Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened

By Elizabeth Ewen and Rosalyn Baxandall

Book Overview

In Picture Windows, Baxandall and Ewen shatter naive stereotypes of suburban life, replacing them with a clear and compelling historical analysis that situates the development of the suburbs in relation to the pivotal issues of postwar American life. They examine the years from World War II to the present, chronicling the transformation of rural lands into tidy, uniform subdevelopments that promised all of the comforts of postwar technology. The building of the suburbs, the authors argue, was conducted in the context of heated debates over the American standard of living, visionary planners and architects' attempts to solve the "housing crisis," women's liberation, and racial segregation. Baxandall and Ewen use interviews with hundreds of residents of three Long Island suburbs to weave together a story about suburbs past and present, and ultimately to insist on the centrality of suburban experience in the second half of the twentieth century.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465070132
• ISBN13: 9780465070138
• Release Date: June 2001
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful history

Just had a chance to read "Picture Windows." Finally, a book about the suburbs that doesn't just reiterate one-dimensional cliches about conformity. Real people and real history, with amazing links to the history of the housing issue in the United States. I was especially interested by material on links between Joe McCarthy and the tract housing industry in the forties. Refreshing and illuminating.