‘It’s often said that the original sin of the United States was slavery. [Joshua] Specht [in his book “Property Values”] winces at this, not because he downplays slavery but because he regards Native dispossession as equally fundamental. The act itself was consequential, but so was the mind-set it encouraged: a tendency to treat territory as empty space. U.S. leaders stood before the map like mathematicians before a chalkboard…
It would be hard to overstate how ignorant the Founders of the United States were about their own country. The main map they’d used to negotiate the postwar peace with Britain was woefully inaccurate. It showed the Mississippi River—set as the outer border—curving adventurously west onto the Great Plains. The historian Daniel Boorstin noted that some politicians misunderstood the treaty because they’d confused the Mississippi and the Missouri. A forgivable mistake, given that they did not know where either river actually ran.
They didn’t know because those rivers wound through foreign lands. The quiet fact about the new United States was that half the territory it claimed (and far more of the continent beyond its borders) remained under Indigenous control. The largest inaccuracy of the era’s maps was to show that land as belonging to the United States.
That half-claimed Western territory might someday furnish desirable farms for settlers. Yet, even presuming that the government could beat back Native powers, intelligently dividing that unseen area into plots would require understanding its geography, soil, and waterways. Perhaps there was an easier approach, Thomas Jefferson suggested. What about drawing a gigantic grid and just partitioning the area into squares?
The grid was a familiar form, occasionally used in colonial cities, such as Philadelphia. But previous grids had been tightly bounded—patches of orthogonal civilization within an arcing and twisting terrain. What Jefferson envisaged, in contrast, was an unyielding north-south grid of continental proportions. He imagined new states as roughly rectangular, tiled end to end with square plots…
Jefferson’s idea was strange in many ways, but the strangest thing about it is that it took hold. By the early twentieth century, thirty-five more states had joined the original thirteen. All had at least one straight side, and several were essentially rectangles. Meanwhile, the public-land survey that began in Ohio had extended to the Pacific, covering two-thirds of the contiguous United States. As whites marched onto new lands, the grid unrolled before them like a red carpet.
Squares suited the fast-moving settlers. Certainly, they were simpler than plots defined by landmarks. Consider how one Massachusetts landowner delineated his property in that traditional system: it was “more or less bounded” by a path that started with a stake on E. Daniels’s land and then moved east “about 97 1/2 rods” to a corner of a fence, north “about 54 rods” to the corner of I. Fowler’s land, twenty-four rods toward the chestnut tree growing in the wall of Daniels’s property, and back to the stake. Compared with that morass of rustic wayfinding, where you practically had to marry Fowler’s daughter to get comprehensible directions, coördinates were bliss…
Eventually, the government started giving land away. The first Homestead Act, signed by Lincoln in 1862, distributed squares for free, as long as recipients went and farmed them. In a country known for its bootstrap individualism, this was a monumental handout; officials ultimately doled out an area the size of Pakistan. The vast checkerboard that airline passengers see when they fly over the West shows state socialism in action…
The grid treats the Earth as if it’s flat, which, famously, it is not. Squaring off the land required property lines and related roads to perform a sort of topographical parkour, running straight over hills and across rivers. In San Francisco, the grids simply ignored the steeply sloping terrain, resulting in streets so precipitous that they make parking an extreme sport.
All this unswerving rigidity served one end: transferring property. In that, the grid succeeded marvellously. During the late nineteenth century, in what is now Oklahoma but had been Indian Territory, the government distributed some formerly Native-owned land to whoever could reach it first in a race. At the firing of a federal official’s gun, settlers scrambled to claim their squares.
Native Americans, in losing their land, lost the anchors of their worlds. Settlers, in gaining it, gained something less. Jefferson had imagined planting the countryside with farmers, but how deeply would roots grow in a property defined, as Lincoln’s was, as “N. W. ¼ of the S. W. ¼ Sec. 20 T. 84 R. 15 West in Tama Co. Iowa”? Men like Lincoln, in selecting square plots on maps, weren’t joining communities so much as amassing commodities…
One of the grid’s most astute late-nineteenth-century critics, the geologist John Wesley Powell, decried its environmental recklessness. Square plots might work in the East, but they’d cause ruin in the semi-arid West, he felt. Their straight lines ran roughshod across natural drainage basins, leaving some tracts unirrigated. Borders should follow water flows, not compass directions, Powell believed.
A fine idea. Yet Powell was “using bear language in a bull market,” his biographer, Wallace Stegner, wrote. The government went on gridding land, and hopeful farmers surged onto the plains, snapping up plots whose ecologies they barely understood. They enjoyed bumper crops in rainy years. But when drought struck Oklahoma and surrounding states, as drought regularly did, the topsoil dried out and blew away. Plowing up the native grasses that held that soil in place probably didn’t help.
Specht writes eloquently of the Depression-era Dust Bowl caused by an especially dire drought. The liberated dirt smothered crops and choked towns, burying farmers’ dreams in fine powder. It blew east, in great dark storms, to Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta. Dust rained on the White House and the Statue of Liberty.
The symbolism, for anyone who cared to notice, was rich. Whites had seized enormous swaths of unfamiliar territory. To turn it hastily into property, they’d partitioned it into squares, reducing complex geography to simple geometry. They had come for the land in droves. Now the land was coming for them.
The nineteen-thirties were a tipping point, Specht argues. If strivers in the previous decade had sought newly available farmland, their children more often sought suburban houses. The American Dream, in this sense, moved from production to consumption, from homesteaders growing crops to homeowners buying appliances. With this social shift came a spatial one, from the grid to the curve.
Again, the state blazed the trail. Whereas previously it had subsidized the mass acquisition of land, now it started subsidizing the mass purchase of houses. It did so by providing zero-down-payment loans, guaranteeing mortgages, building roads, and insuring loans to developers. The home-buying boom was “guided by government but implemented through the market,” Specht writes. This made it seem like the result of individual choices. But policies shaped those choices, and those policies strongly incentivized new, detached houses on cities’ edges. By 1960, Specht notes, “there were more Americans in suburban single-family homes than people in cities or in the countryside.”
In essence, officials helped city dwellers flee the grid. Cars made suburbs physically accessible, and subsidies made them financially so…
Developers sold slices of nature, but there was nothing natural about the suburbs. They were as sudden and artificial as the grids had been. The most famous postwar suburb, Levittown, on Long Island, was an explosion of 17,447 houses built in a four-year spree on failed farmland. (The farmers had daringly pursued an all-potatoes style of industrial farming only to see their tuberous cash crop ruined by an invading pest.) The builders, the Levitt family, boasted that by using assembly-line techniques they could produce a house every sixteen minutes. They’d intended to at least personalize the streets by choosing nomenclatural themes for subdivisions, but they couldn’t think of enough. Throwing in the towel, they just gave some areas street names starting with the same letter: the “D” section, the “E” section, and so on.
Throughout the nineteen-fifties, developers like the Levitts levelled an area about the size of Rhode Island every year, according to the historian Adam Rome’s “The Bulldozer in the Countryside” (2001). Hillocks, which interfered with mass construction, had to go. So did trees—the Levitts ripped them out to ease the work of building crews (and then planted saplings after the homes were built). It was Oklahoma all over again. Some suburbs battled soil erosion, which ruined rivers and contaminated drinking water. Others suffered dramatic landslides.
Mud and silt weren’t the only substances flowing downhill. In escaping the grid, suburbanites also escaped municipal sewer systems. Often, this meant septic tanks. These had worked adequately for isolated farmers, but too many could overwhelm the absorptive capacity of the ground—especially if sprinklers were watering the lawns—causing effluent to rise to the surface or enter waterways. In Levittown, the cost-cutting builders at first hadn’t even bothered with tanks and had installed cesspools instead—three decades later, the suburb’s sewer system was still under construction…
Had anyone thought this through? Perhaps not, Michael Glass suggests in “Cracked Foundations” (University of Pennsylvania), a bracing new history of Levittown and its environs. Although curving suburbs were spatially antithetical to gridded cities, they shared one principle: speed. Most were instant communities, born of the same monomania for property sales as the grid. Glass chronicles the chaos as home buyers thronged into tracts without schools, sewers, trash removal, or viable tax bases.
The reward was homeownership. But the way to capitalize on homeownership wasn’t by sinking roots; it was by buying, building equity, and selling. This made the suburbs transient places, Glass argues. The average nineteen-fifties Levittowner left after five years.
As is well known, many suburbs were racially exclusive. The government favored loans to racially homogeneous suburban developments, and racial covenants maintained that homogeneity. In 1948, the Supreme Court found such covenants judicially unenforceable, but Specht explains how communities upheld them nonetheless. When the first Black couple moved into another Levittown, in Pennsylvania, in 1957, their neighbors burned crosses, threw stones, and gathered menacingly at their property line. The man who sold the couple that house was fired from his job.
This racial discrimination gave whites privileged access to government-backed assets—suburban houses. But, as Glass points out, condemnation of the suburbs’ racial exclusion can make it sound as if they were paradises whose only flaw was that their gates were unfairly locked. That is worth questioning. Did open spaces, cul-de-sacs, and “Oops, all curves” street designs make for better living?
It’s hard to say. The problem with the grid was its empty abstraction, an insensitivity to purpose that made the city a “grinding and piling up of blind forces,” in Frank Lloyd Wright’s words. Suburban developers swung hard in the opposite direction, designing large areas around specified activities. But in doing so they took the elements that had been interwoven in cities and separated them into housing tracts, office parks, industrial zones, and shopping areas. Critics compared this to eating an omelette by consuming its ingredients one by one—eggs, cheese, vegetables, oil, then salt…
Although suburban enclaves boast winding lanes, their more determining feature is their lack of intersections, the architectural theorist Albert Pope observes in his highly intelligent book “Ladders” (1996). Urban grids are a tight mesh of streets and junctions, meaning that any two points on them are connected by many viable routes. Suburbs, by contrast, are generally hostile to the idea of strangers barrelling through, so they have fewer streets and fewer crossings. This prevents traffic from flowing evenly, pushing it away from cul-de-sacs and go-nowhere lanes and onto a few large roads. Some communities, famously, have gates at those roads. The gatehouses prompt eye rolls, but the underlying exclusion lies in the fact that such places have so few entrances that they can be gated.
The unintended effect of low-density construction, restrictive zoning, and curving roads is a staggering increase in the distance between destinations. Ultimately, the cul-de-sacs designed to repel traffic increase the number of needed cars. And the more a place accommodates cars—widening main roads into smooth, unobstructed arcs—the more dangerous it becomes to walk or cycle, and the more everyone drives.
This country is now littered with developments that are called parks and gardens where it is miserable to do the one thing people like to do in parks and gardens: walk. The writer Jonathan Franzen has described a bizarre sociological phenomenon resulting from this state of affairs. Whenever Franzen, an avid urban hiker, tries his perambulations in suburban Missouri or Colorado, he sticks out so awkwardly that men in passing cars shout obscenities at him…’ (from the New Yorker)
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