Reconsidering the Suburbs: An Exploration of Suburban Historiography
An Exploration oj Suburban Historiography I N THE SPRING OF 1987, a group of museum administrators and their counterparts at historic houses and villages gathered at the Strong Museum in Rochester, New York, for a workshop on the interpretation of the history of home and family. One of them commented, more or less in jest, that soon museum interpreters would be turning their attention to the first Levittown, where they would seek a house from which they could strip away the "improvements" in order to restore it to its original 1947 condition. Guides would give tours, dressed in period costumes, and museum educators would design "living history" tableaux. The idea seemed fanciful then, but a month later Hofstra University, located on Long Island near that same Levittown, marked the suburb's fortieth anniversary with a conference. Scholars and policy-makers gathered to analyze the suburbs of post-World War II America. When a local museum official confessed a desire to restore one of the early Levittown houses, hardly anyone smiled. The idea seemed perfectly credible. Urban intellectuals may raise their eyebrows, but it is not so farfetched to think that Levittown, or a community like it, might become the Colonial Williamsburg of the twenty-second century. After all, in our own century, the suburbanite has become the American archetype, much as the farming villager was in the colonial period. According to the 1980 census, about forty percent—a larger group than live either in cities or small towns—of all Americans reside in suburbs. Because the United States at this historical moment appears