9
Before they put a grid over it, and restrained the ground from indifference, any place was as good as any other.
10
There were only a few trees here, eighty years ago. They were eucalyptus trees near some farm buildings, deliberately planted for shade. Men waited under them before their work began.
The men’s faces were brown on the jaw and chin, and pale above.
In the fields, only the upper part of a man’s face is shaded by his hat, salt-stained along the base of the crown.
Work began for the men when each man pulled himself to a high wooden seat above a harvester’s moving rack of teeth.
This contraption was pulled by twenty mules, straining as the men joked.
11
The grid is the plan above the earth. It is a compass of possibilities.
12
In 1949, three developers bought 3,500 acres of Southern California farmland.
They planned to build something that was not exactly a city.
In 1950, before the work of roughing the foundations and pouring concrete began, the three men hired a young photographer with a single-engine plane to document their achievement from the air.
The photographer flew when the foundations of the first houses were poured. He flew again when the framing was done and later, when the roofers were nearly finished. He flew over the shell of the shopping center that explains this and many other California suburbs.
The three developers were pleased with the results. The black-and-white photographs show immense abstractions on ground the color of the full moon.
Some of the photographs appeared in Fortune and other magazines. The developers bound enlargements in a handsome presentation book. I have several pages from one of the copies.
The photographs celebrate house frames precise as cells in a hive and stucco walls fragile as an unearthed bone.
Seen from above, the grid is beautiful and terrible.
13
Four of the young man’s photographs became the definition of this suburb, and then of suburbs generally.
The photographs look down before the moving vans arrived, and before you and I learned to play hide-and-seek beneath the poisonous oleander trees.
Architectural critics and urban theorists reprinted the photographs in books with names like God’s Own Junkyard. Forty years later, the same four photographs still stand for the places in which most of us live.
The photographs were images of the developers’ crude pride. They report that the grid, briefly empty of associations, is just a pattern predicting itself.
The theorists and critics did not look again, forty years later, to see the intersections or calculate in them the joining of interests, limited but attainable, like the leasing of chain stores in a shopping mall.
14
In the Los Angeles basin, the possibility of rain is ignored until the rain falls. Since it hardly ever rains, ignorance has prevailed as climate.
15
The local newspaper in 1956 used a picture to show how much had changed. This picture “Harvesting, 1900.”
It shows a team of mules, a combine harvester, the field, and the men. The mules are sawteeth of black; the combine is a grand contraption in gray; the field is all design.
You cannot make out the men. They are patterns in the photograph.
16
My father’s kindness was as pure and indifferent as a certain kind of saint’s.
My father did not have a passion for his giving; it came from him, perhaps after much spiritual calculation, as a product might come from a conveyor belt.
The houses in this suburb were built the same way. As many as a hundred a day were begun between 1950 and 1952, more than five hundred a week. No two floor plans were built next to each other; no neighbor had to stare into his reflection across the street.
Teams of men built the houses.
Some men poured concrete into the ranks of foundations from mixing trucks waiting in a mile-long line. Other men threw down floors nailed with pneumatic hammers, tilted up the framing, and scaled the rafters with cedar shingles lifted by conveyor belts from the beds of specially built trucks.
You are mistaken if you consider this a criticism, either of my father or the houses.•
Excerpted from Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, by D. J. Waldie. Published by W.W. Norton & Company. © 1996 D. J. Waldie. All rights reserved.
Unfortunately, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir has fallen out of print. Please buy the book from Alibris or a local used bookstore of your choice.
