![]() ![]() He is also defending suburban living and its architecture against the familiar charge that it is fundamentally about escapism and materialism. In tracing the history of the suburb, built by the real-estate developers Louis Bayer, Mark Taper and Ben Weingart in part to house returning GIs, many of them employees of the nearby Douglas Aircraft plant in Long Beach, Waldie aims to explore the appeal of a way of life that became increasingly commonplace by the 1950s and 1960s across the American landscape. ‘I live where a majority of Americans live: a tract house on a block of other tract houses in a neighborhood of even more,’ he writes. In 316 brief, numbered entries, some just a sentence or two long, some written in the first person and others in third, Waldie relates the history of Lakewood’s first major post-war suburban housing development, and of his own family’s history there, in the modest house where his father died and where Waldie still lives.įrom the beginning, Waldie makes an evident effort to give his story an element of the generic, even the universal. Waldie’s book, published in 1996, is unlike any other book in our series - and, for that matter, unlike any ever written on the architectural and civic makeup of Southern California. ![]()
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