivision were upper-class railroad suburbs. According to Spiro Kostof, "In the United States, the picturesque suburb learned from the example of England, especially the 18th-century garden, and the landscaped cottages of J.C. Loudon and reinterpreted for an American audience by Andrew Jackson Downing." Kostof believes that the first picturesque suburb in the U.S. was probably Glendale, Ohio, founded in 1851 (Kostof, 47). The two most influential picturesque developments were Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, designed by Alexander Jackson Davis and built in 1857 and Riverside, just west of Chicago, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., and Calvert Vaux in 1869. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the design principles of Llewellyn Park and Riverside were widely emulated for the well-to-do and became the physical embodiment of an American suburban ideal (Sies, 210). Both of these developments were railroad suburbs from which residents commuted to New York and Chicago, respectively.

The second stage of suburbanization was ushered in by the electric streetcar, which was introduced in 1888. An innovation quickly adopted by many cities, the electric streetcar fostered a suburban explosion by 1900, the first large wave of suburbanization. It also introduced a growing class of middle and upper middle-class families to the suburban fringes. Increasingly, working classes were catered to by developers and joined the movement. Concentrated along radial street car lines, streetcar suburbs formed radial corridors extending out from the city, giving it a star shape.

The third stage of suburbanization was launched by the introduction in 1908 of the mass-produced automobile by Henry Ford. Its rapid adoption by Americans led to the creation of the automobile-oriented suburb of single-family houses sited in subdivisions that became the quintessential American landscape of the twentieth century.

The fourth and largest surge of suburbanization in the United States came after World War II and was fueled by advances in transportation technology and a demographic event, the Baby Boom, coupled with a housing shortage. This most rapid spread of suburbs in the nation’s history was facilitated by freeway construction culminating in the interstate highway system. The post-World War II suburban housing boom, manifested in the so-called freeway or bedroom suburbs, were further creations of rubber tire transportation, as trucks joined cars to support growing commercial and even industrial activities at the city fringes. In this period, Federally subsidized housing mortgages, especially for veterans, greatly spurred the growth of homeownership. By 1990, most Americans lived in the suburbs.

Each of these suburban periods produced its own characteristic landscape with distinctive stages of physical development. Initially a transportation system of vehicles and rights-of-way made land available for suburbanization. Residential development of subdivisions and housing immediately followed. The construction of public community facilities such as churches and schools and finally the construction of commercial facilities followed to serve the residential population. Since the 1970s, an additional stage has occurred where jobs have relocated to the suburbs.

The rapid expansion of steam railroads westward from major northeastern cities, starting in the 1830s, was designed for the long-distance transportation of goods between cities. By the eve of the Civil War, a national rail system had begun to emerge, connecting major cities as far west as Chicago (Martin, 47). Looking for new revenues, railroad companies started to build stations for passengers where they passed though rural villages on the outskirts of cities (Jackson, 35). These stations became the focal points of railroad suburbs strung along the railroad tracks radiating from cities. By the Civil War, railroad commuting was well established in many cities including New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Lines extended north from New York City to Westchester, County and New Haven, Connecticut and east to Long Island in the 1840s and west and south into New Jersey in the 1850s (Jackson, 37). By 1850, there were 83 commuter stations within a 15-mile radius of the city of Boston (Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: Redefinition of Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century America, 152). In Philadelphia more than 40 trains a day were commuting to the northwest suburb of Germantown by 1859. On the west coast in 1864, a railroad built south from San Francisco stimulated the rapid growth of a string of five suburban railroad towns from Burlingame to Atherton (Vance, 43).

But it was Chicago, which developed almost wholly within the railroad era and accommodated more than 100,000 residents from 1850 to 1860 (Keating, 14), that developed the most extensive railroad suburbs. Eleven separate railroad lines entered the city between 1847 and 1861 (Stilgoe, 140), and by 1873, there were more than 100 railroad suburbs surrounding the city (Goldfield and Brownell, 259). A Chicago railroad suburb, Riverside, would become the model for American suburban development.

Railroad suburbs offered the upper middle class an escape from the city. It was an escape that, according to Robert Fishman, gave them the opportunity to create truly suburban communities that incorporated natural elements into a domestic landscape. The railroad simultaneously gave them rapid access to the center of the city while the high cost of railroad commuting protected and insulated their communities from invasion by urban lower and working classes (Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias, 138). At the same time, influenced by the railroad, the horse-drawn omnibus had been converted to rail, creating horsecars that allowed horses to pull twice the load at twice the speed, revolutionized urban travel, and became the first mass transit systems (McShane and Tarr, 111). The horsecars extended the distance one could commute in a half hour from two to three miles and expanded the land available for new residential development on the edge of the city from 13 to nearly 30 square miles (McShane and Tarr, 111). Horsecar tracks followed the main roads radiating out from the center of the city toward the emerging wealthy, often railroad, suburbs on the periphery. While the well-to-do were building exclusive railroad suburbs in the outer periphery, the middle and working classes were founding new horsecar suburbs on the city’s edge.

Thus, the structure of rail transportation, to which streetcars would be added in the 1890s, came to outline the geography of classes with each group distributed along the system according to how far it could afford to travel from the center and which line it could afford to take (Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias, 138). John Stilgoe has called the outermost periphery of exclusive suburban railroad towns sited on lines radiating from the city in an otherwise rural landscape the borderlands. Among the characteristics of the borderlands, according to Stilgoe, are "houses so far apart that even in winter they cast shadows on their own lots . . . , Are ordered about a carriage and horseback pace, not a pedestrian one ;. . . And are distant enough from cities to be free of pigeons." (Stilgoe, 11) It was within the borderlands, with their protected railroad suburbs and the wealth with which to experiment and build new suburban communities that the classic American suburbs were created. These included not only Llewellyn Park and Riverside but others such as Isle of the Lake in Minneapolis, Oak Park outside of Chicago, Roland Park in Baltimore, and Scarsdale and Brookline outside of New York and Boston respectively, to name a few.

The importance of these exclusive planned suburbs in understanding the historic suburbs of the United States lies not only in their prototypical design of curvilinear subdivisions of single-family houses, but in the values they reflected. It was in these exclusive upper middle class developments, through debate and experimentation, that the values of the American suburban ideal were formulated between the 1870s and the turn of the century (Sies, 199). This suburban ideal--as reflected in a consensus about a model suburb, the model house and life-style--was diffused throughout American society and would become the motivation for suburbanization among all income and social groups. The suburban trends of the twentieth century reflected the playing out of these values by all classes, culminating in the post World War II boom when a veteran could buy a suburban dream for a two percent down payment.

The event that allowed the middle and even working class to begin to suburbanize was the introduction of the electric streetcar in Richmond, Virginia, in 1888. This electrified vehicle allowed people to travel in 10 minutes as far they could walk in 30 minutes (Knox, 89) and inaugurated the era of streetcar suburbs from Boston to Los Angeles. As advances in transportation increased household mobility, each succeeding landscape was built at a lower density. Streetcar suburbs extended in linear spokes along the streetcar lines outward from the city on these fixed rails, creating a star-shaped metropolitan area. Houses were built within a 5-or-10 minute walk of the streetcar line. The streetcar neighborhoods tended to be made up of rectilinear subdivisions abutting the streetcar line. Often the streets themselves were extensions of the familiar grid pattern of the older city. Unlike railroad suburbs which grew in nodes around rail stations, streetcar suburbs were continuous corridors because streetcars could stop in each block.

Although houses of the streetcar suburbs were generally on their own lots, the lots were small. One thing that motivated Americans to suburbanize was the ideal of a freestanding house; by the 1840s, reformers saw the single-family house as a means of countering the conditions of the high-density industrializing city (Ford, 134). The widespread adoption of the balloon-frame method of construction, invented in Chicago in the 1830s, had reduced residential construction costs substantially by mid-century. The balloon frame was a light framing system in which 2-by-4-inch studs, nailed together in such a way that every strain went in the direction of the wood, for the heavy beams and posts of the traditional framing system. By reducing the cost of construction, Kenneth T. Jackson believes that the balloon frame was as important as mass transportation in making the private home available to middle-income families (Jackson, 125). By the 1860s, the opening of new land by the horsecar and omnibus, and later by the trolley in the 1890s, made room for the freestanding house, although initially on very narrow lots. New freestanding house types emerged; houses were placed sideways on narrow lots of 25-foot fronts with their gable-ends facing the street. In a period of numerous revival styles, the houses were decorated in a variety of architectural motifs from Greek to Gothic to Second Empire. As the century concluded, lot size and houses became larger.

Streetcar suburbs ranged socioeconomically from working to upper-middle class, with the great majority being middle class. Especially in smaller cities of the Midwest and West that developed after 1890, the streetcar was the primary transportation to work for all income groups.

Neighborhood-oriented commercial facilities such as grocery stores, bakeries, and drugstores clustered at the intersections of streetcar lines and along major routes. Barns and stables were not included in these new residential landscapes.

The mobility introduced by the automobile after 1908 spawned a new type of residential development. Automobiles sold astronomically: in 1894, according to the Federal Highway Administration, four motor vehicles were in use in the United States, 16 in 1896, 8,000 in 1900, almost one-half a million in 1910, nine and a quarter million in 1920, and nearly 27 million in 1930 (Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics: Summary to 1985, as quoted in Knox, 107). The automobile allowed land between the streetcar line spokes to be developed to fill in the star-shaped city. With commuters no longer needing to live within walking distance of the streetcar line, new residential developments could be built at lower densities and designed to be self-contained with curving interior streets providing more privacy and sense of country.

The first decades of the twentieth century also witnessed a change in suburban house types. By the end of the century, the more ornate Victorian houses, with their complex floor plans and likely need for servants, lost favor to a smaller simpler house with a more open floor plan - the bungalow. Appearing in the 1890s, the bungalow reflected the need for an affordable single-family house for households without servants. This house type was characterized by "a compact single story plan, a prominent hipped roof, usually with a sloping segment presented to the street and with a spacious porch across the front of the house, most of these houses were built during the 1920s (Rowe, 68)." The demand for the smaller, architecturally plainer house also reflected the suburbanization of families with more modest incomes. These houses, and a style known as the four-square, were also sold by catalog and were the first mass- produced houses in the United States.

As suburbs grew faster than cities, the 1920s became known as the first suburban decade (Goldfield and Brownell, 289). By the end of the 1920s, a distinctive automobile suburban landscape began to take shape and the modern curvilinear subdivision was beginning to emerge. The template of the picturesque, upper-class residential developments such as Riverside and Llewellyn had been modified by Garden City influences from England and had been adapted to the automobile by experiments such as Radburn in New Jersey.

The historic integrity of the suburban development lies in both the site plan and the houses it holds, as well as the design relationship between the two. As important as the development of the model subdivision site plan in the 1920s and 1930s was its institutionalization through zoning and subdivision regulations. In 1928, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of zoning in which the exclusively residential development of single-family houses was supported as the most inviolate of land use zones. In 1934, the Federal Housing Administration supported the curvilinear subdivision as the preferred layout for developments it would insure.

Yet the subdivision was only the setting for the dominant feature of the suburban landscape, the single-family house, and just as the form and plan of the residential subdivision evolved during the first four decades of this century, so too did the single-family house that it sited. Rowe has reflected that "no other artifact is as pervasive or carries the same emotional charge as the detached house in its suburban

garden ( Rowe, 67)." Although the streetcar suburbs made the freestanding house more common, reaction against the Victorian style of display and the early twentieth-century reformist pursuit of a good and proper American home led to the development of a series of new-single family house types. From 1900 until the 1920s, the most common suburban house type was the bungalow.

By the 1920s, a new generation of suburban housing types emerged. An open floor plan like the bungalow was placed in a more classically designed, often two-story, dwelling in a variety of revival styles including Colonial, Tudor and Dutch. Garages became respectable structures on the residential sites. (For a history of the garage, see Jan Jennings, "Housing the Automobile," in Roadside America: The Automobile in Design and Culture) Originally located on alleys away from the house, garages were moved closer to the house, often were built in the same style as the house, and provided with a driveway from the street (Ford, 156). Garages were not commonly integrated into houses until the 1950s. A more formal building architecturally, the Colonial Revival house was usually a compact two-story building with a square or rectangular floor plan emulating colonial symmetry and architectural ornament (Rowe, 69).

In the 1920s and 1930s, suburban areas began to be developed on a larger scale and assumed identity as communities. In the early suburbs, except those built for the well-to-do, subdivisions were small and developed into lots separately from the construction of houses. Typically, the developer acquired the land, developed a plan for the streets and the layout of lots, installed the infrastructure of streets and utilities, and then sold the lots to builders or individuals who, in turn, contracted with a builder. The early automobile suburb saw the emergence of the real estate entrepreneur who undertook the entire process for the initial purchase of land to the sale of houses. These developers sought to be community builders to sell not just houses but a whole way of life (Judd and Swanstrom, 193).

Perhaps the most significant stimulus for suburbanization in the 1930s was the creation of a Federal program--the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)--to insure long-term mortgages made by private lenders for home construction and sales. Before this, mortgages were limited to one-half to two-thirds of the appraised value of the property and required at least a 30% down payment. The FHA reduced this amount to less than 10%, thus drastically reducing the cost of becoming a homeowner. Nevertheless, the surge in housing starts and home ownership would not come until after World War II in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Thus, we find the prototype of the post-World War II and contemporary subdivision almost fully developed by 1940. What was required for the second period of explosive growth was the post-war demand for housing, which was facilitated by low-cost financing and the introduction of methods for the mass production of housing.

The invention of the mechanical road and the automobile commercial strip - In addition to the subdivision and suburban houses, two other distinctive property types emerged with the growth of the automobile and became important elements of the suburban landscape. These were the mechanical road and the automobile-oriented commercial strip. One of the most unheralded structures that facilitated the growth of the suburbs was the perfected mechanical road. Automobiles required smooth, hard surfaces and before 1900, even in cities most roads were unpaved. Asphalt, introduced to mollify bicyclists in the 1890s, became the common road surface by 1916. Hordes of untamed automobiles stimulated a succession of innovations in traffic control devices: Philadelphia experimented with semaphore traffic signals in 1910, Michigan laid down road markings in 1911, and Chicago introduced stop signs in 1916. By 1920, the system of green, yellow, and red electrical signal lights had been adopted as standard and New York City installed an integrated system of street lights on Fifth Avenue that governed traffic at 26 intersections (Relph, 79-80). On a larger scale, Congress passed the Good Roads Act in 1916 and the Highway Act of 1921, allowing federal funds to be used for road construction and doubling the total miles of surfaced highways during the 1920s (Ford, 233). The Bronx River Parkway in New York, conceived in 1906, became the prototype of the freeway--the high-speed, multiple-lane, limited-access highway type that opened up the post-World War II suburbs. Although intended for recreational driving, it was the first highway designed for the exclusive use of cars with long shallow curves suitable for the speeds of automobiles, separated interchanges in which crossing roads were bridged over, limited access, and beautiful landscaping--and thus was called a parkway (Relph, 77).

A distinctive automobile-oriented, commercial suburban landscape emerged as well. Its two most distinctive elements were the commercial strip and the shopping center. The automobile created both new types of businesses and structures to house them--gas stations and motels, for example--and new variations on older businesses such as restaurants. In the 1920s, in an effort to attract customers speeding by at 30 mph, two types of architecture evolved unique to the automobile strip--signature architecture and exaggerated regional architecture (Ford, 235). In signature architecture, buildings were built to resemble either the name of the establishment - such as the Brown Derby restaurant housed in a derby-like building--or its product, such as a market on Long Island that sold poultry from a building shaped like a duck. Indeed, as this commercial architecture shaped like teapots, doughnuts, frogs, and hot dogs became popular, it was known as duck architecture (Ford, 236). A variation on duck architecture was an exaggerated regional.

In the 1930s, a more serious commercial automobile-oriented architecture evolved that has been called Streamline Moderne (Ford, 238). Reflecting the design innovations that were occurring in automobiles, airplanes, and other symbols of the new machine age, moderne buildings featured a sleek round look and clean white tiled or ceramic surfaces (Ford, 238). Gas stations, diners, automobile showrooms, and other commercial buildings began to look like the automobiles that passed in front of them.

During the Depression, both housing starts and birth rates declined. World War II production, however, revived the economy while creating a demand for the consumer goods it replaced. Marriage and birth rates also revived. After the war, several events combined to transform American suburban and metropolitan landscapes. Returning veterans set off a demographic explosion by continuing to form families at a high rate, having children and producing a baby boom unprecedented in American history. But they also faced a seemingly intractable housing shortage. By 1947, six million families were doubling up with families or friends (Jackson, 232). In addition, in 1945, new housing, if it had been available, would have been beyond the means of 75% of American families (Goldfield and Brownell, 342). In response, the Federal government appropriated millions of dollars for mortgage insurance through the Federal Housing Administration and for the newly authorized veteran’s mortgage program. Housing starts skyrocketed, rising from only 114,000 in 1944 to 1,692,000 in 1950.

The post-World War II suburbs shared five characteristics (Jackson, 238-341). First was peripheral location. The scale of mass-produced development was not amenable to a filling-in process nor would that satisfy the "temper of the times." Second, post-World War II suburbs were built at a relatively low density. Typical lot sizes ranged from one-tenth to one quarter of an acre. Third, they exhibited great architectural similarity. And the architectural similarity of a tract house in a subdivision extended to the nation as a whole, replacing traditional regional variation in housing types with uniformity. Fourth, postwar housing was easily available financially because of mass-production techniques, government financing, and low interest rates. Finally, postwar suburbs were racially and economically homogeneous.

Nearly all of the new construction took place outside of central cities, except for some western cities that had legal boundaries far beyond their built-up edge or were newly developing. In meeting demand for housing, a new phenomenon appeared on the American landscape - the mass-produced large-scale subdivision. Thousands of nearly identical houses were built in nearly identical subdivisions. Whereas inexpensive long-term housing finance gave families financial access to housing, other factors were prerequisites for the large-scale suburban developments: the emergence of large corporate developers, the standardization of housing construction, the widespread adoption of zoning, new and improved roads, and the systematic discrimination against central city neighborhoods by lending institutions and the FHA.

In addition to the Cape Cod, two other housing types became standards for the new post-war subdivisions--the Colonial Revival and the Ranch House. The Colonial Revival house continued its popularity from the 1920s into the 1950s. Usually a compact two-story building with a square or rectangular floor plan emulating colonial symmetry and architectural ornament (Rowe, 69), the houses were often finished in materials reflecting local colonial vernacular materials.

It was the Ranch House, however, that became the quintessential American suburban single-family house. Presumably tracing its origins to western ranch houses, the architectural inheritance of this type owed much to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie style houses and later Usonian houses of the 1930s. With a simple horizontal profile and a serial arrangement of rooms, the Ranch House evolved through three phases of development from a small modest house to a large sprawling rambler (Rowe, 73). With a more open, less formal floor plan than the Colonial Revival or modest Cape Cod houses, the Ranch House reflected the emphasis on family life of the baby boom families.

By the late 1940s, the garage became integrated into the house and the car moved in with the family. By the 1950s, the garage was frequently placed at the end of the house, or in L-shaped range houses, located in the L in the front of the house (Ford, 167). As two-car garages become more common, automobile storage could take up almost one-quarter of the area of the house.

It was the curvilinear subdivision that became the setting for these houses and the building block of the post-World War II suburban landscape. In the 1930s, curvilinear subdivisions gained favor among planners and builders. They drew on the earlier picturesque plans of Riverside and Llewellyn Park, which created privacy with their long blocks and a park-like atmosphere. Also less dangerous in an automobile age by avoiding four-way intersections, these subdivisions incorporated new ideas from Clarence Perry’s neighborhood unit and Radburn, N.J. In the 1930s, the FHA, seeking to enhance the value of the properties it insured, promulgated recommendations for subdivision design that favored the organic, curvilinear subdivision (Rowe, 205).

Levittown was designed with a curvilinear circulation system. The community’s pattern of curving streets--called roads and lanes--as self-contained, allowing no through traffic. The site plan provided for swimming pools, playgrounds, baseball diamonds, and seven village greens for open space and recreation (Jackson, 236). In later developments, Levitt would provide commercial facilities. Postwar suburbanization was not limited to huge developments around large cities, but took place throughout the country at different scales and for different income groups. Wherever it occurred, the arrival of the mass-produced residential community--bedroom suburbs--marked a fundamental change in the way American urban landscapes developed, a change from fine-grained addition and infill to a process of the mass production of coarse chunks of suburban land (Knox, 122).

In large part, the scale of the endeavor was made possible by two waves of freeway construction after World War II. In 1939, a study by the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads called for more limited-access highways to accommodate the high volume and increasing speed of traffic and suggested that most cities would benefit from the creation of a hub-and-wheel system of high-speed roads, with the downtown encircled by an inner beltway and series of high-speed connectors radiating out to join an outer beltway (Knox, 119). The golden age of highway construction in the United States was introduced by the 1944 Federal-Aid Highway Act and solidified by the Interstate Highway Act of 1956. The former called for 41,000 miles of interstate and defense highways, including 5,000 miles of urban freeways, and the latter provided a means of financing them (Rowe, 195). Just as the streetcar lines had done 60 years earlier, freeway construction multiplied the land available for suburbanization.

More important, they facilitated the rise of an automobile and drive-in landscape. Between 1950 and 1980, when the American population grew by 50 %, automobile ownership grew by 200% (Jackson, 246). The growth in the metropolitan fringe of large, self-contained residential subdivisions connected by arterial and freeways created a dispersed landscape requiring an automobile for mobility. This gave rise to a landscape that has been variously called a "Drive-in Culture" or "California Suburbia," a drive-in and drive-through suburbia designed to accommodate the automobile for virtually all aspects of daily living. As retailing and services following the new residents into the suburbs they formed in two major types of development the commercial strip and the shopping center.

During the post-World War II suburban boom,strip commercial areas flourished as extensions of older streetcar and automobile strips and along roads in newly developing areas. What has been called the classic automobile strip evolved from the opening of the first McDonald’s drive-in restaurant in 1948 to the gas crisis of 1973 (Ford, 240). Although the strip was marked by a variety of individual establishments -frequently drive-ins - strip centers assumed a coherent architectural form. They were a linear arrangement of stores distributed along a street, one store deep and with parking in either the front or rear, or in both locations (Rowe, 112). Progressively, commercial strips moved back from the street to accommodate automobile parking. The great supply of inexpensive land made accessible for development by the new roads reduced the percentage of land of total building costs. This made it possible not only to support commercial activities with large parking lots, but also to construct extensive commercial buildings such as drive-in theaters and miniature golf courses in the middle of suburbia(Ford, 241).

The post-World War II strip developments were marked by the arrival of roadside franchises -including convenience stores, filling stations, motels, and fast-food restaurants. One of their most distinctive architectural characteristics was the standardization of design. Whereas the "duck" architecture along the early automobile strips had been unique and somewhat infrequent, franchises used standardized buildings--designed in a distinctive, usually exaggerated form resembling a three-dimensional sign--to advertise their products and to assure the consumer a predictability in the quality of product. (For a good description of automobile-oriented commercial architecture see, Chester H. Liebs, Main Street to Miracle Mile: American Roadside Architecture) Called "cartoon architecture" or, more gently, "exaggerated modern", when these franchised buildings were aligned along the roadside interspersed with oversized, neon-lit signs, they created a scene of jumbled commercial chaos. Yet, nowhere in the post-World War II suburbs is there a landscape more telling of the new drive-in culture.

The Arrival of the Shopping Center - The most purely suburban commercial invention was the shopping center. Although many of the hallmarks of the modern shopping center had been established by Country Club Plaza near Kansas City in the 1920s, it was the culmination of trends in retailing and its decentralization that had started in the teens (The best description and analysis of the suburban commercial landscape form is Richard Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950). By 1947 there were only eight shopping centers in the United States due to the continuing dominance of the central city as the major retailing outlet in a metropolitan area. As suburban populations multiplied, by the end of the 1940s major department stores began to move to suburbs, providing the anchors for large new shopping centers. The first major planned shopping center of this period was built in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1949. Soon, shopping centers began to be built ahead of the anticipated suburban advance along major highways and freeways, the most favored locations being near interchanges. Regional shopping centers quickly assumed the form of enclosed malls consisting of a building complex surrounded by large areas of surface car parking. Within the complex, stores were arranged around an open, well-landscaped pedestrian spine, often with department stores located at both ends (Rowe, 124). By 1956, with the opening of Southdale Shopping Center near Minneapolis, the mall became enclosed and climate-controlled (Jackson, 259).

By the mid-1950s, a dispersed automobile-oriented, suburban landscape was created. A network of highways had opened land for new large, residential subdivisions. Commercial facilities followed, capped by the regional enclosed mall. It was also a landscape that excluded many and drained the central city of much of its wealth and many of its middle-income residents. The same FHA that promoted investment in the suburbs discouraged it in the central city through practices of labelling central city neighborhoods as poor investments. Hence, the historic American suburban landscape is a succession of landscapes, each with its own unique characteristics but each created by the same interplay of forces.

Historic American Suburban Areas

This section examines four major national trends related to suburbanization: urban and metropolitan transportation, the evolution of the curvilinear suburban subdivision and related housing, the invention of long-term mortgages to finance suburban development and housing, and the evolution of the suburban commercial landscape. Most of these trends are reflected at the local level and relate primarily to National Register Criteria A and B.

Because land requires accessibility to be developed, the laying out of new transportation routes using new technologies led the outward movement of new suburbs. The new circulation patterns formed the skeleton around which new land uses and suburban landscapes became organized.

Railroads, Horsecars, and Streetcars: 1820 to 1920s - Although the electrification of the streetcar in 1888 facilitated the first extensive suburbanization for the middle class, earlier, mostly upper-class suburbs, made possible by the commuter railroads, pioneered influential principles of subdivision design. Nor were the numbers of suburbanites insubstantial. In 1873, for example, Chicago was surrounded by nearly 100 railroad suburbs, and Boston’s suburban population grew from 60,000 to 227,000 between 1870 and 1900. Railroads started expanding rapidly 1865 and by 1900, the United States boasted more miles of track than the rest of the world combined (Jackson, 91). Residential developments for the well-to-do were built along the railroad lines extending from the city which became dubbed "mainline" suburbs, a term derived from the Pennsylvania Railroad route west of Philadelphia. These included places like Swarthmore, Villanova, and Radnor. Railroad suburbs that were models of the curvilinear Picturesque design included Lake Forest and Riverside near Chicago and Llewellyn Park in New Jersey.

Within cities, systems of mass transit--defined as operations along a fixed route following a fixed schedule--began to appear in the 1830s. With the introduction of the horse-drawn omnibus (short-haul stages), the more efficient horse-drawn streetcars on rails were beginning to expand the perimeters of many cities in the 1850s. By 1860, horsecar systems were operating in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cincinnati, Montreal, and Boston (Jackson, 39). Although horse-drawn streetcars extended the suburban fringe of cities only very modestly, more importantly, they established the precedent for mass transit as a means of moving around the city. In this, they set the stage for the rapid suburbanization stimulated by the much faster electric streetcar.

In the spring of 1888, Frank Sprague, a former associate of Thomas Edison, introduced an electric-powered streetcar system in Richmond, Virginia. By 1902, there were 22,000 miles of streetcar tracks in American cities. From 1890 to 1907, streetcar mileage, most of it electrified, increased from 5,783 to 34,404 miles (Tarr and Konvitz, 204). The faster streetcar made streetcar suburbs possible by greatly increasing the land available for residential development. Since streetcar lines tended to radiate out from the old city and the new suburban houses were built within walking distance of the new lines, the streetcar suburbs gave the city a star shape. (Use graphic from David Ward). Sam Bass Warner calculated that in Boston by 1900 the area open for residential construction as a result of the streetcar was 32 times larger than the old city of 1850 (Warner, 63).

In most cities, there was a close relationship between the development of streetcar lines and real estate development: often the streetcar lines were financed by residential developers. As well, streetcars were adopted in cities of all sizes, not just large ones. In some midwestern and western cities that had their formative periods of growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, streetcar systems were not extensions of an older transportation system but integral to their initial development, just as the automobile came to be the primary transportation system in cities that developed later. As streetcar systems evolved, they also developed cross-town and interurban lines connecting surrounding small towns to the central city and to each other. In addition to residential suburbs tied to jobs in the central city, between the late 1880s and World War I, a number of industrial suburbs appeared on the urban landscape, including Pullman and Gary in the Chicago area (Foster, 16). Thus, the streetcar lines laid out a network of transportation that was the skeleton of a circulation system for an emerging metropolitan landscape.

Streetcar entrepreneurs facilitated outward radial growth in two ways (Jackson, 119). Tracks would be extended beyond the built-up area through open country to existing villages. The new trolley line would first stimulate the growth of the village and, second, new residential areas would be built flanking the trolley line, thus creating corridors of streetcar subdivisions. The second way in which streetcar operators accelerated outward growth was by generally charging flat fare with free transfers. This encouraged households to move to the cheaper land on the suburban periphery. Thus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, real estate interests and trolley promoters combined to develop huge suburban areas in American cities. These areas were long linear bands extending out from the city with the streetcar line as the spine and development limited to a few blocks of the lines.

Streetcar use continued to increase until 1923 when patronage reached 15.7 billion (Foster, 49) and then declined rather slowly. There was no distinct break between streetcar and automobile use from 1910 to 1930. Cities continued to grow and as the demand for transportation increased with that, the automobile was adopted more by the upper-middle to upper income households while trolleys tended to serve the middle and working class population. In spite of the rapid growth of automobile ownership, in the 1920s trolley company executives were still confident of their industry’s future as the prime mover of the metropolitan population (Foster, 52). By the 1930s, streetcar companies had added buses and trackless trolleys to their fleets, making their routes more flexible, and had become mass transit companies. But by the 1930s the ridership of these mass transit companies began to decline and in the 1940s dropped precipitously. The post World War II boom in automobile ownership spelled the end of the streetcar as a determinant of American urban form. As automobile became the major source of personal transportation, streetcar suburbs became serviced by automobiles, and today virtually all direct evidence of the street car has disappeared. Yet, any urban residential area developed from the 1880s until shortly after World War I undoubtedly started life as a streetcar suburb.

Early Automobile-1908 to 1940s - Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1908 and began to mass produce it in 1910. From 1910 until 1930, automobile registrations in the United States increased from 458,000 to nearly 22 million, or from one car for every 201 persons to one car for every five (Tarr and Konvitz, 210). The explosive growth of the automobile brought with it the need for a new transportation infrastructure that included the construction and improvements of roads and highways, the development of traffic systems, the building of bridges and tunnels [especially to facilitated cross-river transportation], and the widening and reconstruction of downtown streets (Tarr and Konvitz, 211).

The automobile created a new circulation system in the metropolitan area, a new transportation landscape. If the streetcars created a metropolitan area of residential land use spokes radiating from a commercial and industrial core, then the automobile first allowed new suburban development to fill in between the spokes. As new radial arterials were built suburban development decentralized, further creating urban fringes of increasingly low densities. By the 1920s, the modern automobile-dependent residential suburb or subdivision had come into being (Tarr and Konvitz, 210). By the end of the 1930s, a hub and wheel system of metropolitan freeways became envisioned as the future of the highway. In this highway system, radial freeways extending from the urban core intersected a circumferential freeway surrounding the city.

The two most intense episodes of suburban expansion stimulated by the automobile took place from 1918 until shortly after the Wall Street crash of 1929, and from 1945 to the present (Rowe, 4). The automobile suburbs that began to appear in the 1920s differed in four ways from the earlier streetcar suburbs (Jackson, 181). First, the mobility of automobiles allowed suburban development to fill in between the finger-shaped corridors of transit lines. Second, the average commuting distance increased, although the automobile allowed workers to work in the periphery of the city. Third, the mobility of the rubber-tired truck allowed factories, warehouses, and distribution activities to begin to move to the suburbs. Fourth, densities declined as lot and house sizes increased. Lot sizes increased from 3,000 square feet in the streetcar suburbs to 5,000 square feet in the automobile suburbs; residential densities fell by half from about 20,000 people per square mile in the streetcar suburbs to about 10,000 per square mile in the automobile suburbs.

The Federal government became heavily involved in highway construction after 1914. The Good Roads Act of 1915 established the Bureau of Public Roads, and the Highway Act of 1921 set in motion the construction of a national highway system. Most states established highway departments during the 1920s. During the period 1921-1936, which has been called the Gold Age of Highway Building, more than 420,000 miles of roads were built (Seely, 67). Much of the effort was devoted to improving existing roads to accommodate the automobile and truck. "Total highway mileage increased only slightly in the 1920s . . .the mileage of surface roads increased 157 percent and high-grade surfaced roads 776 percent between 1914 and 1929 (Tarr and Konvitz, 211)." Most of the construction took place outside of city limits, but many of the improved highways radiated out from cities, making new land available for suburbanization by the automobile. Much engineering effort was directed at creating designs and standards for roads to accommodate the automobile which, by 1923, Americans were buying at the rate of 3,000,000 a year (Scott, 186).

In the 1910s and 1920s, new parkways were being constructed in the New York metropolitan area that would have a far-reaching influence on the design of metropolitan systems of freeways and interstate highways after World War II. The first parkways--roads within parks for carriages--were built in the late nineteenth century in Boston on the advice of Frederick Law Olmsted (Rowe, 187). Kansas City followed suit, building its first parkway in 1908. These parkways were characterized by wide rights-of-way that maintained a park-like environment and buffered the road from adjacent development. Roadbed widths of 40 feet in the Boston system set parkway standards well into the 1930s, although the Kansas City system had roadbed as wide as 56 feet. However, William K. Vanderbilt’s Long Island Motor Parkway (1906-1911) was the world’s first thoroughfare restricted solely to the automobile and designed for its needs (Jackson, 166). The first modern parkway for automobiles was the Bronx River Parkway, which was begun in 1906 and completed in 1923. Running sixteen miles from Bruckner Avenue in New York City to White Plains in Westchester County, the design standards of this parkway and the 75-mile Westchester County Parkway System of which it would become a part were the prototype for future generations of high-speed automobile highways in the United States. These included extensive land rights-of-way ranging from 300 to 1,800 feet, providing complete separation of the parkway from surrounding properties.

The highways themselves were four lanes with 40-foot roadways running in each direction. The roadways were separated by landscaped dividers and medians. Curves were minimized, wide shoulders provided, and cross traffic separated from the parkway by bridges and tunnels. Extending these concepts, the Merritt Parkway, connecting New York and New Haven, was begun in 1926. It extended north to Hartford as the Wilbur Cross Parkway and was the first long-distance, high-speed divided highway in the United States. With its complete grade separation and controlled access, it was the forerunner of the interstate highway (Rowe, 189).

Yet most cities during the 1920s and 1930s met the needs of the automobile by extending and improving existing street systems. And in some, such as Detroit, there were creative attempts to meld new concepts of transit with the needs of the automobile - to create what today is called a multimodal system. In 1923, the Detroit Rapid Transit Commission announced a comprehensive transit plan that included a subway system in the central area, proposed 65 miles of rapid transit that would be integrated with 560 miles of trolley by 1950 and, most significantly, proposed integrated rights-of-way for rapid transit and automobiles (Foster, 80). These 206-feet-wide rights-of-way would extend in a radial pattern fifteen miles from downtown. A center strip 84 feet wide would accommodate rapid transit, allowing limited access highways on either side. Although hailed as a model plan, it soon became clear that the highway elements were attracting most of the attention and support for the transit element of the proposal waned. A similar proposal in Los Angeles in the 1920s also failed. In addition to the attraction of the automobile, fixed rail facilities were very expensive and inflexible. By the end of the 1920s, the automobile seemed to have gained ascendancy.

In the 1930s, suburban areas continued to grow faster than central cities and, since virtually nobody challenged the dominance of the automobile in outlying areas, a large portion of the traffic planning effort of the 1930s was devoted to suburban superhighway construction (Foster, 151-152). In the 1930s, greater attention was devoted to conceiving metropolitan systems of highways. One of the most influential visions of the future form of the highway system in metropolitan areas was presented at the 1939 New York World’s Fair in the Futurama and Highways and Horizons Exhibit sponsored by General Motors (Rowe, 183). With scale models, it exhibited a metropolitan system of high-speed limited-access highways with total grade separation and roads graduated by speed. Radial highways connected the suburbs to downtowns where commuters ramped into garages under their offices. A ring highway surrounding the city connected the suburbs. In the same year, a study published by the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads recommended that to solve their traffic problems, most large cities would benefit from the creation of a "hub-and-wheel" system of high speed roads, with the downtown encircled by an inner beltway and a series of high speed connectors radiating out to join the outer beltway (Knox, 119).

Thus, from the end of World War I until 1940, the first two suburban decades, the rise of the automobile had accelerated suburbanization, become the dominant mode of transportation in the suburbs, caused the demise of the streetcar, stimulated the design and construction of a new infrastructure of roads, highways, bridges, and tunnels, and laid the groundwork for a metropolis-wide highway system that would transform the American metropolitan area after World War II.

Freeway Period: 1940s to 1960s - After World War II, automobile ownership boomed: automakers sold more than 3,000,000 cars in 1948; total registrations jumped from 31 million to nearly 45 million between 1945 and 1949; and vehicle miles traveled increased 87 billion between 1947 and 1950 (Seely, 193). During World War II, the concept of a National System of Interstate Defense Highways was incorporated into the federal Highway Act of 1944. The legislation called for a limited system of national highways of which metropolitan expressways would be an integral part (Rowe, 194). The system was authorized in 1956 as 41,000 miles system of toll-free superhighways including 5,000 miles of urban freeways. Highway construction authorized under the 1944 act got off to a slow start, but by 1951, every major city was working on arterial highway improvements and 65 percent of federal funds were being used for urban expressways. It was not until the late 1950s and early 1960s that the Interstate system began to be built and influence patterns of suburbanization.

This section describes trends in the design of residential subdivisions from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1950s as the context for the evaluation of subdivisions in terms of Criterion A and also describes the physical characteristics of subdivisions that apply to Criterion C. The basic landscape unit of residential suburban development is the subdivision siting single family houses on their own lots. It starts as a parcel of vacant (usually agricultural) land that is bought by a developer. This parcel is large enough to be subdivided into individual lots intended for single family houses. In addition, it is provided with the necessary infrastructure, including streets and water and sewer and utilities lines.

Planned and designed as a whole landscape or land development unit, densities, placement and other characteristics of buildings are governed by land controls ranging from restrictive covenants running with the land to public subdivision regulations. Subdivisions range in design from large, elaborate curvilinear site plans to simple rectilinear plats with three or four lots bracketed by streets. Historically, subdivisions have been relatively small. Until the advent in the 1930s of Federal Mortgage Insurance, developers sold unbuilt suburban lots to individuals or builders who in turn constructed the dwellings.

Emergence of the Subdivision - From the mid-nineteenth century, families were motivated to move to the edge by the desire to live in the country away from the city but close enough to commute to employment there. The motivations were several. There was a push factor. American cities were rapidly industrializing during the second half of the nineteenth century, a process that by creating increasingly congested, polluted urban environments dangerous due to disease and crime, reenforced Americans’ dislike and fear of cities. At the same time, the Romantic Movement extolled the virtues of nature, and its picturesque architectural illustrations sought to create romantic, naturalistic buildings and landscapes by reviving styles from the past thought to be more in tune with nature and hence more moral.

In the mid-nineteenth century, during a period of rapid industrialization and urbanization in the United States, the home became viewed as the sanctuary from the pathologies and stresses of the city. In her popular 1841 book, Treatise on Domestic Economy, Catherine Beecher Stowe offered the first plans for practical dwellings and, in attempting to relate her domestic ideals to landscape design, assumed that family life could best thrive in a semi-rural environment (Jackson, 62) . The clearest visual architectural articulation of the ideal home was presented in 1842 by Alexander Jackson Davis in his book Rural Residences, which featured "plans for ornamented Gothic and Italianate villas and cottages set in a far-reaching pastoral landscape dotted with pleasant houses. . . (Wright, )" Other architectural pattern books followed, emphasizing the coincidence of the ideal home and the rural residence.

The Picturesque subdivision or the residential development became the means by which upper-income city dwellers sought to satisfy their desire for a semi-rural environment with single-family houses within commuting distance of the city. The prototypes for what became the suburban subdivision ideal were built for the elite in the mid-nineteenth century - the picturesque developments of Llewellyn Park in New Jersey and Riverside, Illinois, near Chicago. [Figure -- and ---] Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, designed by Alexander Jackson Davis and built in 1857, is commonly acknowledged as the picturesque prototype. In its design, Davis introduced the curvilinear road and natural open space in the center, two features, that, according to Jackson, were unprecedented in modern residential experience (Jackson, 78). Riverside, Illinois, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and founded in 1869, further articulated the suburban ideal with its fluent system of curved streets, extensive plantings, and houses on irregular, individual lots with 30-foot setbacks (Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias, 129). The residential land developer became the individual that largely defined the appearance the suburban landscape.

The historic context for American suburbs is largely defined by two major trends: the first is the evolution of the subdivision or residential development and the second is the development of the single-family house. This must be undertaken at two of levels. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, suburbanization was largely associated with upper- middle and upper-income households, partly because suburbs were associated with particular designed landscapes, such as the curvilinear subdivision design of Llewellyn Park and Riverside. Yet, no less desired by the middle and working classes, the achievement of the suburban ideal was constrained only by their lower incomes. Within their limited incomes, they sought to create physical approximations of the upper class-developments in the gridded extension of the city.

On the one hand, the ideal models of early suburban developments were upper-income developments such as Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, Riverside, Illinois, Short Hills, New Jersey, Kenilworth, Illinois, and Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis, Minnesota (Sies, 199). On the other hand, no less suburban were the small freestanding temple-houses built in the 1870s for middle-income families on their own narrow 25 foot lots on square blocks on a gridded street pattern served by horse-trolleys. They met the suburban criteria by being single-family houses on their own lots in subdivisions removed, if but slightly, from the city. In both instances, the common denominator was the subdivision, the large parcel bought and subdivided with the purpose of building a uniform residential area.

What distinguished upper-class developments from those of lower incomes was their form of individual transportation. The Riverside and Llewellyn Park models were premised on flexible personal mobility by horse and carriage, while the lower-income subdivisions had to function with much more limited individual mobility in which residents walked to their houses from streetcar lines. Only when the automobile became common, providing personal transportation free from fixed streetcar lines, were developers and builders able to offer curvilinear subdivisions to middle-income households. The self-contained curvilinear subdivision plans adapted to automobiles began to appear in the late 1920s and were more widely built in the 1930s. They were institutionalized in most zoning ordinances by the 1950s.

Thus, while the curvilinear subdivision layout, the picturesque model, was the highest, most desirable form of residential development, it contained several features that could be, and was, achieved in simpler rectilinear subdivisions in a higher density, less costly variety along streetcar lines. Developing several houses in a group allowed the developer to create certain economies and suburban amenities that individual builders could not attain. Hence, from the mid-nineteenth century, suburban subdivisions have existed on a social and economic continuum ranging from the most modest cottages on a few square feet on a square street pattern to the large Riverside-like developments for the rich.

Subdivision Property Types - Historically, residential subdivisions have been of two recognizable types: rectilinear plats and curvilinear subdivisions (Garvin, 253). Rectilinear plats were usually laid out within a larger gridded street system whereas curvilinear subdivisions were more self-contained and laid out with access to a main arterial, including railroads.

Rectilinear plats or subdivisions.- Although the gridded city plan has Roman origins, in the United States it served primarily as the most profitable way to develop and sell residential land. Most American cities laid out in the second half of the nineteenth century platted extensive grids to guide their future growth. In fact, cities in states surveyed by the rectilinear land surveys of the Northwest Ordinance or the Homestead Act simply extended the surveyed grid (Garvin, 253). During periods of rapid land speculation in the 1880s in Kansas, for example, town sites conformed to quarter sections, or 160 acre tracts or half-sections, or 320-acre town sites (Rowe, 198). By 1915, Portland, Oregon, for example, had laid out a proposed street grid so extensive that it accommodated its growth until 1970 (MacColl, 14-16). Developers would buy land within the platted area, subdivide the land, lay out streets according to the city street plan, install utilities, and sell the improved lots for residential construction. Although seen today as part of an urban fabric, as on the east side of Portland, such rectilinear residential subdivisions are as suburban in their origins as any curvilinear subdivision.

The first suburb planned on a plat was Brooklyn Heights, established in 1819 across from Lower Manhattan. A steamboat suburb developed by a backer of Robert Fulton, it was a 60-acre plat divided into 200 by 200 foot blocks by 50-foot-wide streets laid out in a grid originally siting single family houses (Garvin, 254). Suburban plats can have design elements beyond the simple grid. Before 1856, Savannah, Georgia, accommodated growth by adding planned rectangular wards--each ward was centered around a landscaped public square bounded by eight rectangular blocks (Gravin, 253). Like Savannah, St Louis also grew by rectilinear suburban plats, known as private places, because they were built by private developers. They consisted of large rectangular plats, subdivided for single-family houses, and organized around two parallel boulevards with broad landscaped dividers (Fig__) (Garvin, 258). Before the streetcar, these developments were within walking distance, about 1 1/2 miles, of the downtown St. Louis or Mississippi River. After the streetcar, developers quickly began to build new residential private places as far as six miles out along streetcar

Lines (Garvin, 257).

The streetcar broadened the income range of households that were candidates for suburbanization to include the middle and working classes. The gridiron remained the most efficient and inexpensive way to subdivide and sell land in small lots. At the turn of the century, a small average lot size of 1/17 to 1/14 of an acre (25- X 30- X 100-foot lot) predominated in one- and two-family subdivisions on the edge of the city (Tunnard and Pushkarev, ). Small lots were dictated in part by the lack of long-term financing of mortgages and the need to finance and build the house separately from the land. This created a demand for less expensive houses, which gave rise to what one writer has called the bungalow suburbs (Palen, 51). The persistence of the grid was especially strong in small subdivisions intended for the middle and working classes. Around Wilmington Delaware, 48 subdivisions were laid out between 1900 and 1930. Of the 32 designed from 1900 to 1920, all but three were grids of straight streets (Chase, Ames, Siders, 28). Subdividers there did not use curved streets in any appreciable numbers until the 1930s and then used more of a modified grid than a self-contained subdivision.

The very influential example of the modified grid street system was the Country Club District in Kansas City, Missouri, developed by Jessie Clyde Nichols. A large-scale development, the first section of which was designed in 1913, the Country Club District consists of a grid of long, narrow rectangular blocks with curved streets and some diagonal streets. The architects modified the stiff grid-iron system somewhat so as to recognize existing valleys of the rolling terrain (Newton, 472). The development is bisected by two parallel boulevards running north until they converge at Country Club Plaza, home of the shopping center noted earlier.

In midwestern and western cities, which grew rapidly after the 1880s, along the lines of the rectilinear survey and after the introduction of the streetcar, the pattern was somewhat different. Here the streetcar lines were part of the initial transportation system, and a grid plan of streets was often overlaid with a larger grid of streetcar lines, creating a checkerboard of major arterial routes. In these, suburbanization filled out into large rectangular cells created by the grid of the streetcar lines. (Example of Sanborn map of Cedar Rapids).

This would also become the pattern of cities laid out after the advent of the automobile. In the San Fernando Valley of the Los Angles region, development took place after 1940 on a primary gird of arterial and collector streets conforming to survey sections (Rowe, 198). This grid was further subdivided in response to the intensity of development. Some subdivisions were built next to each other while other subdivisions developed in noncontiguous locations in a suburban process called leapfrogging, or scatteration. Made possible by the streetcar and the automobile highways as they radically reduced the time of transportation, suburban leapfrogging occurs when new development leaps over vacant land to less costly or more profitable locations beyond existing development. As time passed, development filled in the leapfrogged land.

Thus, in land area, most suburban development before World War II took place on a rectilinear pattern of streets and blocks. Because it does not fit the modern mold of curvilinear subdivisions beyond the city, much of it has not been recognized as suburban--occurring in subdivisions planning as a unit with single-family houses on individual lots. In gridded subdivisions in western cities continued to be development well into the 1950s because of earlier rectilinear land surveys.

Curvilinear subdivisions - Although the rectilinear grid remained the dominant subdivision form well into the first three decades of the twentieth century, the curvilinear form seems always to have been the ideal layout to which all aspired. At the most basic level, its organic design symbolized nature and the countryside that the prospective suburbanite sought. Associated with the more fashionable and upper-income developments, the curvilinear subdivision spelled prestige for residents and higher sales values for realtors.

The curvilinear subdivisions evolved through three stages from initially being the reserve of the elite in the nineteenth century to becoming a regulated requirement for residential development after World War II. These stages are summarized below: 1. Establishing the Olmsted Model from the 1860s to the 1910s; 2. Garden City to the Radburn Idea and Neighborhood Unit: 1900 to 1930, and; 3. Institutionalizing the Curvilinear Subdivision: 1930 to the 1950s.

Establishing the Olmsted Model from the 1860s to the 1910s - Riverside, Illinois, designed in 1868 by Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., and Calvert Vaux, established the template for the curvilinear subdivision. Olmsted saw the suburb not as an escape from the city, but as a delicate synthesis of town and wilderness (Jackson, 79). The design of Riverside became the ideal of the curvilinear subdivision and became emulated by others. Between 1857 and 1950, Olmsted’s firm, which was continued by his son, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., planned 450 subdivisions in 29 states and the District of Columbia (Garvin, 263). It has been claimed that some 60 years after Riverside, when Stewart Mott was writing the first subdivision design standards for the Federal Housing Administration in 1933, he used Riverside as a model (Rowe, 205).

Riverside expressed the Olmstedian design philosophy of subdivisions consisting of single-family houses on lots within large irregular blocks bounded by broad, gently curving tree-lined streets. Through his design, Olmsted created privacy for households within a parklike setting yet at reasonably high densities and provided with urban services. The first design requirement of an Olmsted subdivision was a tranquil site with trees and grass and some variation in the topography. The second requirement was good roads and walks of, in Olmsted’s own words, . . . gracefully-curved lines, generous spaces and the absence of sharp corners, the idea being to suggest and imply leisure, contemplativeness and happy tranquility (Olmsted, "Riverside, Illinois: A Residential Neighborhood Designed Over Sixty Years Ago," Landscape Architecture, July, 1931, quoted in Newton, Design on the Land: The Development of Landscape Architecture, 467). The gently curved paved streets and walks enclosed irregularly shaped blocks, the third element of an Olmsted subdivision. Designed to follow the topography, the curving roads were built without curbs and placed in slight depressions, making them less visible from the side, and heightening the rural character (Newton, 467).

Olmsted subdivisions were planned for single-family houses on relatively large lots -one acre at Riverside. Olmsted placed the houses on the lots to create a sense of privacy while heightening the sense of nature for the residents. To create a sense of openness, houses were set back from the road far enough to allow for large open lawns and arranged to limit the number of houses within each resident’s line of vision (Garvin, 265). That houses on facing lots were offset was another feature of curving streets. As well, the use of shrubs and trees lining the streets shielded structures from direct view, making greenery the predominant feature of an Olmsted subdivision. Trees were planted at irregular intervals to create a sense of spontaneity (Jackson, 80). As pioneered in Riverside, Olmsted residential subdivisions also featured a series of small parks possessing, in Olmsted’s words, "the character of informal village greens, commons and playground. (as quoted in Jackson, 80) " Hence, the genius of the Olmsted curvilinear subdivision was to maintain the essential features of an urban community - relatively high density, movement and communication, and community facilities - in a designed landscape that incorporated nature and seemed in all details to be the opposite of the city. The Olmsted firm designed many curvilinear developments that also become models for upper and upper- middle class development. These included Tarrytown Heights, New York (1870-1872), Parkside in Buffalo (1872-1886), and Sudbury Park and Roland Park outside of Baltimore (1876-1892 and 1891-1914).

By the turn of the century, curved roads began to be seen in otherwise gridded subdivisions. This was an aesthetic and practical influence as flat land became scarcer, curvilinear subdivisions were more adaptable to hillier terrain, at least in some places. In many places, the cumulative effect of different engineers adapting the grid to local terrain resulted in a rather relaxed grid of uneven block sizes that vary in size and shape--such as the streetcar suburb of Elmwood in Berkeley California (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 102).

Garden City to the Radburn Idea and Neighborhood Unit: 1900 to 1930 - If upper class residential developments provided the design template for the curvilinear subdivision, it was the Garden City movement and company town experiments that modified it for households of modest incomes. In 1898, as an antidote to the intensely overcrowded, featureless industrial city, English social reformer Ebenezer Howard, proposed a new urban form--the Garden City--intended to combine the best aspects of town and country (Crawford, 70).

To be planned as a whole and not left to grow in a chaotic manner (Garvin, 319), Howard diagrammed his Garden City as a series of concentric circles devoted to bands of houses and gardens for residents of mixed income and occupations. A large park, public institutions and commercial shops formed the center of the city, while an outer ring provided for industrial activities, an agricultural college, and social institutions and linked the community to outlying agricultural land. The Garden City diagram was so compelling an image of community in 1911 a Portland, Oregon, developer adopted the plan for a large subdivision known as Ladd’s Addition.

In England in 1902 and 1905, Howard’s conceptual diagrams were translated by Barry Parker and Howard Unwin to the design for the new towns of Letchworth and Hampstead Gardens. Parker and Unwin used the planning principles that,

The aspect of the Garden City concept that made it so adaptable to suburban applications was that, in modern terms, it was modular. Howard called for the town to be divided into six equal parts or wards, each with a population of about 5,000 and a public school, and specified it should be in some sense a complete town by itself (Newton, 455). Conceptually, these subareas became the planning units for applying Garden City planning principles to the design of communities on a scale smaller than a city or town.

To provide a Garden City environment for working-class residents, Parker and Unwin designed naturalistic residential areas at far higher densities than the planners of American Picturesque developments. To do this, they used several planning concepts that became fundamental to Garden City design and were later adapted at Radburn, New Jersey.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, several large model towns, workers' housing developments, and garden suburbs were designed and built adapting Howard’s Garden City model and Parker and Unwin’s new town designs. Many housing reformers and other Progressives adopted the Garden City as a model for workers’ housing and industrial villages such as Carnegie Steel’s company town of Homestead, Pennsylvania (Crawford, 68).

The first major influence of Letchworth and Hampstead Gardens in the United States was reflected in the 1909 design of Forest Hills Gardens, a model suburb outside of New York (Barnett, 77). Its design was a collaboration between the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and architect Grosvenor Atterbury. Whereas the parks and curving road system reflect the Picturesque prototypes, the central axis of community facilities and open spaces enclosed by an encircling avenue reflects the Garden City influence. The Garden City concept is especially visible in the architectural spaces Atterbury designed at the community's center near the railroad station and in the use of courts to group houses (Figure 53).

After Forest Hills Gardens, Garden City concepts were next applied to the design of World War I emergency workers' housing developments. One of the best of these projects--Union Park Gardens in Wilmington, Delaware, built in 1918--was designed by John Nolen, a pioneer in American city planning and disciple of Unwin and Parker. Intended to house 500 shipyard workers and their families, Nolen created a plan where two neighborhoods flanked both sides of a landscaped parkway that extended from a large park at one end to a community center with shops at the other (Figure 54a). In 1923, Nolen also applied Garden City principles to the design of the new, full-scale company town at Mariemont, Ohio, where the town center reflects the radial street pattern of Letchforth and a strongly defined architectural space flanked by community buildings. (Figure 54b).

It was the work of Henry Wright and Clarence Stein in the 1920s, culminating in the design of Radburn, New Jersey, that permanently imprinted the Garden City principles on the American suburban landscape. The larger goal of Howard’s Garden City proposal was to decentralize congested industrial cities by building regional clusters of the new towns. In the United States, the pressure for solutions to urban congestion and associated problems led to the First National Conference of City Planning and the Problems of Congestion in Washington, D.C., in 1909. This conference laid the groundwork for the development of modern urban planning practice, including comprehensive planning and zoning. Concern for regional planning emerged, and, in 1923, a group of planners--Lewis Mumford, Henry Wright, Clarence Stein, and Clarence Perry, among others--formed the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 60).

Setting out with the purpose of building an American garden city, Wright and Stein designed Sunnyside Gardens in New York City in 1924 as a model community for moderate-income families. Later in 1928, they planned Radburn, New Jersey, as the American equivalent of Letchworth (Barnett, 82). Compelled to adhere to the gridiron street system, Wright and Stein were able to plan with entire blocks because the area was zoned industrial and not required to be subdivided into residential lots. Treating them like miniature superblocks, the designers placed narrow single- and two-family houses around the perimeter of each block, permitting the core of the block to be devoted to common use while allowing for small private gardens (Stein, 24). The inner courts were connected to form a greenway system along which children could walk to school without crossing streets.

By the 1920s, planners had to deal with a new, and lethal, element of city congestion - the automobile. Not only were cars killing more and more pedestrians in the city, but, according to Clarence Perry, a leading planner of the time, traffic was cutting the gridded city up into isolated cellar blocks and undermining community cohesion. Americans bought cars by the millions - 2,274,000 in 1922, more than 3,000,000 annually from 1923 to 1926, rising to nearly four and a half million in 1929, right before the stock market crashed (Scott, 186). Outside the city, the automobile and the paved highway were rendering earlier decentralization proposals moot, spreading urban population over the surrounding countryside, absorbing old satellite communities, forming congeries of business centers, open fields, suburban villas . . .but having little effect on central city congestion and social conditions (Boyer, 173). It was in this context that the RPAA had been formed and that Radburn was designed to create a new form of suburban community -A Town for the Motor Age.

To many planners and others, the automobile was seen as a major threat to community cohesion and safety. Indeed, Stein wrote that the purpose of " 'The Radburn Idea' [was] to answer the enigma How to live with the automobile, or, if you will, How to live in spite of it . . . (Stein, 41)" Before Radburn was designed, however, Clarence Perry proposed a planning concept he called the Neighborhood Unit as the basic urban residential unit of development. In devising the Neighborhood Unit, Perry drew upon Garden City ideas and several years of studying residential areas and living in Forest Hills Gardens(Figure 55). Intended to protect the community from traffic and speculation, the neighborhood unit was based on six principles. They were that the neighborhood should contain just enough residents to support an elementary school--about 5,000 residents; that no through traffic should be allowed; that about 10 percent of the neighborhood’s land should be in open space; that the school and other institutions should be at the center of the neighborhood; that local shops should be located on the edge of the neighborhood; and finally, that the streets of the neighborhood should have a varied layout and be only wide enough for local traffic. Defined in this practical way, the neighborhood unit became a basic design template for laying out residential neighborhoods in North America, Great Britain, and Australia.

Wright and Stein incorporated the neighborhood unit concept into their design for Radburn in 1928 (Relph, 65). Even more so than the neighborhood unit, Radburn was designed to incorporate the automobile into residential development in the safest way possible. Located 16 miles from New York City in the Borough of Fairlawn, Radburn was planned according to the Radburn Idea as three interrelated neighborhoods of up to 10,000 residents (Figure 56a). The five interrelated elements of the Radburn Idea were the superblock, specialized roads, separation of pedestrian and automobile traffic, houses turned to front the park, and the park as the backbone of the neighborhood (Stein, 41 and 44). Although none of the elements of the Radburn Idea were completely new, their synthesis and integration into a comprehensive layout was a breakthrough in the subdivision form (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 64).

Radburn was organized around a series of superblocks with parks at their core, as had been Letchworth and Hampstead Gardens. Partly to accommodate the automobile, as well as to provide more parks, the superblocks in Radburn were increased in size to from 30 to 50 acres. Located along cul-de-sacs that penetrated the superblocks from perimeter feeder streets, Houses Turned Around had floorplans with living rooms and bedrooms facing the gardens and park while kitchens and service rooms fronted the cul-de-sac and automobile access (Stein, 47). The parks in the superblocks joined together to form a town-wide park.

The specialized roads--inspired partly by Olmsted’s separation of routes in Central Park for carriages, horsemen, and strollers afoot--restricted residential streets to local traffic for the first time in the United States (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 65). The four-level hierarchy of roads ranging from service roads for access to buildings to parkways for connection to outside communities minimized traffic throughout Radburn by restricting cars in an area to those that had a destination there. With the exception of a few sidewalks, pedestrian circulation was restricted to the greenways in the center of the superblocks.

Unfortunately, the Depression forced the developer of Radburn into bankruptcy and left the community only partially completed. Yet, so well designed was the community that the Radburn Ideal became the fundamental premises of suburban community planning from the 1930s to the 1960s. The broad objectives of the Radburn Idea of decentralized, self-contained settlements, organized to promote environmental considerations by conserving open space, harnessing the automobile, and promoting community life (Birch, 123) became some of the strongest and most enduring intellectual streams in urban planning and a major design influence on the modern curvilinear subdivision and suburban community design.

Many of the design aspects of Radburn were applied to the Greenbelt communities built by the federal government in the 1930s, including the use of loop roads and cul-de-sacs, or motor courts leading off major collector streets (Rowe, 201). However, unlike Radburn, the houses were turned around to face the cul-de-sacs and common parkland allocated to individual lots. The curvilinear subdivision combined the hierarchy of roads with the older practice of houses on individual lots. The clearest prototype of this layout that would become the standard subdivision was an idealized street design proposed by the Los Angeles Regional Planning Commission in 1929. (Fig. 57) It featured houses on irregularly shaped lots facing a cul-de-sac or motor court with service alleys behind the houses (Rowe, 202).

Out of these developments in the 1920s and 1930s evolved the curvilinear subdivision layout that became the standard site plan of post-World War II subdivisions. Descended from the organic curves of the nineteenth-century Picturesque developments, the curvilinear plan, when compared to the grid by its advocates, provided greater privacy, could be adapted to a greater variety of topography, and avoided dangerous four-way intersections.

Institutionalizing the Curvilinear Subdivision : 1930 to the 1950s - In spite of the Garden City and Radburn experiments, until the 1930s developers continued to use the rectilinear grid of streets and blocks for most residential development. Responding to the collapse of the housing market and foreclosures caused by the Depression, the federal government undertook a series of actions to help the housing industry recover and produce affordable housing. The first of these was the Presidents Conference on Homebuilding in 1931, which put forth a number of proposals that shaped the future of government intervention in housing. Its thirty-one member committees endorsed Perry’s neighborhood unit concept enthusiastically, citing it 25 times in the published conference proceedings (Hise, 32) ⁽ Fig. 58a). In 1934, the Federal Housing Administration was established to restructure the collapsed private home financing system through mortgages insured by the federal government. The FHA proved enormously influential and by 1959 had insured more than five million homes (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 82).

To qualify for federal financing, developers had to meet certain standards set by the FHA. In their standards for subdivision design, the FHA rejected the gridiron plan and supported the town and neighborhood planning concept of Unwin, Perry and Stein and was influenced by the picturesque suburban schemes of Olmsted and Vaux. (Fig.58). FHA recommended curvilinear, cul-de-sacs and courts as appropriate residential street layouts. FHA’s comprehensive subdivision review process made the curvilinear subdivision design the standard of both good real estate investment practice and local planning. It also became the standard of local subdivision regulations throughout the country.

Zoning emerged during the 1910s and 1920s as a means of controlling land use and new development for the health, welfare, and safety of a community (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 88). Zoning was declared constitutional by the United States Supreme Court in 1926. By 1941, thirty-two states had delegated the police to localities power to zone. Based on a comprehensive land use plan - that allocates land to certain uses such as residential, commercial, and industrial - zoning is the division of an area into zones within which specific uses are legally permitted (Cullingworth, 77). Of all the zoning categories, single-family residential is the most protected. Within a zoning ordinance, subdivision regulations govern the division of undeveloped land into parcels for the purpose for sale or development - as from agriculture to residential. As the FHA financed more and more new residential development, local planning commissions adopted some form of the FHA subdivision standards as their own subdivision regulations. Thus, by the late 1940s, the curvilinear subdivision had descended from the Garden City model and Radburn Idea and, promulgated by the FHA, had become the legally required form of new residential development in a majority of localities in the United States.

The curvilinear subdivision layout was further institutionalized as the building industry came to support national regulations that would minimize the variability of local building regulations and reduce unpredictable development costs. The most influential private organization representing the building industry was the Urban Land Institute (ULI), established in the 1939 as an independent nonprofit research organization in urban planning and land development (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 88). Sponsored by the National Association of Real Estate and a consultant to the National Association of Home Builders, ULI provided information to developers about community developments that supported the FHA approach and promoted coordinated metropolitan approaches to development. In 1947, the ULI published the Community Builders Handbook, which provided detailed instructions for community development based on the curvilinear subdivision and neighborhood unit approach. It became a basic reference for the community development industry and by 1990 it was in its seventh edition.

Thus, by the late 1940s, a standardized curvilinear subdivision design -- distilled from the Picturesque developments of the nineteenth century, the Radburn idea and neighborhood unit concept both descended from the Garden City model -- had become institutional in planning practice and development that, in endless repetition, would create the post-World War II suburban landscape.

The Development Process - Central to residential development were the developers and the ways in which their developments were financed.

Types of Developers - Whether rectilinear or curvilinear, large or small, built for the well-to-do or the working class, the process by which subdivisions were built and sold was much the same. And, as the way land development and houses were financed and marketed evolved, the development process and the appearance of subdivisions also changed. The land development process, as Anne Keating has written, "consists of two distinct procedures: the initial subdivision and improvement of a tract of land, and the actual construction of buildings (Keating, 124) " From the early subdivisions of 1870s to the post-World War II suburban boom, the subdivision land development process went through three overlapping stages. These can be called The Subdivider Stage from the 1870s to the 1920s,The Home Builder Stage from the late 1920s to the 1940s,and the Community Builder Stage from the 1930s to the present."

In the Subdivider Stage from the 1870s until the 1920s, the building and selling procedures were done by separate individuals. Developers, or subdividers, acquired land, surveyed it, developed a plan, laid out building lots and roads, and improved the site with certain amenities and services (Chase, 119). The range of improvements provided varied from subdivider to subdivider. The lots were then sold either to prospective owner-residents who contracted with a builder, to speculators, or to builders who bought a few parcels, building one or two houses at a time (Chase, Ames, and Siders, 90). These early land developers maintained control over many aspects of the layout of the subdivision and the character of the housing through the use of deed restrictions (Weiss, 41). These restrictive covenants legitimated the idea the private owners should surrender some of their individual property rights for the common good, including their own...[and]...were the principal vehicle by which subdividers and technicians refined and tested the methods of modern landuse planning (Weiss, 68). In Riverside in 1869, for example, Olmsted and Vaux included deed restrictions that designated lot sizes, established building lines, set minimum dwelling values, banned fences, and required the dwellings to be owner-occupied. Deed restrictions were commonly used in middle- and working-class subdivisions. The great majority of subdividers also operated on a small scale, laying out, improving, and selling lots on only a few subdivisions a year (Warner, 122).

The home builder phase of development began when subdividers began to build homes in their subdivisions. Subdividers competed in the market with the number of improvements they offered, such as graded and paved roads, sidewalks, landscaping with trees, and railroad depots. By the turn of the century, developers learned that they could enhance the marketability of their subdivisions by building houses on at least a portion of their lots. At a time when there was a great deal of speculation and fraud in subdivision development, constructing a few houses helped convince prospective buyers that a subdivision was more than a paper plan (Keating, 70). But developers saw themselves in the business of selling land, not houses. And although more developers began to add houses to their subdivisions, it was not until the subdivision boom collapsed in the 1926 and lot sales and prices fell precipitously, that subdividers became home builders on a wide scale (Weiss, 41). In Los Angeles, for example, subdivision activity doubled from 1920 to 1921, when developers filed 607 tract maps; by 1923, 1,424 tracts were recorded, but in 1925 the number dropped to 684 (Hise, 24). The scale of operations for most home builders remained small, fewer than 10 houses built a year.

Community builders were, according to Marc Weiss, "subdividers who changed the nature of American land development during the early decades of the twentieth century, (Weiss, 45)" and were, to Leo Grebler, "large-scale operators who developed integrated communities with especially designed street patterns and commercial and other facilities (Grebler, 62). "Community builders acquired large tracts of land that they developed in stages according to a master plan. The first and most influential of these community developers, Jessie Clyde Nichols, introduced long-term planning as a way of developing large-scale suburban communities. He exhibited his principles in building the Country Club District near Kansas City--a community that would ultimately house 35,000 residents in 6,000 homes and 160 apartment buildings (Jackson, 177). As the centerpiece of the County Club District in 1925, Nichols built the first automobile-oriented planned regional shopping center in the United States. He created a new form of retailing and service center that, along with the single-family house, would become the icon of the post-World War II suburban landscape.

The term community builder came into use during the 1910s and 1920s in connection with city planning or large-scale private subdividing and residential developments. Community builders' developments incorporated the latest planning ideas in subdivision design. By "communities," planners, housing advocates, and the leading community builders meant "neighborhood-scale developments with dwellings, schools, commercial centers, recreational facilities, religious structures and civic

institutions . . . (Hise, 25)" Examples from the 1920s included Palos Verdes Estates (outside Los Angeles), Shaker Heights (Cleveland), River Oaks (Houston), and the Country Club District (Kansas City) (Muller, 43).

Community builders were generally strong advocates of zoning and city planning because they wanted to promote predictability in the land market and protect their investments. Indeed, the deed restrictions they used to control development within their subdivisions were a form of private zoning. On the other hand, planners supported community builders because they operated on a large scale and could implement the type of developments planners thought necessary to create new communities, such as embodied in the neighborhood concept of Clarence Perry.

The community builder, then, was an individual developer who operated on a large scale, controlled all aspects of a development, and was concerned with developing a complete residential community. Community builders greatly influenced the form of the post-World War II suburb and were responsible for shaping the character of the post-World War II metropolis. The idea of selling both a home and a lifestyle was not simply a marketing ploy by developers to ensure sales, it represented the integration of the suburban ideals of homeownership and community in a single real estate transaction. The collapse of the housing industry in 1928 and the Depression that followed (in which residential construction fell 90 percent from 1928 to 1933) made the resurrection of the construction industry, the reemployment of its workers, and the provision of affordable housing national goals of the highest order. Federal housing programs enacted in the 1930s would revolutionize and dramatically expand the financing and construction of subdivisions and owner-occupied housing.

Financing Suburban Residential Development - The long-term federally subsidized mortgage was not invented until the 1930s. Before that time, homeownership was difficult and expensive to finance. In the nineteenth century, because of the stigma attracted to mortgages, well-established families were expected to purchase their houses outright (Jackson, 196). For the less well-to-do, mortgages commonly were short three- to five-year renewable loans with interest rates of two to five percent calculated semiannually (Warner,). As paying off a mortgage within its term required a large payment at the end, most homeowners counted on renewing their mortgages several times before paying for their house and lot. This was a reasonable expectation when the economy was growing, but periods of economic downturn, such as the Depression, led to many foreclosures.

First mortgages were made on less than 50 percent of the value of the property, thus requiring more than a 50 percent down payment. Second mortgages on improvements could be made on 20 percent of the property, but first and second mortgages rarely combined for more than 50 percent of the value of the property (Warner, 119). These were the terms available to subdividers and homebuilders alike. Subdividers would buy the land they intended to develop with cash or a short-term mortgage. To finance the improvements such as roads, they would take out a short- term mortgage on the market value of the land after the improvements had been made. Once the improvements had been made, the subdivider was anxious to sell the improved lots to retire his mortgage and collect his profits. Subdividers did not build dwellings because as small-scale operators, most did not have the necessary capital or the time under the short terms of the mortgage practice.

The subdivider would sell lots to builders, to real estate brokers, and to individuals wanting to build their own homes. In order to finance the construction of a house, builders and prospective homeowners would take out a mortgage on the value of the lot as improved with the house. Once construction was well along, a second mortgage would be taken out to complete the construction. Many individuals with less capital for a down payment would first buy the lot with a mortgage and, after paying off the lot in several years, use it for collateral for a mortgage to construct a house. Thus, it was many years before some subdivisions were completed. After World War I, mortgages became a more typical way to finance home ownership because of rising costs and consumer debt (Jackson, 196). The impact of the Depression collapsed this system of home financing. In 1933, half of all the home mortgages in the United States were technically in default and foreclosures were taking place at a rate of 1,000 a day.

To help rebuild the home construction industry, Congress passed the National Housing Act of 1934, which established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), to stimulate moderate-cost housing. FHA--and after World War II, the Veteran’s Administration--insured long-term, low-interest mortgages made by private lenders against loss. This both revolutionized the home finance industry and expanded the number of potential homeowners by lowering both the down payments on a house and the ongoing monthly payments. The necessary down payments were reduced from 30 percent to 10 percent of a house’s appraised value by raising the amount that could be loaned from 50 percent to 90 percent of that value. Monthly mortgage payments were reduced by extending loan periods from 15 to 25 or 30 years. Mortgages insured under the VA after 1944 to benefit veterans often required no down payments and even lower mortgage payments.

Having fallen to 93,000 units in 1933, housing starts rebounded to 332,000 in 1937 and 619,000 in 1941 (Jackson, 204 and Wright, 240-241). But the FHA regulations were prejudiced against African-American buyers and central city locations and heavily favored suburban locations. The agency would not insure loans in city neighborhoods threatened by "Negro invasion" because it felt their presence made the loan a bad risk. Indeed, it "red-lined" and refused to make insured loans on any property in entire neighborhoods the agency felt were threatened. This caused a chain reaction as private lenders then would not grant loans in redlined neighborhoods (Jackson, 209 and Wright, 247). These policies lead to the decline of many stable city neighborhoods. At the same time, in new suburban subdivisions, the FHA encouraged restrictive covenants prohibiting African-American occupancy until 1949--two years after the Supreme Court ruled that racial restrictive covenants were unconstitutional. Favoring new construction and biased against city locations, the FHA was the primary force in the development of post-World War II suburbs.

Mass Production: Post-World War II Subdivisions and Zoning - As it was structured before World War II, the home building industry--consisting of small local builders handbuilding a few houses or small developments a year--could not have met the postwar demand for housing. However, after World War II, in addition to insuring homes to up to 95% of their value, the FHA agreed to provide large builders with billions of dollars of credit—(Goldfield and Brownell, 343) leading to the rise of the large-scale corporate developer. The FHA and the war also streamlined housing production techniques. During the 1930s, the minimum standards promulgated by the FHA for the houses it would insure were influential in shaping the floor plan, ceiling heights, and other features of the single-family house (Rowe, 102). As well, during the 1930s and early 1940s, new materials and construction technologies had been developed but little used. They included plywood, concrete slab foundations, prefabricated window units, drywall and plasterboard, and aluminum sliding glass doors (Ford, 161). During World War II, in efforts to mass-produce worker housing, government contractors experimented by prefabricating components of housing, applying production-line techniques to their construction at the site and using new management techniques. Thus, after the war, faced with a backlog of some four million dwellings, supplied with massive construction financing, and possessing new building materials and techniques, developers moved to mass-produce a new landscape.

Huge developments were built rapidly. The most famous one, Levittown, begun on Long Island, New York, in 1948, pioneered the new techniques of mass production, providing homes for 82,000 residents in more than 17,500 houses (Jackson, 235). Levitt and Sons, the developers, sped construction by simplifying the house and turning the construction site into a production line. The basement was eliminated, and much of the house was preassembled off site. Construction was divided into 27 steps with specialized crews for each step. During peak production, 32 houses were being completed a day. The houses were 750 square-foot, four-room Cape Cods with a practical and well-designed floor plan. These mass-production techniques were adopted elsewhere as in the Lakewood Park complex built south of Los Angeles, which eventually housed 100,000 people (Knox, 121).

Levittown was not unique. A small number of large developers built an increasing share of post-war housing. By 1949, the year when the post-World War II housing boom really began, 45 percent of all new housing units were built by just four percent of all builders and developers (Weiss, 161). The housing in these subdivisions built by the community builders, single developers who were responsible for the complete development of a subdivision from the acquisition of land to the construction and selling of houses, tended to be uniform. Indeed, one of both the hallmarks and critiques of the post-World-War II subdivisions was the uniformity of their housing. Yet, these tract houses reflected the developers' attempts to keep prices down. They did so by standardizing on a single model and by preassembling major components of the house -- roof trusses, side panels, kitchen and bathroom plumbing units-- off site. This was as important in lowering construction costs as the shift from post-and-lintel to balloon frame construction a century earlier (Vance, 449).

It was this combination of low-cost, long-term financing and lowering of construction costs that brought home ownership in the suburbs to a majority of Americans.

While the subdivision has been the building block of the suburban landscape and the creation of developers, the motivation of families to suburbanize has focused on the house - their suburban home.

The Evolution of the Single-Family Suburban House - In the second half of the nineteenth century, as rapid industrialization and growth made cities increasingly congested and polluted, the family became seen by many Americans as the vehicle for reforming society, giving rise to a "cult of domesticity." The expansion of professional jobs with higher incomes expanded the middle class, enabling more men to become the sole financial support of their wives and children. The single-wage-earner family, in which only the father had to go to work daily, had more freedom to choose a residential location away from work, allowing families to take advantage of mass transit, affordable land, and houses in the city’s fringe. As a family-centered Victorian society elevated the woman as mother and wife to be the creator and guardian of the home, responsible for perfecting an alternative to the commercial world where her husband and sons had to work (Clarke, 100), that alternative was a suburban home. It was to be a private refuge, a place of peace and inspiration and reward for diligence and thrift.

The trends in the evolution of the suburban home involved the design of the house itself, the character of its immediate lot, and its placement in the larger subdivision and landscape. By the 1870s, it was taken for granted by family reformers, plan book writers, and architects that the suburban home and its setting should be the antithesis of the urban center (Clarke, 100). If the city ignored and destroyed nature, the suburban home celebrated it, sheltered in a landscape of green lawns, shrubs trees, and birds. If the city seemed a chaotic mix of frenetic activity, of immigrants and poorer groups, of disorder and crime, the suburban subdivision and neighborhood offered order, boundaries, and rules of behavior. And if the impersonality and competitiveness of the city squelched creativity, the suburbs supported personal growth and creativity (Clarke, 100). The ideal suburban home came to be defined as much by the character of its landscape context--from parcel to subdivision to semirural location--as by its architectural characteristics.

The quest for the natural surroundings of the suburbs as a healthier place to live did, in fact, reflect a realistic fear of the city as a source of disease. As late as the turn of the twentieth century, in spite of advances in public health, epidemics of tuberculosis, cholera, smallpox, and typhoid fever still beset urban populations, especially children (Gowans, 28). And in the Victorian mind, disease was also tied to the lack of morality of the city. The greater natural purity of the suburban environment was seen as an antidote to disease. Indeed, increasingly Victorians saw the city and suburbs as separate moral spheres in which the suburban home became an important means of sheltering the family from the corrupting influences of the city. The suburban home became the locus of these values.

The discussion of trends in American housing in the second half of the nineteenth century often focuses on a collection of eclectic architectural styles generally called Victorian. This was a period of exuberant styles, of complex shapes and elaborate detailing including Second Empire, Stick, Queen Anne, Shingle, Richardson Romanesque, and a variety of eclectic vernacular variations. In part, these new forms reflected the impact of the Industrial Revolution on residential architecture. The balloon-frame method of construction, using 2x4s and wire nails, lowered the cost of housing, simplified its construction, and permitted a greater variety of shapes and forms to be built. Industrialization allowed many architectural elements--doors, windows, siding and decoration--to be mass-produced and shipped by railroad through the country. By the end of the century, entire prefabricated houses were being sold by mail-order catalog.

However, the central theme in understanding the historical significance of houses built in the suburbs in the second half of the nineteenth century is not found in the trends in architectural styles but in how a new type, and new form, of housing emerged--the suburban house. This house reflected the aspirations and resources of those that moved to the suburbs; its evolution reflected two major themes. The first theme was that the creation and evolution of suburban house plans and types reflected changing concepts of the ideal family that the house was designed to support. Indeed, as Alan Gowans points out, the Victorian house was a visual metaphor for the family (Wright, 111). The many rooms and intricate floor plans, for example, reflected the hierarchical Victorian family with a need for distinct zones for different activities (Gowans, 29). Later, the more open plans of suburban bungalows in the early twentieth century reflected a movement toward a more egalitarian family living more informally. The Ranch House of the 1950s, organized around a recreation room with the garage built into the house, was equally a manifestation of the concept of family then current.

The second theme is the role the suburban house played in creating a landscape in complete contrast to (and rejection of) that of the city, both as a building and as an element of the landscape. If the urban landscape was rectilinear, hard-edged, and unnatural, covered with rows of monotonous row houses, the irregular-shaped houses in the suburbs, finished in colorful textured natural materials, consciously symbolized an organic counterpoint. As we have seen, the goal of designing the placement of the house in a subdivision was to enhance the illusion of a natural landscape. Yet, a new concept of house was required to fulfill this role, "a dwelling intended to sit on its own plot of ground, like the rural houses of earlier America, yet also related to other houses on a street, like older urban row houses." (Gowans, 29) The significance of the suburban house should be interpreted within the historic context of changing conceptions of family and the constant ideal of the suburban landscape as a semirural retreat from the city. Alan Gowans has tried to capture the essence of the new suburban house as "the comfortable house."

At mid-nineteenth century, as horsecar lines began to push out from the walking city, the suburban house had yet to be invented. Housing choices were largely limited to high-density urban row houses or walkups or rural farm houses, although prototypes of what would become suburban houses could be found in small towns. The central motivation for the invention of the suburban house was the desire to own a single-family house in a semi-rural environment away from the city - what would become The American Dream. The invention of the suburban house required and reflected several elements:

Stages in the Evolution of the Suburban House - From the 1860s to the 1950s, there are three broad periods in the evolution of the suburban house. They are:

1. The Victorian Villa and Homestead Temple House: 1860 to 1900;

All of these house types are a manifestation of changing concepts and styles of family living and of creating a house as part of the ideal suburban landscape.

Suburban Prerequisite: The Invention of the Balloon-frame Method of Construction -

As important as cutting the costs of suburban living and improvements in transportation was the revolutionary invention in the 1830s of the balloon-frame method of construction - a new technology of assembly that both lowered the cost of a house and sped its completion (Gowans, 125). Before the balloon-frame method was invented, most houses were built using the post-and-beam system of construction. With this method, the frame of the building consisted of heavy horizontal beams held up with thick vertical posts strengthened by angled cross-braces, all joined with mortise and tenon. It was expensively labor intensive because the heavy, bulky materials had to be assembled and framed on the ground and raised into place. In addition, the construction of post-and-beam frame required specialized knowledge and carpentry skills that often were in short supply in a growing area (Gowans, 125).

The balloon-frame method of house construction substituted much lighter, precut 2x4 inch studs for the heavy, preferably oak, post and beams. The studs were joined with nails to create a box-like frame that attained its strength by spreading the stress over a large number of light boards. This method required fewer workers and much less time and expense to complete (Wright, 87). Using precut, dimensioned lumber and mass-produced cut nails, the balloon-frame was a product of the early factory system. Because the method relied on manufactured parts of lightweight, precut lumber and mass-produced nails, building materials could be transported to construction sites some distance from the source of materials. The rails of mass transit played the double duty of bringing construction materials to new residents in the areas they opened up.

By using lighter materials that could be nailed together in a variety of shapes, the balloon-frame allowed architects and builders to build with greater variety in form, shape, and decoration than was possible with the older post-and-beam and masonry methods of construction. It was a medium well suited for building the Romantic and Picturesque architecture of the second half of the nineteenth century.

Adapting the Villa to the Suburbs - In 1842, Andrew Jackson Downing published Cottage Residences , one of a number of pattern books (Davis 1842; Shaw 1843) in which he and others introduced the Gothic country cottage and villa set in a semi-rural environment as the ideal place to live. Downing's books made several contributions. His illustrations gave detailed architectural expression to the ideal of living in the countryside. This was achieved by Downing's use of romantic, rustic architectural styles and detailing that were associated with nature and organic design. The pattern books not only provided plans for the house, but gave advice on the style of landscape appropriate to each type of dwelling (Schuyler, The Apostles of Taste, 58). Downing appealed not only to the well-to-do with villas, but to the working class with smaller cottages of inexpensive designs. The villa introduced a new concept of a house--"a place with a yard. (Jackson, 58)"

By the 1860s, the single-family house was rapidly becoming the visible symbol of material achievement and the paragon of middle-class housing (Jackson, 50). Stylistically, Downing was concerned with the evolution of an American aesthetic in architecture. Although he realized it would take some time to evolve, he favored romantic styles such as the Italianate, bracketed, and Rural Gothic as the most complementary to the rural and semi-rural sites he promoted (Schuyler, The Apostle of Taste, 128). The character and size of the land on which the house was sited, creating separateness in a private space while providing a verdant buffer to the surrounding world, became integral to the suburban ideal. Initially the parcel was thought of as roughly natural and semi-rural, but by the 1870s, it had been transformed and simplified into a green, grass lawn.

The natural imagery so vital to the suburban ideal of a semi-rural location was provided as much by the house as by the landscape. Even the middle-class family that bought a small suburban plot in a rectilinear subdivision near the streetcar line could find natural imagery in the house. According to Gwendolyn Wright, the natural qualities of the suburban Victorian house were reflected in a number of ways. First, the irregular shape of the house was considered organic. Second, the combined use in a single facade of rough limestone, wide clapboards, and cedar shingles gave the look of natural materials and venerable age to a house. Third, colors were used to simulate the hues of nature, including the reds and golds of autumn, the greens of plants, and the soft browns and grays of weathered woods. Fourth, porches were designed to emphasize the relationship of the house to the natural environment, and most suburban dwellings had more than one porch (Wright, 106-107). To make the house more open to the natural suburban landscape system of which it was a part, by the late 1870s windows had become much larger and were often grouped together to bring more light into the house and present an open vista to the outside.

For the upper and upper-middle classes, the villa on its own parcel became an expression of individuality and economic attainment. As rooms were provided for individual roles and family activities, which often reflected gender, the villa grew larger and more complex. To promote family unity houses, the living room with a fireplace--a popular symbol of domesticity (Wright, 108) - was designed to be the center of the house (Sies, 205). As overseer of the home sphere, the wife required rooms for her own domestic obligations such as the kitchen with a pantry, rooms for sewing and for laundry, and a parlor for her own rest and reading and for tutoring of children. When possible in the child-centered family, children were given their own rooms to encourage individuality and self-discipline. In addition, specific rooms satisfied the needs of the husband, such as a study, and the suburban home contained a variety of nooks and crannies for privacy, to counter for the loss of individual expression that seems endemic to mass urban society (Sies, 205). Thus, the interior of the suburban villa was designed in appearance and layout as an idealized alternative to the city. At the same time, the villa was a part of the large suburban landscape. The Victorian villas in the planned subdivisions of the late nineteenth century were the most complete architectural statements of suburban ideal, and the values they embodied would serve as models of the suburban house.

The Homestead Suburban Temple House - Although the well-to-do were able to build the most complete architectural statements of the suburban ideal in planned subdivisions, less affluent middle- and working-class families sought separation from their neighbors and the city in the ways that they could afford - which were much more modest and small scale. We will call the modest suburban houses they built homesteads in contrast to the more elaborate and expensive villas of the well-to-do. A homestead is a house primarily intended to raise a family and only secondarily to proclaim social status, whereas a mansion is intended to express social status (Gowans, 32). Middle- and working- class families faced the difficult problem of building individual houses on small, rectangular lots in gridded subdivisions while retaining some sense of separation and feeling of the natural environment.

Until the 1860s, most houses in the United States were either freestanding farm houses, housing of the elite, or urban row houses sharing party-walls and a common facade. Most free- standing houses presented their wide side to the street as the front. However, the Greek Revival style, popular from the 1820s to the 1860s, presented an alternative--the temple house. The core architectural form of the Greek Revival style was the Greek temple, a colonnaded structure with its front on the gable or narrow end--well suited for narrow urban lots fronting the street. A proper Greek temple was freestanding. This led to the development of a rectangular Greek Revival residential building with the front, and principle decoration, on the narrow gable end. By the time of the Chicago boom in the 1850s, nearly all urban houses were built with the narrow gable end to the street and freestanding, although crowded on narrow lots (Ford, 140).

The temple house evolved into a new suburban form by being designed with essentially three facades: front (street), back, and side (Gowans, 33). An ad by the Chicago Wrecking Company for mail-order houses called their temple houses a combination of country and city home. They deviated from the city form of house by not being completely street-oriented. They lacked the identical facades of row houses and were freestanding on small lots. With distinctive side and back facades, they retained individuality as a scaled-down version of the suburban villa or country house. Although built at higher densities than the suburban villa, and certainly the country house, temple houses were part of a rectilinear subdivision (summarized from Gowans with additions).

The gable-ended suburban house was built in a variety of forms ranging from the simplest one-story version, called shotguns or small cottage, to elaborate one and a half- and two-story versions finished in the most ornate eclectic style. It was the simplest of the homestead temple houses that allowed the working class to suburbanize. For example, of the 7,000 suburban houses he built from 1880 to 1892, Samuel Eberly Gross of Chicago built as many simple workers' cottages for $800 as he did the more expensive $3,000 to $4,000 homes for middle class families (Wright, 100). From the 1840s, with the publication of pattern books extolling romantic country cottages, until the 1890s, the ideal suburban home took a distinctive shape and form that was widely understood and aspired to by Americans of all incomes. The major vehicle for the dissemination of the ideal suburban home was the booming business in pattern books.

Building the Suburbs with Pattern Books - In the nineteenth century, the suburbs were constructed primarily by developers, or subdividers, who divided the land, installed utilities to some degree, and sold lots to individuals. These individuals might be households or builders with a client or building on speculation. In either event, whether built by the owner or contractor, the major source of designs and instructions for suburban homes construction was the pattern book, of which there was a great outpouring from 1860s until the turn of the century.

Unlike the earlier builders’ guides, the pattern books that emerged in the 1840s, led by Downing’s example, were oriented to the client, the consumer of the house. The books showed completed houses in their landscaped settings accompanied with floor plans, instructions for unusual architectural elements, and suggestions for landscaping and plantings. A client could choose a design and take it to a local builder who would follow the instructions to build the house as desired by the client (Schuyler, The Apostles of Taste, 58). The pattern books increased exponentially the houses families could visualize. Pattern book images were often published in other forms of literature. Some 450 model house designs were published Godey’s Ladies Book between 1846 and 1898 and provided the plans for more than 4,000 houses in a single decade (Wright, 82).

The pattern books of the second half of the nineteenth century provided both the vision and technical assistance to many households, ranging from those who wanted to buy their own suburban homes in a land market in which land is sold on short-term mortgages to aspiring households who must build their own houses as economically as possible. And while the curvilinear, upper-class models of Riverside and its progeny articulated the more complete suburban ideal, at all income levels the suburban house of the nineteenth century was designed to reflect its own natural imagery essential to the suburban ideal. This ideal was aggressively promoted by pattern books and mail-order architecture across all income groups.

The demand for housing was great as urban growth was explosive throughout the country, including small cities. Wilmington, Delaware, for example, grew from 4,000 in 1840 to 110,000 by 1910. After the Civil War, and partly in response to the demand for housing, a new generation of pattern books appeared, exemplified by the work of Henry Hudson Holly and the Palliser brothers (Clark, 74). Both tried to heighten the picturesque quality of new suburban housing while lowering its cost. Holly suggested the picturesque quality of middle-income homes could be heightened if families clubbed together in developments designed to respond to the topography and create shared vistas and views.

Holly and the Palliser brothers also incorporated a greater eclecticism in architectural style in which the visual and artistic effect of the house was more important than an adherence to tradition, as in the case of Downing and earlier pattern book writers. Holly introduces irregularities in the housing form and shape to increase the contrast between light and shade. Likewise, his designs feature a variety of colors, diversity of surface treatments, and large decorated chimneys (Clark, 75). George and Charles Palliser present an even looser, more interpretive eclecticism in their best-selling plan books, beginning in 1876 with the publication of Model Homes for the People, a Complete Guide to the Proper and Economical Erection of Buildings. But the great innovation of the Palliser brothers was the introduction of mail-order architecture. By filling out a request form and sending it to the Pallisers' office, along the appropriate fee, a prospective client could get detailed construction plans for the house he liked. And unlike other pattern books, the Palliser book was printed inexpensively and cost only twenty-five cents (Clark, 77). The Palliser brothers democratized the availability of quality architectural plans for a house that embodied the Victorian ideals of family and suburban living. As the second half of the nineteenth century progressed, the suburban ideal was actively promoted not only as an abstract ideal for the elite, but to many income levels and in many styles.

Writing about Boston, Warner observes that the majority of new housing construction turned to suburban styles by the 1860s and 1870s (Warner, 145). By the last third of nineteenth century, even the wealthy are building suburban houses on smaller lots and no longer depend on rural allusions or estate-sized lots for their effect but rather on building large houses arranged in big masses on relatively small lots (Warner, 149). The reality was that most suburban development was a variation on a rectilinear subdivision, ranging from the Private Places in St. Louis to Gross’ workers cottages in Chicago.

The introduction of the streetcar multiplied both the land available for suburbanization and the demand for housing. It also allowed for greater outward movement of the middle and upper classes to the further reaches of the streetcar line. This created a greater segregation of neighborhoods by income and class, as reflected in newer and more modern homes on larger lots as one traveled outward in the streetcar. But the new housing was also about progressive ideas and "modern" advantages such as indoor toilets and electricity (Palen, 38). The subdivisions provided utilities and amenities not yet available in the city. Consequently, the movement to the suburbs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was as much a movement toward new housing with the latest utilities and appliances as much as a movement away from the city.

It was the period from 1860 to the 1890s that the suburban house was developed. First appearing as a suburban villa for the well-to-do, it was adapted for households of more modest incomes as suburbs were desired by a broader spectrum of the population. The suburban ideal, as a place on the edge of the city, was intentionally designed to be the opposite of the city physically and to serve as a therapeutic refuge from the city. This ideal was aggressively and persuasively articulated through pattern books, the writings of home and architectural reformers, and popular magazines. In the 1890s, however, the suburban ideal and the suburban landscape began to change.

The coming of the streetcar in the 1890s coincided with fundamental changes in the perception of the ideal family and a revision of what constituted the best suburban home. Changing ideals stressed a less hierarchical, more informal, spontaneous family pursuing a more relaxed life-style. Families were smaller and women’s roles as wives and mothers changed. The Victorian aesthetic that valued richness and complexity was replaced by one stressing "practicality and simplicity, efficiency and craftsmanship (Clark, 132)." This, in turn, was converted into new principles of architectural design based on simplicity and honesty (Clark, 134). The function of the suburban home as a place of rest and tranquility and a refuge from the city, however, remained constant.

The elaborate Victorian house was replaced with a house of structural simplicity, balanced proportions, and minimal decoration. Its epitome was the low-profile, cleanly designed, horizontal bungalow. As with the Victorian house, it was the floor plan that best reflected new family values: the many specialized rooms of the Victorian suburban house--entrance hall, front and back parlors, and others--were replaced with an ideal of simplified design and standardized layout - with fewer multipurpose spaces in a more standardized design (Clark, 163). The first floor was generally laid out from front to rear with a small front porch, living room, dining room, and kitchen. All of the first floor rooms were intended to be multipurpose. The living room was to combine the functions of the front and back parlors, the hall, and the library. To accomplish this, built-in architectural features maximized efficient use of space. Living rooms were provided with a fireplace, built-in books shelves, and englenooks. Dining rooms were no longer considered rooms used only for eating. Kitchens were designed with great attention to efficiency and cleanliness, reflecting the principles of the new science of home economics, and also included "dinettes" where families could eat more quickly and informally (Clark, 163).

The ideal house layout preserved the circular pattern of movement on the first floor. However, because of the smaller size and multipurpose rooms, the ideal house often had several ways to enter and to move around within it. A departure from the Victorian house was the elimination of the back staircase due in part to the decline in the availability of household servants, to the increasing numbers of new suburban households that could not afford servants, and to the new ideal stating that the housewife should be able to run this new, smaller, more efficiently designed house by herself.

In addition to the desire for more efficiency, the trend toward building smaller houses reflected the increasing costs of building suburban houses. The many technological innovations that were introduced to improve household life, such as central heating, gas hot water heaters, indoor plumbing, and electricity, entailed expensive mechanical systems that increased the cost of construction. The reduction in floor space combined with a standardized plan helped offset increased construction costs in an aesthetically minimalist house.

Of the new types of suburban housing that appeared during the streetcar era beginning of in the 1890s and the early automobile period in the 1920s, the most important were the Bungalow and the Foursquare. The homestead temple house continued to evolve and be popular. Making their appearances in 1910s and 1920s, Revival houses would come to be the most common suburban house by the 1940s.

The Open Plan and Bungalows- Hardly known in the 1890s, the bungalow by 1910 had become the ideal suburban home and was being built by the thousands, giving rise to what one writer called The Bungalow Suburbs (Palen, 51). Influenced by the prairie school movement around Chicago, (Rowe, 68) the bungalow typically was a one-story, side gable house, with a wide, shallow-pitched roof extended with overhanging eaves. If it was a story and a half, the second floor was hidden under the roof and revealed only by low dormers in the front. The low profile and overhanging roof of the bungalow symbolized shelter and safety (Clark, 173). The wide open front porch, the second most important feature of the ideal bungalow, made the home open to nature. The ideal bungalow emphasized its relationship to nature by using natural materials that would help it blend into its site.

The floor plans were divided into two zones of a family living and entertainment area--living room, dining room, and front porch--and private bedrooms. In the one-story bungalow, the family-entertainment areas were located in the front and the private bedrooms in the rear. In one-and-a-half story versions, the private areas were upstairs. Most of these houses averaged 1,300 to 1,400 square feet (Rowe, 69). The simple form of the bungalow was a reaction to the ornateness and complexity of the Victorian houses. As suburbs became available to more middle- and working-class families, the bungalow reflected the need for smaller houses that could be maintained without servants.

Bungalows also came in smaller cottage form, or what some called a California beginner bungalow, which was a low gable-end house of one story (Gowans, 82). It was the most inexpensive of the bungalow form. Although frequently associated with the Craftsmen style, bungalows were built in a range of styles, which was part of their appeal. All bungalows were placed in the middle of their lots.

The American Foursquare and Revival Houses .- The American Foursquare was a second new type of suburban house that made its appearance in the 1890s. By the 1930s, it was a fixture of the suburban (and national) landscape. The foursquare is two-story house on a raised basement with a one-story porch across the front. Topped with a pyramidal roof with a front dormer, the floor plan consists of four equally sized rooms on each floor (Gowans, 84). Although usually to the side, the staircase may be centered in more strictly Colonial Revival models. Some call the type Colonial Revival (Rowe, 73), and, in fact, its ancestor is the eighteenth-century Georgian mansion. Although the Foursquare was built in a variety of architectural styles, it is referred to here as the Foursquare. The house was organized into two areas of use with the first floor devoted to the more public and formal functions of living room, dining room, and-often-den. The second floor, containing bedrooms and bathrooms, was the private realm of the house (Rowe, 73). There is also a one-story version of the Foursquare known as the Workingman’s home, or the small Foursquare. This version generally lacks a porch or veranda. The small Foursquare usually has one or two bedrooms.

In the 1920s, revival styles, especially Colonial, became very popular, and the Foursquare was modified into a more traditional rectangular classical shape with a symmetrical facade and a gable roof. The popularity of revival styles was partly stimulated by the invention of inexpensive techniques in the 1920s for adding brick veneer to a balloon frame house (McAlester, ). With a gambrel roof, the house became a Dutch Colonial. It was converted into a Tudor form by the addition of a sloping roof and half-timber decoration.

Mail Order Suburban Housing - A fundamental characteristic of suburbanization in the United States has been the drive to lower the cost of suburban houses while improving their quality and diversity. During the periods of rapid urban growth in the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, suburbanization was reflected not just in a household choice to live outside the city but as a means of modern affordable housing. Suburbs arose partly in response to a overwhelming demand for new housing.

As we have seen, until the 1940s, developers by and large supplied only the subdivided land, laid out by plan and prepared to varying degrees for construction with utilities. Housing choice and construction were the responsibility of either the household buying a suburban plot or speculative builders who built one or two houses at a time. Thus, suburban builders were a mix of amateur self-help owners who served as their own general contractors, small-scale builders, and carpenters. They were provided with increasingly complete architectural technical assistance beginning with Downing's pattern books in the 1840s. These books catered to the housing consumer by providing floor plans, elevations, and three-dimensional renderings to guide construction. In the 1890s, the Palliser brothers offered complete architecture plans and specifications and a mail-order consulting architect to customize plans. One of the most prolific and influential of the publications was the Ladies Home Journal (Gowans, 46, see Roth VAF). Although its plans were mostly Colonial Revival, it did publish two Prairie houses by Frank Lloyd Wright. By the turn of the century, complete prefabricated, disassembled, and boxed houses could be ordered by mail (An excellent bibliographical source for mail order houses is Stevenson and Jandl, Houses by Mail: A Guide to Houses from Sears Roebuck and Company).

Although ordering ready-made parts of buildings out of catalogs--hardware, doors, and all manner of trim, steps, fireplaces, and, especially for Victorian houses, jig-cut and scrolled wooden ornament of all types--had been going on since the 1860s, the first to market mass produced prefabricated buildings seems to have been the E.F. Hodgson Company of Dover, Massachusetts, in 1892 (Gowans, 48). However, the first company to offer full build-it-entirely-yourself services was the Aladdin Company in 1904. Sears, Roebuck and Company entered the business in 1907, followed soon after by its major mail-order competitor, Montgomery Ward Company (Gowans, 52). In addition to these giants, a host of smaller companies sold prefabricated houses by mail.

The efficiencies of mass production and the reduction of on-site work helped reduce the cost of housing. Sears and Montgomery Ward also sold their kit houses on credit, which helped make them even more affordable. Thousands of prefabricated houses were sold and shipped annually. They occupy a significant portion of the suburban landscape that was built during the 1910s and 1920s. Thus, the notion that the post-World War II suburban boom ushered in the first mass-produced suburban housing in developments like Levittown is not true. The mail-order houses were mass-produced and, unlike the uniformity of housing produced after World War II, the mail-order subdivisions were architecturally diverse because builders were ordering from catalogs with a great many choices in type, style, and price range. Sears alone offered approximately 450 ready-to-build designs ranging from bungalows to mansions. (Stevenson and Jandl, 19) Sears' sales reached 30,000 houses by 1925 and 50,000 by 1930.

With the coming of the Depression in the 1930s, housing starts, including mail-order suburban housing, declined precipitously, coming almost to a standstill. There was a great deal of discussion and experimentation, however, about the ideal small house that would influence post-World War II design.

The immediate response to the housing shortage after World War II was to built rental housing. The first 6,000 units begun in 1947 in Levittown on Long Island, for example, were rental units. Designed to relieve the housing shortage, the Federal Housing Act of 1949 authorized billions of dollars of construction credits for developers and greatly liberalized home purchase terms with both the FHA and the VA. The down payment necessary for an FHA mortgage was lowered to 5 percent, and no down payment was required for a VA mortgage. The repayment period was extended to 30 years (Kelly,). A veteran could own a house with no down payment and $60.00 a month--cheaper than renting.

These actions temporarily reversed the historic trend of suburbs being settled by refugees from the central city. After World War II, the suburbs offered the only available affordable housing. Little decent housing could be found in cities both because of the housing shortage and the redlining of urban neighborhoods by the FHA and the VA. The only new housing being built was on the cities’ periphery, as developers bought extensive undeveloped tracts--often farms foreclosed on during the Depression--on which to build the new, large- scale subdivisions.

In another change in a historic trend, and counter to the image of suburbs being overwhelming middle class, the majority of the suburbs built immediately after World War II were primarily working- and lower-middle-class. Settled by young couples at the beginning of their family and work cycles and whose incomes were modest, they were only able to afford suburban, if any, housing because of the extensive federal subsidies and new economies of construction. These households were able to act on middle-class values they could not yet afford and become middle income as the economy and their incomes grew.

The two suburban housing types--the Cape Cod followed by the Ranch House--sheltered most of the post-war growth into the 1950s. Built by the thousands in hundreds of similar curvilinear subdivisions across the United States, they formed a suburban landscape that drew intense, even vicious, condemnation from a legion of critics, including planners, architects, social scientists, and journalists (Kelly, 16). The houses were criticized, even in song, as "little boxes" in "rows of ticky-tacky" which, censured as poorly constructed and badly designed, were even credited with undermining family life. Yet, both the Cape Cod and the Ranch House were radically new, carefully thought-out housing types. As did preceding generations of suburban house types, they reflected changing family values and the attainment of the American Dream for most who bought them.

Transforming the FHA Minimal House to the Cape Cod - The Cape Cod that eager prospective renters lined up to inspect in Levittown on Long Island in June 1947, was a one-and-one-half story house with an attic and no basement. Its 700 square feet of living space was divided into a living room, a kitchen, and two bedrooms. Set on a lot of 7,000 square feet, the exterior of the house--with a steeply pitched gable roof pierced by two dormers above a clapboard first story with neocolonial trim--was a variation on a Cape Cod cottage. Beneath its traditional exterior, however, the interior four-room floor plan with no basement was a significant departure from prewar suburban housing and represented more than two decades of research and experimentation by the federal government and private parties to develop a low-cost, single-family house for moderate-income American families.

Home ownership had long been promoted in the United States as a source of social stability. As president of the Better Homes movement in the 1920s, Herbert Hoover argued that home ownership was a guarantee that our society will continue to develop rationally as changing conditions demand (Kelly, 48, See also Hutchinson). The Depression, with the collapse of homebuilding and foreclosure on thousands of mortgages, brought new urgency to the desire to promote home ownership. In the face of popular unrest, home ownership was also promoted by the government and others as protection against involvement in socialist movements. In 1948, at the beginning of the Cold War, William Levitt restated this view, claiming that "no man who owns his house and lot can be a Communist; [because] he has too much to do (Kelly, 49)." More fundamentally, the Housing Act of 1949 declared "the goal of a decent home and suitable living environment for every American family."

The Housing Act of 1934 had also called upon the FHA to promote affordable housing. As with subdivision design, the FHA published standards of the types of houses it would insure, one of which was FHA’s minimum four-room-plus-bath house. Not the FHA’s invention, the standards for the minimum house was the synthesis of research by housing reformers using the new tools of scientific analysis to design a new, small, efficient, low-cost house. To create a house that a majority of American wage earners could afford, the scientific housers pursued a three-fold strategy of simplifying the house itself, streamlining the construction process with labor-saving equipment and materials, and, to produce it, applying principles of modern industrial management (Hise, 57).

Challenging traditional house types by conducting time-and-motion studies of how space was actually used and applying new scientific behavioral knowledge, the design of a new, efficient, low-cost house took shape. After lengthy analysis, the four-room plan gained consensus as the best layout. The basement, as 15 percent of the construction cost, was jettisoned as wasteful and expensive. The dining room was lost to a new approach that favored frequently used multipurpose rooms over less used single-purpose rooms. The move to fewer multipurpose rooms was also thought to respond to a trend to more informal families. In sizing the house, the researchers allowed 400 cubic feet per occupant and to discover how big the rooms should be, the U.S. Housing Authority actually constructed a full-scale, four-room study house with exterior and interior walls on movable tracts (Hise, 63).

Based on this research, the FHA’s minimum house prototype was a 624 -square-foot building. The public multipurpose spaces of a small kitchen and larger living room were laid out across the front of the house. The private spaces - two bedrooms and the bathroom - were located across the back and side. A small hall divided the bedrooms from the bathroom and provided a passageway from the public to the private realms of the house. The location of the kitchen in the front of the house facing the street was a important departure from traditional layouts. Beyond its floor plan, efficiency in the minimum house meant the inclusion of new labor-saving technologies, including a kitchen replete with appliances and an integrated mechanical system in a utility room replacing the basement furnace (Hise, 69). It was this FHA minimum house decked out in colonial trim that became the generic Cape Cod house of post-World War II suburbs.

Lowering the cost of the house by streamlining production was integral to the development of the minimum house. Reformers had long considered the traditional on-site manufacture and assembly of a house by craftsmen as too costly. To reduce costs, they looked to the off-site prefabrication of major components of a standardized house--including plumbing and mechanical systems, wall units and roof trusses, and other components of the building shell. The economies of scale of mass production in a factory would lower the cost of the components. The house was even sized in multiples of four feet to use standard 4 x 8-foot dry wall panels with a minimum of cutting (Clark, 220). The houses would be assembled on site. Once all of the components of the house were on site, they were to be assembled through an adaption of assembly line methods to the construction site called horizontal or serial production (Hise, 47 and Kelly 59-65). The tasks, skills, and manpower needed to assemble the standard house were precisely defined. Work crews, with each member having specific assigned and repetitive tasks, would move through the site sequentially assembling their assigned part of the house.

To build a standardized house achieving the economies of prefabrication required an enormous increase in the scale of production and the use of industrial management techniques to direct the process, resulting in the emergence of the large-scale developer. In building his Levittowns, William Levitt actually perfected a building and a construction process, ultimately completing a house every fifteen minutes, that had been in the making for more than two decades. Other developers did the same. Thus, the vast subdivisions of Cape Cods and later Ranch Houses, mocked by critics as suburban wastelands, in fact represented not only an unprecedented building boom, but the concerted and organized effort by many groups, including the federal government, to create a single-family house that a majority of Americans could afford and a revolution in construction methods and suburban development.

The minimum house was also built in different and expanded variations. Frequently, the living room was enlarged with a front facing gable, creating an L-shaped floor plan. Fireplaces and chimneys were added as well as basements. The houses were built in a variety of materials.

The Suburban Ranch House - In contrast to the proscribed character of the minimal Cape Cod designed by experts, the Ranch House reflected consumer preferences, and growing incomes, after 1948. Originated in the 1930s by California architects (McAlester, 479), and drawing inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie houses (Rowe, 72), the horizontal, one-story silhouette and rambling floor plan of the Ranch House reflected Americans fascination with the West Coast and its informal life-style (Clark, 211). It also reflected changing functional needs of families. From 1936 on, magazines such as Ladies Home Journal, House and Garden, Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, and Parents’ Magazine conducted social science surveys of the housing preferences of their readership. A 1946 survey of 11,428 families found that they wanted more space and favored the low rambling style called Ranch House which had come out of the southwest (Clark, 201). Specifically, they wanted their space on one floor and to include at least three bedrooms, a multipurpose room for hobbies and recreation, and a basement for laundry and other utilities.

By 1948, the Baby Boom was in full swing, creating larger families and needs for more space. The birthrate increased from 2.2 births per women in 1933 to 3.51 by the 1950s, producing a population growth rate of 33 percent for the 1940s and 1950s. As well, by the late 1940s the housing market began to soften as the first wave of demand was being met and developers turned to the Ranch House to boost sales. By late 1949, even Levitt had modified the Cape Cod into a ranch-like house called "The Forty-Niner." Leaving the floor plan intact, the house was given an asymmetrical facade, and horizontal accents were created by shingling on the lower half of the front wall and adding new horizontal sliding windows (Kelly, 82).

The true Ranch House was a single-story, rectangular structure longitudinally located across its site. With an average floor area of 1,500 to 2,000 feet, the house was laid out in three areas, which included a private zone of bedrooms and bathroom, a family living and entertainment zone, and the kitchen and housework center. The horizonal profile of the house was often extended by a garage attached at the end. The kitchen--located at one end of the house, usually next to the garage--was designed as a multipurpose room in keeping with what was thought to be the multiple roles required of women after World War II. Often built in a U shape, the kitchen was commonly separated only by a counter from the living room. The middle zone of the house consisted of the family living and entertainment area. In smaller ranch houses, it consisted of a multipurpose living room and in larger ones included a recreation room as well. Meals were eaten in a dining el off the living room. The private zone of bedrooms and bathrooms was sequestered at the other end of the house. Small half-baths or powder rooms were added to the family area so that guests did not have to enter the private zone.

In the 1950s, as families grew larger with teenagers, households traded up to larger ranch houses in which the zones within the house were more separated. The split-level ranch created barriers between the zones by moving the bedrooms, the private zone, to a half-floor up and the all-purpose room to the lower floor. With the introduction of television and inexpensive "high-fidelity" photographs, noise levels became higher within the house and the need for more soundproof zones grew.

As with the homes of earlier eras, the Ranch House was seen as having created a relationship to nature. Large sliding glass doors created, according to one writer, an indoor/outdoor unity--the changing seasons became a wall decoration. With the rising costs of construction restricting house size, the sliding glass door on patios and the use of large windows enhanced the sense of spaciousness. Patios were marketed as "outside rooms." The arrival of small air-conditioners in the late 1940s, coupled with more efficient heating, meant the Ranch House, with all its glass exterior surfaces, could be built in any

climate (Clark, 212-213). Finally, with its rambling floor plan and longitudinal placement on the lot, the Ranch House used more land than any of its predecessors. Because of expanded highway construction and the rapid growth of the automobile, lavish use of land became possible (McAlester, 477). The Ranch House in variation configurations, including the split level, continued as the dominant suburban house well into the 1960s.

For all of the emphasis on the large-scale subdivisions near larger cities, suburbanization also boomed around smaller cities. There, smaller developers adopted what they could and built variations of the minimum and Ranch Houses. For middle and upper-middle-income families around all cities, especially in the East, prewar revival styles such as Colonial Revival continued to be built using traditional construction techniques until the 1950s. Not all developers built uniform houses, and some even hired architects to design innovative plans reflecting modernist architecture (Hayden, 248). The FHA, however, did not favor houses with modern designs and instructed their evaluators to lower the ratings of such architecture.

Identification activities locate properties that may eligible for the National Register and evaluation activities apply National Register Criteria to those properties to determine which ones are eligible for listing. Identification entails three activities: developing a historic context, conducting archival research, and surveying the properties identified as being appropriate by the historic context and supporting research. There are two levels of survey: reconnaissance and intensive. A reconnaissance survey collects data to refine the historic context and identifies all resources within a designated geographic zone or property types and collects information sufficient to determine whether a resources is potentially eligible for the National Register. The intensive level survey evaluates the data from the reconnaissance survey, determines which resources are potentially eligible, then resurveys those properties, collecting information detailed enough to make a final determination of eligibility. Subdivisions are the primary historic resources surveyed in the identification phase. Because of their large and increasing numbers, suburban historic properties present a great challenge to identification activities, especially in conducting field surveys.

This bulletin has presented a framework for understanding the history of suburbanization in the United States and for developing historic contexts on suburban development at the State and local level. Suburban property types have also been identified. The elements of a historic context are theme(s), geographical limits, and chronological period. The major theme, suburbanization of the United States, is defined as the process and product of predominantly residential land development on or near the edge of an existing city within daily commuting distance. The four subthemes are 1) demographic trends, 2) transportation trends, 3) trends in land development and subdivision design, and 4) trends in suburban housing. The broad chronological period of suburbanization extends from 1840s to 1950 and is subdivided into four sub-periods: railroad and horse car suburbs from the 1840s to 1890s, streetcar suburbs from 1888 to the 1920s, early automobile suburbs from the 1920s to the 1940s, and the freeway suburbs from 1940s to 1960. (Table __)

Property types link the themes of a historic context to actual historic properties and are groupings, or classes, of individual properties that share physical or associative characteristics. The two basic physical property types of the historic suburban landscape are the subdivision and the suburban house. Taken together, single-family houses set in subdivisions within daily commuting distance of a central city, make up the third property type of the suburban landscape itself. Associative property types may include transportation facilities, commercial properties, and other historic properties directly associated with suburbanization (Table 1). Identification activities are divided into two phases:

The objectives of identification activities are to identify the range of properties in a metropolitan area that may be associated with historic suburban landscapes and to gather information to determine which properties in an area are significant. From these identification activities, the elements of a suburban historic context framework can be adapted to reflect unique aspects of the local suburbanization process and associated property types. The primary identification activities are research, field survey, and analysis.

1. Applying the suburban historic context framework to determine major elements of a historic context on regional or local suburbanization. This will determine the chronological sub-periods that a local suburban area may represent and predict generally the types of subdivisions and suburban housing that may be present.

1. The analysis activities are those associated with analyzing the data from the reconnaissance survey, undertaking additional archival research to develop final historic context with property types and setting objectives for carrying out identification and evaluation activities.

Archival research takes place before and after the field survey. The purpose of the archival research listed in Steps 1 and 2 is to set out the general parameters of the historic context, delimit the general boundaries of the suburban geographic zone or study area, identify general property types, and locate subdivisions to be surveyed in a reconnaissance survey. After the reconnaissance survey is completed, additional archival research may be conducted to gather more documentation for determining property types. A primary source of research in developing a local suburban context are the real estate sections of local papers where the subdivisions were advertised and sometimes described.

1. Determining the Chronological Periods for the Local Historic Context.-

After establishing the date of the incorporation of the central city, an initial estimate of the chronological period of significance can be determined by plotting a graph showing population growth of the central city and, separately, the adjacent counties (or smaller jurisdictions if the data is available for them) in ten-year intervals through 1960 using data from the U.S. Census. Although not precise, such a graph will give a sense of when suburbanization is likely to have occurred for that metropolitan area and the beginning of its suburban chronological period. For example, an older eastern city may have experienced rapid growth beginning in the 1840s spurred by industrialization, a midwestern city may have seen its growth begin in the 1880s, while a western city may not have expanded until the early twentieth century. As for applying chronological periods, the older metropolitan areas in the eastern United States are likely to contain the full spectrum of suburban property types; ones in the Midwest are likely to include streetcar and automobile suburbs; and the those of the West can be predicted to contain early automobile and freeway suburbs. Table 1 summarizes the periods of suburbanization and selected characteristics of each period.

2. Determining the Suburban Geographic Zone of the Local Historic Context by Determining Extent of Historic Transportation Systems and Locational Patterns of Subdivisions

Whereas demographic trends can document the approximate growth and extent of suburban areas, the trends of transportation and travel time from the central city define the limits of suburban property types for each chronological period. The best method for delimiting transportation and subdivision development is through the comparative analysis of historic maps of the city and its larger hinterland. A series of period maps should be assembled, if possible, which reflect major points in the suburban chronology but that are far enough apart to be able to capture significance changes in the landscape. Sanborn and other fire insurance maps are excellent sources after the mid-1880s.

The purpose of mapping transportation is to define the evolution of the network of transportation rights-of-way. Key dates are suggested for assembling maps to document each transportation period: maps from the mid 1880s are preferred when considering railroad suburbs, for which peak development occurred in the 1870s and 1880s; maps from 1910 to 1920 should document the extend of street car lines, which expanded rapidly from 1890 to 1910; maps from the late 1930s on will help document the early automobile period. A useful final product would be a large base map with the historic sequence of transportation network plotted in overlays.

3. Determining Trends in Subdivisions and Housing and Property Types of Local Historic Context

The number and distribution of subdivisions can be identified in several stages. First, they can be identified from the general historical maps and many of the maps showing transportation facilities. Secondly, more detailed information can be gathered from the records of local assessment and deed office. The objective of this research is to develop a list of all subdivisions in the study area, with addresses, dates of construction, and key characteristics such as size, number of lots, types of original improvements and so on which can be used as the basis for doing field surveys. Fire insurance and road maps often carry the name of subdivision from which a preliminary list can be made. Streetcar suburbs can be difficult to identify both because streetcar lines have largely disappeared; the current city-limits. A streetcar route map is the key resource for identifying streetcar suburbs.

The key maps that should be obtained for each subdivision are a one-to-one copy of the original plat prepared by the developer showing street layout and the subdivision of parcels, fire insurance maps, such as Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, drawn as soon after the completion of the subdivision as possible, and a current parcel and building outline map attained from the local planning or assessment office. Also, since the 1930s many areas have been systematically recorded in aerial photographs.

Identifying whether the subdivision was developed by a subdivider or by a community builder, that is whether the developer only sold lots or also constructed houses, should be done at this stage. The name(s) and companies of the developers should be recorded. This is an important indicator of the variety of housing to be expected.

The subdivisions should be categorized by sub-period yielding a profile of suburbanization for the local historic context. By comparing this profile to the trends for subdivision development and suburban houses, one can get a preliminary idea of the range of resources that might be expected in the local suburban landscape. Other sources that are useful for studying the history of suburban areas include: historic photographs, census records, state, county, and local histories, newspaper archives, oral histories, local planning documents, family histories, and local real estate records.

In preparation for the reconnaissance level survey, a subdivision survey form should be designed and a computer data base should be constructed listing all of the subdivisions with their key attributes derived from archival and cartographic analysis and survey form.

Reconnaissance Survey of the Suburbs

The next identification activity is to conduct a reconnaissance field survey. A reconnaissance survey is a general survey intended to collect information necessary for developing a historic context. Its purpose is to determine the range of variation in the property types for subdivisions and housing and to develop a classification system of key property types. Another objective is to confirm that the types of subdivisions indicated by the archival research are present and meet the general characteristics for the property type.

It is through the reconnaissance survey that you will begin to identify both how your area relates to the larger national trends as well as what aspects of suburban design and development are unique to your area. The basic unit of observation in a survey of the suburbs is the subdivision. However, subdivision boundaries are often invisible from the field and even on street maps, this is especially true of older rectilinear suburbs which tie into the larger street pattern. Also in older, mostly pre-World War II subdivisions, in which houses were built by individually or in small clusters, there will be no break between subdivisions signaled by changing architectural style.

List subdivisions by age from oldest to newest. Organize the itinerary for the survey so that you move from the oldest to the newest in order to gain a sense of the range of variation you can expect to find. The reconnaissance survey should be done in two stages. In the first stage, simply drive through as many subdivisions as possible, noting detailed observations and taking photographs. In surveying a subdivision, looking at three things: 1) the site plan and layout, 2) housing as a design element in the site plan, 3) housing as architecture.

Subdivision site plan and layout.- The site plan and layout include such items the overall size, the degree to which the streets follow a rectilinear or curvilinear pattern, the internal circulation system, overall density and lot size, vegetation, and so forth. In surveying subdivisions, one can expect to find an huge variation in size and design. Remembered that most subdivisions were relatively small in size up until World War II or, in small cities, even later. Table 2 illustrates that range. Something as small as short, straight streets, with a few facing houses qualifies as a subdivision if it meet the criteria of having been subdivided from a single parcel of land.

Many subdivisions will fall into the transitional area and are difficult to categorize. In developing a historic context for the suburban areas around Wilmington, Delaware, Susan Chase dealt with the problem of classifying the variety of subdivisions by classifying them in terms of streets, access, and architectural variety. Streets in a subdivision were categorized in terms of whether there was a single street or multiple streets and whether they were straight or curved. Access to the subdivision was classified as to whether it was limited to a single entrance or multiple entrances, and architectural variety could be limited, moderate or high. Although these variables could be combined to define 24 types of subdivisions, she found that over half of the 182 subdivisions she surveyed fell into four categories. Two categories were variations on a rectilinear subdivision in a larger gridiron street patterns of multiple straight streets/multiple access. One group exhibited moderate architectural variety while the other group displayed high architectural variety. Her third category was a transitional curvilinear subdivision set in a larger street pattern which was described as multiple curving streets, multiple access/moderate architectural variety. The fourth was a class of single straight street/limited access/high architectural variety (Chase, et al, 33-34). Thus, surveying subdivisions in terms of attributes allowed the construction of a definitive set of property types which reflected local variation in a way that could be related to national trends.

Table 2. Variation in Subdivision Property Types

Housing as Subdivision Design Element.- Housing, considered in aggregate, is an important design element in a subdivision. Even in earlier subdivisions where housing was built individually, through restrictive covenants, developers controlled the location of housing on the lot, its size, massing, and often its quality by specifying a minimum cost. Thus even what appears to be a great deal of architectural variation associated with subdivision where only lots were sold homes were built according to some form of design requirements.

Conversely, a great deal of subtle architectural variation can be found in large post-World War II curvilinear subdivisions in which only one or two basic housing types are found. Developers often created variation by reversing floor plans, orienting houses differently on lot (some side gable, some end gable) and by using different architectural decorative trim. Consequently what appears to be repetition of housing type, upon closer inspection, appears to be a variation of a pattern. Such patterns are a part of the overall subdivision design and an important aspect of their integrity.

Thus the subdivision survey forms should be designed to describe and measure some of the aggregate aspects of housing as a design element in the subdivision.

Housing.- The historic context framework focused on the evolution of the single-family house, divided suburban housing trends in the three major categories: 1) 1860 to 1900: The Victorian Suburban Villa and Homestead Suburban Temple House; 2) 1900-1940: The Practical Suburban House: The Bungalow, Foursquare and Revival House, and 3) Post World War II Suburban Houses: the Cape Cod, the Ranch House and others. The purpose of surveying housing in the reconnaissance survey is to establish the range in types of housing found within the subdivisions and from this to develop trends in housing development and property types. Because of the great variation in type of housing that occurs, it is important to describe and photograph housing so that property types can be developed in the analysis phase. For the reconnaissance surveys, use property types that reflect local and regional variations rather than already developed detailed classifications of housing types.

The data from the reconnaissance survey should be analysis to determine the trends in subdivision and housing design, in developers, development practices and financing. Additional archival research should be done, especially in the real estate sections of local newspapers. This will yield information on the nature of the original housing and subdivision, the income market for which it was built, and other factors important to interpreting its significance. The product of phase one should be the local historic context, defined property types with evaluation criteria and a listing of subdivisions that are potentially eligible for the National Register (Level 1), those subdivisions that are not eligible but may provide information (Level 2), and those that are not eligible based on the developed criteria (Level 3).

PHASE II: INTENSIVE LEVEL SURVEY

The purpose of an intensive level survey is to gather information on the appearance, significance, integrity and boundaries of each property sufficient to permit an evaluation of its significance and eligibility for the National Register. The general steps include:

1. Select Level 1 and Level 2 Subdivisions for Intensive Level Survey. Based on realistic assumptions about the availability of staff, time, and funding, subdivisions should be selected for intensive level survey. In so far as possible, they should be selected to reflected the broadest range of type and chronological period.

1. Intensive Level Survey Methodology and Survey Forms Developed. A survey form for subdivisions should be designed that reflects the criteria devised at the conclusion of Phase 1. Because some suburban surveys can involve literally hundred of properties, prior decisions need to be made about how many houses in a subdivision need to be surveyed and retain integrity for the entire subdivision to be considered eligible.

3. Intensive Level Survey of Subdivisions and their Housing Conducted.

Figure ____. Integrity Aspects of a Subdivision

Table __. Chronological Periods of Suburban Development and Associated Property Types

Evaluation entails three major activities: defining significance, assessing historic integrity, and selecting boundaries. Information gathered through historic research and survey is related to the study area's historic contexts to determine the extent to which identified properties possess the characteristics of a historic suburban property type and are associated with important events in the growth and development of a community. Significance, integrity, and boundaries depend upon the presence of landscape features such as organization according to an overall general plan of development or the conscious design and arrangement of dwellings according to a distinctive principle of design or important historic pattern of development. Historic period, relationship to transportation corridors, cohesive planning principles, or architectural character usually give a historic suburb its distinctive character and distinguish it from surrounding development.

Historic suburbs can be identified on local maps for a given period of time and are often documented by general development plants on file with a local planning office, private developer, or archival collection. Historical facts and survey data should verify the presence of significant features such as the street patterns, housing styles and types, set-backs, street and domestic plantings, parks and open space, sidewalks, and community facilities such as schools and playgrounds. Consideration should be given the historic design intent of the suburban development and the evolution of the plan throughout its history, keeping in mind that changes occurring in the execution of the plan may be significant. Identification of the specific type of suburb early in the evaluation process will help the researcher to formulate ideas about potential areas of significance. The period during which the suburb was created and the dwellings constructed should be defined early in the process, so that the researcher has an understanding of the relationship of the district to the National Register's fifty-year rule and can determine if a case for exceptional significance is needed for more recent suburbs. As a general guideline, if the plan for a suburban district was realized and a majority of the dwellings were completed fifty or more years ago, the district may be considered to satisfy the fifty-year requirement. Circumstances may exist that make it reasonable to extend the period of significance within the less-than-fifty-year period and thereby classify as contributing resources that are within the defined period of significance but are less than fifty years of age. In general, the significance of the district and the construction dates of dwellings and other resources possessing historic characteristics or reflecting the subdivision's design intent should be considered to determine the appropriate period of significance. All resources designed and built outside the period of significance are considered noncontributing unless they individually meet the requirement for exceptional significacne under Criterion Consideration G.

Properties related to the same historic contexts may be compared to identify those eligible for listing in the National Register and to determine the relative level--local, state, or national, at which the property is significant. Although most historic suburbs will be eligible at the local level as reflections of the outward development of urban centers, those that established a precedent or influenced subsequent development regionally or have particularly distinctive or representative aspects of design for their plans or their architectural character, may have importance at the State level. Suburbs whose plan, landscape design, or architectural character introduced important innovations in design or are associated with developers or designers whose ideas had an impact on design nationwide may be important on a national level.

Facts concerning the development and design of a particular historic suburb are examined to define the periods of time and aspects of development in which the district achieved historical significance. This information is considered in relationship to the broad themes, or historic contexts, important to a community, State or the nation, and to the National Register Criteria for Evaluation.

To be eligible for National Register listing, a historic suburb must possess significance in at least one of the four aspects of cultural heritage specified by the National Register Criteria. Because of their reflection of the outward spread of metropolitan areas and the growth and development of communities, historic suburbs are commonly evaluated under Criterion A for their association with community planning and development. Historic suburbs may also be eligible under criterion A for association with specific groups of people (not specific individuals) who resided there who may have made important contributions collectively to a locally important industry or to the area's identity (e.g. government or education for residential neighborhood that served employees of a nearby university or county government) or Criterion B for association with specific important individuals (for example, Llewelyn Park as home of inventor Thomas Edison). A historic suburb may also meet Criterion B for its direct association with a developer or designer who made important contributions to the history and development of a community or metropolitan area or who introduced important innovations of design through their role in the suburb's creation. Historic suburbs are evaluated under Criterion C for their embodiment of distinctive characteristics of a type, period, style, or method of construction, or representing a significant and distinguishable entity whose components may lack individual distinction. Qualifying physical characteristics, under Criterion C, may be present in the overall plan for the suburb, the architectural design of dwellings and other buildings, and the landscape design of the overall subdivision or of individual homes, parks, or parkways within the suburb.

The overall design and the organization of space within a suburb's design may be defined by the arrangement of streets, the size and location of housing lots, the siting of dwellings within a building lot, and the disposition of common spaces such as walkways, playgrounds, or parks. These design features may reflect picturesque naturalistic style, elements of the garden city or country club movements, or curvilinear patterns distinctive of the 1940s and 1950s. Distinctive architectural design may be present in a variety of building types, primarily dwellings, but also garages, carriage houses, community buildings, gatehouses, and sheds. Buildings may reflect a cohesive architectural type and style with some variation (e.g. Cape Cod or four square) or they may reflect a variety of period styles such as revival or bungaloid. Homogeneity or diversity of housing types and style may be an important architectural characteristic and be an important indicator of the overall design intent of the suburb as well as its historic evolution. Information about the developer and the various architects and landscape architects and their interrelationship is important to understanding the evolution of the suburb and its design significance; it is also important for placing the suburb in the overall history of suburban development in the United States. Suburban districts may also be significant for the relationship of their design to existing topographical or scenic features or for specific characteristics such as street lighting, stone curbing, tree plantings, creation of vistas, building set-backs, or conservation of natural features that add to the overall quality of design. Significance under Criterion C will generally be based on design characteristics and require that distinctive design features remain intact. The recognition of important patterns may require researching local planning records or the records of development or architectural firms as well as a comparison to other suburban developments in a metropolitan area for the same or similar period of time.

With the beginning of the post-World-War-II building boom in residential suburbs, which was spurred by the Federal Housing Act of 1949 and legislation extending housing benefits to veterans, there will be increasing pressure in coming years to evaluate vast numbers of freeway suburbs constructed in the 1950s. These suburbs are likely to reflect institutional standards in both the curvilinear design of roadways and the size and types of dwellings. Many took several years for completion and may include dwellings dating from 1949 to the end of the 1950s and beyond. In cases where exceptional importance can be shown--for the design of the overall plan or architecture of the housing, or based on outstanding events in local history--a suburb of this period may be nominated before the area as a whole reaches 50 years of age or before the majority of the resources making up the district reach 50 years of age.

Regional contexts should be developed for communities where suburbanization was widespread and numerous planned subdivisions took form during the postwar era. Such a context can help establish a chronology of the region's suburban development, target neighborhoods to be surveyed, and identify exceptional examples that may be nominated before the majority of dwellings reach fifty years of age. To determine exceptional importance within a local, metropolitan, or regional context, it is necessary to consider the potential district's history in relationship to the overall local trends of post World War II suburbanization, to identify the best examples (most representative, earliest, most innovative, quality of design of overall plan and of housing design) for the relevant geographical area, and to consider the degree to which notable examples possess historic integrity.

To determine whether or not an argument for exceptional importance needs to be presented, the dates when the overall plan was established and housing took form need to be considered. Also, the date when the suburb was laid out and the majority of buildings constructed needs to be determined. An explanation of these dates should be given in the nomination to support the period of significance and to indicate whether or not a justification of exceptional significance is needed. As a general rule, a majority of resources (more than 50 percent) must have achieved fifty years of age before the district as a whole can be considered to meet the fifty year requirement. The nomination of a suburban district whose design was begun and substantially completed more than fifty years ago, although some resources within the district were built within the last 50 years, does not require a justification of exceptional importance. For further guidance you many wish to refer to the National Register bulletin, Guidelines for Evaluating and Nominating Properties that Have Achieved Significance Within the Past Fifty Years.

Area of significance is that aspect of history in which a historic suburb through design, use, physical characteristics, or association influenced the identity of a community or region. The following are the most common areas applied to historic suburbs having importance for their design and role in community development:

The design of historic suburbs often depended on the expertise and effort of developers, architects, and landscape architects working in cooperation. For this reason the significance of these districts can often be ascribed to a combination of three areas--community development and planning, architecture, and landscape architecture. Nominations should recognize the contributions of individual designers representing each profession. Properties may be important under Criterion C for their reflection of important design characteristics or as works of a master, but also for their contribution to the theory of landscape design and suburban development under Criterion A.

Other areas of significance may apply when a historic suburb is closely related to other themes important to a community's historic growth and development or when it possesses historical associations with important events and persons. For example:

Period of significance is the span of time when the historic suburb was associated with important events, activities, persons, cultural groups, and land uses or attained important physical qualities or characteristics. While suburbs significant under Criteria A and B may have historic periods spanning many years corresponding to the duration of important historic associations, districts under Criterion C may have shorter periods of significance corresponding to the actual years of design and construction. The study of period plan(s) and maps will be useful for gaining an understanding of how a suburb evolved and for determining the corresponding period of significance.

Generally a historic suburb's period of significance will begin with the date when construction began and extend to the date when the plan was fully realized or the construction of the majority of homes completed. Local economic factors as well as worldwide events such as the Great Depression and World War II may have influenced the length of time it took for a historic suburb to develop or the extent to which a plan was carried out or modified. Such factors should be considered in defining an appropriate period of significance.

For historic suburbs where the street system, utilities, and house lots were laid out initially but the construction of homes occurred over the course of many years, the period of significance may cover the entire period of construction provided the later construction is in keeping with the historic design intent or reflects the evolution of historically important patterns of design or physical development. Where development was interrupted resulting in lengthy periods when no construction occurred (for example, a decade or more), it may be appropriate to define several periods of significance and closely examine the suburb's significance for each period.

To determine an appropriate closing date for the period of significance on the basis of the construction of contributing resources, several questions should be answered: Are the more recently constructed dwellings of the district, by their location, size, scale, and style, consistent with the suburb's overall historic plan and earlier housing? To what extent do the dwellings, by their architectural style or landscape design, contribute to the historic character of the district? To what extent do they reflect more recent aspects of suburban development or community history and to what extent are these important patterns or aspects of change?

We are just entering into a period when many suburban neighborhoods, spurred by the post World War II demand for housing, are approaching fifty years of age. Professional judgment should be applied to determine the period of significance for these districts and determine whether or not a justification for exceptional importance is required for nominations. If a majority of resources date to the less-than-fifty year period, the suburb must be evaluated under Criterion Consideration G (see discussion above) and exceptional importance demonstrated.

Historic integrity is the composite of seven qualities: location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association. Decisions about historic integrity require professional judgement about whether a property today reflects the spatial organization, physical components, and historic associations that it attained during its period of significance. A district's period of significance becomes the benchmark for measuring whether subsequent changes contribute to the historic suburb's physical evolution or alter its historic integrity.

Historic integrity requires that the various features that constituted the historic suburb historically are present today in the same configuration and similar condition as they existed historically. This applies to principal dwellings as well as roadways, open spaces, garages, and other aspects of the historic design. Because vegetation is an inherent feature of historic suburbs, the maturity or loss of planted trees, shrubs and other vegetation may have altered the historical setting or erased intended vistas. The general character and feeling of the overall plan, however, must be intact. Historic and contemporary views may be compared through old photographs, correspondence, newsclippings, and promotional brochures. The presence of certain characteristics may be more important than others. For a suburb having an important plan, the integrity of the original boundaries, circulation pattern of streets and walkways, and the division of housing lots will have primary importance. For an architecturally significant suburb, the design and materials of individual houses will have the greatest importance. Elements such as walls, plantings, walkways, roadways, park land, ponds, statuary, and fountains may likewise contribute strongly to the importance of a suburb in landscape architecture.

The amount of infill or subdivision and other changes that a suburban landscape can withstand before losing integrity will depend on its size and scale, the presence of significant features, and the suburban context in which it developed. The subdivision of home lots beyond that specified in historic

plans threatens a historic suburb's integrity of design and will be viewed as a compatible pattern of development only if the subdivision occurred as a result of historically important events during the period of significance.

The seven qualities of integrity called for in the National Register criteria can be applied to historic suburbs in special ways:

Location is the place where significant activities that shaped the suburb took place. This quality requires that to a large extent the boundaries that historically defined the suburb define the historic district

being nominated; it also requires that the subdivision of the suburb and the arrangement of dwellings on individual housing lots reflect the suburb's historic configuration. Location frequently relied upon proximity to transportation corridors (streetcar lines, commuter railroads, parkways, or highways) and accessibility to places of employment. In many cases these factors have spurred growth and development of the rural open space that may have historically surrounded the suburb. While the presence of historic transportation systems may add to a district's historic significance their loss or relocation will not detract in a major way from the integrity of the district.

Design is the composition of natural and cultural elements comprising the form, plan, and spatial organization of the suburb and the construction of dwellings and other buildings. Design results from primarily conscious decisions about the nature of the overall plan and the design of individual housing lots, often according to an overall design or plan. Integrity of design can be affected by changes to the size of housing lots by subdivision and changes to individual dwellings by additions, siding, window replacements, and other alterations. Small scale additions, such as modest porches or garages, may not detract in a major way from the historic character of individual buildings and the neighborhood. Large scale additions, however, that double the elevation or add substantially to the mass of a historic house and alter the spatial relationship of house to street generally threaten integrity of design.

Setting is the physical environment within and surrounding a suburb. Integrity requires that a strong sense of historical setting is maintained within the nominated boundaries. The setting outside many historic suburbs is less likely to retain its historic characteristics as a semi-rural environment due to subsequent development. The relationships that historic suburbs had to early streetcar or railroad systems may in large part have disappeared. Small scale elements such as individual plantings, gateposts, fences, swimming pools, playground equipment, and parking lots may contribute to the historic integrity of setting within a district if they date to the period of significance.

Materials include the construction materials of dwellings, roadways, walkways, fences, garages, curbing, and other structures as well as vegetation planted as lawns, shrubs, trees, and gardens. The presence of particular building materials, e.g stone, stucco, brick, or horizontal siding, may be important indicators of architectural style and methods of construction and often give cohesive character to a historic neighborhood. Original plant materials may enhance the integrity, but their loss does not necessarily destroy it. Vegetation similar in historic species, scale, type and visual effect will generally convey integrity of setting. The vegetation and other landscape features of common areas such as avenues, parkways, or parks may reflect an overall planting plan while the domestic plantings of home lots are more likely to reflect the tastes of individual owners and popular gardening trends.

Workmanship will be most evident in the ways builders fashioned the dwellings for functional and decorative purposes.

Feeling although intangible, is evoked by the presence of physical characteristics that reflect the historic scene. Feeling results from the cumulative effect of setting, design, materials, and workmanship and creates a historic district's sense of past time and place. Alterations introduced since the end of the period of significance generally detract from integrity of feeling.

Association is the direct link between a property and the important events or persons that shaped it. Integrity of association requires a property to reflect its historical relationships. Continued domestic use and occupation help maintain a suburb's historical associations, however, additions and alterations that expand or change the character of use may threaten historic integrity.

Buildings, structures, objects, and sites are classified as contributing if they were present during the period of significance and possess historic integrity for that period. Those resources not present during the historic period, not part of the historic suburb's documented significance, or no longer possessing historic integrity for the period of significance are noncontributing. Resources that are less than fifty years of age may contribute as integral parts of districts if they relate, by date and function, association, or character to the historic significance of the overall district or reflect important aspects of the suburb's history or physical evolution. A 1952 colonial revival house on a half acre lot that was subdivided in the 1920s according to an important plan might be considered contributing if it is consistent with the suburb's historic design intent and if the suburbs's historic period of development is shown to extend into the early 1950s. A 1960 ranch house on newly subdivided lot in the same neighborhood would be non-contributing because its design departed from the suburb's original plan and traditional revival-style architecture and its construction occurred outside the period of historic significance.

The final decision about integrity is based on the condition of the overall district and its ability to convey significance. The integrity of historic characteristics such as the overall spatial design, circulation network, and vegetation as well as the integrity of individual homes should be considered. Integrity depends to a substantial degree on the context of a metropolitan area's pattern of suburbanization and the condition of comparable suburbs in the area. The loss or relocation of a few features usually does not affect the integrity of a historic neighborhood, however, the loss of entire streets or sections of the plan, cumulative alterations and additions to large numbers of dwellings, nonhistoric subdivision of lots, and infill construction all threaten the integrity of the historic plan and the district's overall historic character.

Boundaries for historic suburbs are usually defined by the extent of the historic plan. In most cases, historic districts will be clearly defined on the basis of physical characteristics, historic ownership, and community identity as a neighborhood. In cases where a plan was only partially completed, the district boundaries should correspond to only the area where the plan was realized. Areas annexed or added to a historic plan may be included in the boundaries if such additions are shown to be historically important aspects of the overall suburb's evolution or themselves possess historical significance. If sections of a historic suburb have lost historic integrity, it is necessary to determine, whether lacking a cohesive plan, the property still retains significance and, if so, if the sections lacking historic integrity can be excluded from the boundaries without further denigrating the district's historical integrity.

In cases where a suburb developed in several stages, perhaps as a single farm was sold and subdivided in segments, it may be reasonable to document, evaluate, and nominate each section separately or to differentiate the various stages of development and document each stage separately in a single nomination. Areas laid out and developed within the past fifty years should be excluded from such boundaries unless they can be shown to be integral parts of the historic plan and development or to have exceptional importance. Peripheral areas that have lost integrity, for example, the portion of a historic neighborhood lying along a recently zoned commercial corridor where the relationship of individual dwellings to housing lots has been lost, should also be excluded from the boundaries. Individual dwellings by noted architects or areas such as a park or parkways may be nominated individually if they have special importance that meets the National Register criteria. Natural areas such as ponds or woodlands may be included in the boundaries when they have recreational or conservation value and are integral aspects of the historic plan. Pre-existing resources such as farmsteads may be included in the boundaries when they are integral to the design of the subdivision and were clearly designated for preservation in the historic plan.

Lines drawn on historic plats, legal boundaries, rights-of-way, and changes in the nature of development or spatial organization are generally used to define the edges of historic suburbs. In general, the boundaries should be drawn along historic lot lines or boundary streets. An explanation of the relationship between the historic plan or subdivision and the proposed National Register boundaries should be given in the boundary justification.

Nominations are made on the National Register Registration Form (NPS-10-900) and processed according to the regulations set forth in 36 CFR Part 60. Where the study of a metropolitan area identifies several historic suburbs related by a common historic context that are eligible for listing, the National Register Multiple Property Documentation Form (NPS-10-900-b) may be used to document the context, property types, and methodology. Individual registration forms are then used to document each eligible district and are completed according to the instructions in the bulletin, Guidelines for Completing National Register of Historic Places Forms. Guidelines for documenting nationally significant properties are found in National Register bulletin, How to Prepare National Historic Landmark Nominations.

The following guidance supplements the National Register bulletin, Guidelines for Completing National Register of Historic Places Forms, and is organized according to the sections on the registration form. The form is intended as a summary of the information gathered during identification and a synthesis of findings concerning significance, integrity and boundaries.

A historic suburb is generally classified as a historic district because it is a collection of buildings, structures, and other features. The land covered by the overall plan is generally counted as a single site, and all buildings and structures substantial in size or scale therein are counted separately as contributing or noncontributing resources. Landscape features such as curbing, roadways, paths, tree plantings, ponds, and storm drains are generally considered integral features of the overall site and are not counted separately unless they are substantial in size and scale or have special importance such as a central landscaped avenue or a designed park that created a major focal point for the district.

The description defines the historic suburb being registered and describes the physical evolution and current condition of the development. The narrative describes 1.) overall plan and its outstanding landscape features such as roadways, paths, green spaces, and recreational areas; 2.) the subdivision of the suburb into lots for dwellings and other community buildings; 3.) architectural types, styles, and methods of construction evident in the buildings. It also dates and describes any alterations to the plan or to the dwellings and other buildings, noting the types of changes and the degree to which alterations affect the integrity of individual resources. The description should describe:

The statement of significance explains the ways in which the historic district relates to the theme of suburbanization locally and reflects the national trends presented in this bulletin and sets forth the reasons the district is significant within this context. The statement addresses the National Register criteria, and if applicable, criteria considerations. The greater the importance of certain features --such as the overall plan and circulation network--the more detailed the explanation of how these are important should be. The reasons for selecting the period of significance and the areas of significance in which the district meets the National Register criteria must be justified.

Unless provided on a related multiple property form, a statement of historic context should identify one or more themes to which the property relates through its historic uses, activities, associations, and physical characteristics. The discussion of historic context should:

For districts significant under Criterion A, an explanation should be given on how the events or pattern of events related to suburbanization and reflected by the district made an important contribution to the history of the community, State, or nation. For districts significant under Criterion B the statement should explain how the person with whom the property is associated is important in the history of the community, state, or Nation. For districts significant under Criterion C, context may be developed along three lines: type, period, style, or method of construction, work of a master, and high artistic values.

Maps and Photographs

Include photographs that generally represent the character of principal streetscapes, the representative dwelling types, non-residential buildings, and noncontributing buildings or structures. Include copies of the historic plan or historic views of the district if possible. Period plans that show the extent to which housing was completed at various intervals during the history of the suburb's physical evolution are also desirable for describing graphically the ways in which the suburb evolved.

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Many of America's historic suburbs resulted from the collaboration of developers, planners, architects, and landscape architects. The contributions of these professional groups, individually and collectively, give American suburbs their characteristic identity as historic communities, collections of residential architecture, and designed landscapes. The following list of landscape characteristics can be used to survey and identify the component resources and other significant features that make up a suburban landscape and to understand the interrelationship of the varied professional groups that shaped a particular suburb. A knowledge of landscape characteristics related to the suburban development in a metropolitan area may also lead to the development of typologies for suburban planning, domestic architecture, and landscape design. For further guidance in evaluating the significance of a suburb as a designed landscape, refer to the National Register bulletin, How to Evaluate and Nominate Designed Historic Landscapes.

Since the mid-19th century, the overall design of a residential suburb has based on a general plan, drawn up in advance, which identifies the land to be developed for residential use or for functions supporting residential use. The general plan shows the location of the streets, walkways, and common spaces and indicates how the suburb will be divided into individual housing lots and common spaces such as parks and playgrounds. The general plan may reflect significant trends or principles in suburban planning or landscape design or be the work of a noted landscape architect or planner.

Although the suburb as a whole forms a cluster predominantly residential in use and character, specialized areas within the suburb may form clusters or zones dedicated for special uses, such as recreation, education, or commerce. These areas are characterized by function, architectural type, and vegetation.

Written specifications may accompany a general plan to describe design requirements such as the distance to which buildings must be set back from the street; the size, style, or value of houses to be built; and any restrictions on the use of land or the design of individual housing lots. Such requirements may also appear as covenants or restrictions that are attached to the deed of sale for individual homes. Since the 1920s, local zoning rules may also have influenced the characteristics of a suburb, including the density, or number of dwellings per acre, the height of dwellings, the distance between dwellings, distance from the street, and the provision for public utilities. By definition suburbs are predominately residential in use, they may, however, contain zones for commercial, educational, and recreational activities that support and complement the residential use.

A system of roads and walkways provide circulation for automobiles and pedestrians within the historic suburb. In addition to roads, circulation networks may include sidewalks, trails, traffic circles and medians, parking lots, and driveways. Historic suburbs commonly illustrate distinctive street patterns that may reflect the designer's response to the natural topography of an area, adoption of well-known plans, or evolving trends of suburban design. Curvilinear streets, cul-de-sacs, and traffic circles and medians may be important aspects of a suburb's historic design. Typically a hierarchy of roads will exist, whereby certain roads provide entry into and circulation through the suburb, while others form tiers, spur roads, or cul-de-sacs. Entry roads provide important links to the surrounding community, metropolitan area, and local and regional systems of transportation, including highways, parkways, train lines, subways, and streetcar lines. Circulation networks may contain specific features such as embankments, planted islands or medians, sidewalks, curbing, culverts, bridges, and gutters, that contribute the aesthetic as well as functional design of the suburb.

Fences, walls, and planted screens of trees and shrubs may separate a suburban neighborhood from surrounding development. A gate, gatehouse, pylons, signs, or plantings may denote the entrance to some historic suburbs. A sense of enclosure may also be created by the pattern of streets and the arrangement of individual housing lots along streets, some of which may end in cul-de-sacs. Boundaries between housing lots may be marked by fences, walls, hedges, gardens, or sidewalks; in others demarcations may be absent or merely suggested by spacing of dwellings on open or tree-shaded lawns.

Trees, shrubs, and other plantings in the form of lawns, shade trees, hedges, foundation plantings, and gardens may contribute to the historic significance and setting of many historic suburbs. Vegetation may have resulted from decisions by planners and developers to retain preexisting trees--often native to the area, to plant streets and common spaces for ornamental or shade purposes, and to create screens between housing lots. While the plantings of individual yards typically reflect the tastes and interests of homeowners, they may reflect once popular trends in domestic landscape design as well as decisions by landscape architects and planners to create a homogenous and harmonious setting within the suburb through a unified program of plantings. In the later case, similar elements, species, and patterns of plantings may repeat throughout the district although variations will likely occur from one property to the next. Vegetation within American suburbs is frequently dominated by the grassy lawn, occasional specimen or shade trees, and flowering trees and shrubs. Regional horticultural practices as well as historic trends may be reflected in the choice of native species or introduced or exotic species adapted to the local conditions and climate. Plants may have a strong thematic appeal for their seasonal display, e.g. flowering apple trees, magnolias, azaleas and rhododendrons, oleanders and crape myrtles, sugar maples, palm trees, and golden rain trees. Vegetation may reflect a conscious program of civic improvements by a municipal or local government or community association. Parkland, playgrounds, public buildings such as schools, community buildings, and recreational areas within a suburb may have specially designed plantings. In addition, individual properties within the suburb may be notable examples of domestic landscape design or the work of master landscape designers.

Although dwellings will predominate, historic suburbs may contain other kinds of buildings and structures as well. Garages, carriage houses, and sheds may accompany dwellings on domestic lots. Bridges and culverts, tunnels, and grade separations, may be present on roads and paths, especially in areas having rugged topography cut by streams and ravines. Some suburbs will include schools, churches, shopping centers, and community halls. A gatehouse or even a train station may be present in some suburban districts.

Dwellings may conform to a typology of models, styles, or methods of construction specified in the plans or initial architectural designs for the suburb, or they may reflect prevailing trends and styles related to the period in which the suburb was developed. Depending on the suburb's history, one or more architects may be associated with the design of the dwellings. The relationship between the developer or planner of the suburb and the architect or designer of individual or groups of homes should be explained. The date, condition, and physical characteristics of all dwellings should be considered in the identification of contributing and noncontributing resources. Garages, sheds, and other buildings of substantial size, scale, or importance should be included in the inventory and resource counts.

Small scale elements in the general layout of a suburb may include lampposts and lighting, curbs and gutters, stairs and stairways, benches, and signs. Swimming pools, patios, outdoor fireplaces, trellises, fountains, and statuary may be present in individual yards or common areas.

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