spacer image
spacer image

Welcome! You're looking at an archived Snarkmarket entry. We've got a fresh look—and more new ideas every day—on the front page.

May 15, 2005

| The Future Is Now >>

The Places I Have Come to Fear the Most

childhoodhome.jpg

I have a reflexive dislike of the suburbs. I grew up in Orlando, in one of its suburbs stacked on suburbs, all in distant orbit around a tiny center of faux-urbanity we called downtown. (Which in turn hovered in distant orbit around a giant center of faux-reality we called Disney World.)

Orlando feels horribly lifeless to me. I often say that in Orlando, you have to drive 20 minutes to get to the convenience store. I can’t think of a single good Mom-and-Pop shop around where I grew up. When I go back to visit, there are no places where my friends and I can sit idly and chat until the wee hours. For a while, we seriously took to frequenting the lobbies of the nicer hotels.

When I was a sophomore away in college, my parents suddenly moved away from the house I’d lived in since 4th grade. To this day, I haven’t even gone back to see what the house looks like. I have tons of memories of that time in my life, but the house, lifeless and suburban, figures in none of them. Meanwhile, my grandmother’s house in Chicago, where I spent only a week each year until my late teens, is a living place brimming with unforgettable corners.

grandmashouse.jpgSo it feels instinctively right to me when I hear James Howard Kunstler describe suburbs as resource-sucking parasites, or when I read essays like David Owen’s magnificent “Green Manhattan” (about how super-urbs like Manhattan “offer one of the few plausible remedies for some of the world’s most discouraging environmental ills”) and Michael Pollan’s equally magnificent “Why Mow?” (about how the once-democratic suburban lawn has become a symbol of near-totalitarian conformity).

How could anyone choose a suburb over a city? I ask myself. Cities engender creativity and comity and efficiency. The Renaissance could never have taken place in a suburbanized Europe.

But I occasionally get jolted out of my city-worship when I encounter a bit of reality like this post by Terrance at the Republic of T:

Education is something that’s important to both the hubby and me, and without question we want our kids to have the best shot we can give them in that department; just like a lot of other parents. For us, that either means private schools in D.C. or public schools in the suburbs. Private schools in D.C. are more than we can afford for two kids. So, we’ve sold our house we’re moving to a new house in Chevy Chase, MD, that