## INTRODUCTION

Many of America\'s suburbs are significant historic properties. Even
though many preservationists think of suburbs as relatively recent
developments and a new type of cultural landscape, built mostly since
the end of World War II, Americans have, in fact, been extending their
cities outward through suburban development since at least the middle of
the nineteenth century. Although suburbs built since World War II were
made possible by the automobile, accessibility to earlier suburbs was
provided successively by the ferryboat, by the horse-drawn carriage, by
the train, by the horse-drawn omnibus, by the electric street car and,
after 1908, by the automobile. These earlier generations of American
suburbs are generally called by the form of transportation that spawned
them\--the railroad suburbs from 1850 to the 1880s, the streetcar
suburbs from the late 1880s to the 1920s, the early automobile suburbs
from the 1920s to 1945, and the late automobile, or freeway suburbs,
from 1945 to the present. Each era produced a distinctive suburban
landscape.

The residential subdivision has been, and is, the building block of the
suburban landscape. The residential subdivision traces its origins to
the eighteenth-century suburbs of London and in the United States to the
Romantic landscape movement of the beginning of the mid-nineteenth
century. The two residential developments recognized as the design
prototypes of the modern subdivision\--siting single-family houses in a
park-like setting with curved roads\--were Llewellyn Park, New Jersey,
designed by Alexander Jackson Davis and laid out in 1851 just west of
New York City, and Riverside, Illinois, west of Chicago, designed by
Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted in 1868. Although available only
to the wealthy, these developments of single-family houses on curving
streets in a naturalistic setting captured an emerging American
aspiration for residential life in a semi-rural environment, apart from
the negative qualities of the city but close enough for daily contact
with work in the city.

In the second half of the nineteenth-century, a suburban ideal
crystallized among Americans led by the upper class elite. Even those of
modest incomes would adopt the ideal in small, detached houses on narrow
lots on rectilinear plats, served first by horse-drawn and later by
electrical trolleys. Advances in transportation, from fixed-rail
trolleys\--first horse-drawn and then electrically driven\--to the more
mobile and faster automobile opened new land and lowered the cost of
construction, making it possible for more and more Americans to live in
a suburban environment. Thus, the suburban landscapes that developed
around American cities after World War II, representing the fulfillment
of the dream of home ownership and material well-being for a majority of
Americans, were but the last in a succession of historic suburban
landscapes.

Yet, the post-World War II suburbs, a part of the largest building boom
in American history, represent a new form of suburban landscape in the
extensive territory they occupied, the manner in which they were
mass-produced, and the resulting dispersed pattern of settlement.
(Muller, 45) In fact, they created the modern metropolitan area. Under
the requirement that properties must be at least 50 years old to be
eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, these properties
will become eligible for the Register in increasing numbers in the next
few years, presenting a major challenge to National Register activities
at the local, State, and federal levels.

This bulletin offers guidance to Federal agencies, State Historic
Preservation Offices, Certified Local Governments, preservation
professionals, and interested individuals in the successful preparation
of nominations to the National Register of Historic Places and requests
for determinations of eligibility for historic districts characterized
as historic suburbs.

# DEFINING HISTORIC SUBURBS

## **Defining Suburbs**

Suburbanization is the process of land development on or near the edge
of an existing city. In the United States, residential land use has led
this process. As used in this bulletin, a historic suburb is defined as
a homogeneous residential area built near the edge of the existing city
from which residents commute daily to jobs in the central city. Jackson,
in his book Crabgrass Frontier, has described the modern American suburb
as follows: "Affluent and middle class Americans live in suburban areas
that are far from their work places, in homes that they own, and in the
center of yards that by urban standards elsewhere are enormous.\"
Fishman, another historian of America\'s suburbanization, stresses that
the suburb must be large enough and homogeneous enough to form a
distinctive low density environment defined by the primacy of the single
family house set in the greenery of an open parklike setting. (Fishman,
*Bourgeois Utopias*, 5) These residential landscapes originated in the
middle of the nineteenth century as part of a larger trend of the
decentralization of the American city.

Before the advent of mechanized personal transportation, all but the
most well-to-do city dwellers had to live within walking distance of
their place of work. By reducing travel time, mechanized transportation
such as the electric trolley and self-propelled automobile opened new
land for development and permitted single-purpose residential areas to
be built away from the central city. Farmland near the city was
acquired, planned, and developed by developers as tracts or subdivisions
intended for few or many houses. The subdivisions were designed to be
residential landscapes separate from but connected to the city and to
combine the open space and greenery of the country with an efficient
layout of houses and transportation. At the same time, suburbs were
often the only place to find new housing.

Two aspects of the definition of historic suburbs used in this bulletin
differ from conventional definitions. Suburbs are usually considered to
be incorporated or unincorporated communities of moderate density lying
outside the legal limits of the central city. (Palen, 13) This bulletin
defines a suburb as a largely homogeneous residential area built at the
edge of the existing city at a lower density than the city, usually in
units containing single-family houses on small parcels of land. Thus,
historical suburban development is defined by its locational
relationship, when constructed, to the existing built-up city, not to
the legal city, and by the character of its landscape in contrast to
that of the city. For example, many residential areas that were built as
streetcar suburbs in the 1890s have since been incorporated into the
central city. With the streetcars and the tracks that created them now
gone and housing built at densities higher than that associated with
suburbs today, these areas are thought today to be more urban than
suburban in origin. Conversely, residential areas within many newer
cities that grew in the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the Midwest and
western United States, exhibit such suburban landscape characteristics
as single-family houses, homogeneous residential neighborhoods, and
curvilinear street patterns. In other words, the type of low-density
residential developments built first as suburbs in eastern or older
midwestern cities have come to typify residential developments within
newer western cities. Los Angeles, which has been called the suburban
metropolis, is the culmination of this process and is a city in which
the single-family house in a subdivision is the building block of the
entire city. (Fishman*, Bourgeois Utopias*, 155)

The second aspect is that as a trend, suburbanization has progressively
cut across lines of social class and income from the wealthy to the
working classes. Since the second half of the nineteenth century,
advances in transportation have made suburban land and homes affordable
to an increasingly broader spectrum of the American population, by both
reducing commuting time and increasing the supply of land while reducing
its cost. Although the suburbs of the upper class were distinguished by
impressive houses set on the large landscaped lots, the aspiration for
the freestanding house in a subdivision began to be pursued by
middle\--and even working-class\--families very early and can be seen in
developments of modest bungalows on small lots within gridded street
patterns by the turn of the century. Suburban development affected
nearly all socioeconomic groups, from the very wealthy to the working
classes, although historically the middle class, especially after World
War II, was the largest group to suburbanize.

The residential suburb is characterized by the subdivision of a
relatively large parcel of land into smaller regularly sized parcels
according to a plan that provides for a street system and utilities as
well as the placement of individual dwellings. Geographer M. R. G.
Conzen has suggested that the fabric of an urban landscape consists of
three interlocking elements. The first is the overall land use pattern,
which shows the specialized uses of land and space. The second is land
plan, or town plan, which consists of the street system, the pattern of
parcels or lots, and the building arrangement within this pattern. This
is the framework of development of residential subdivisions. The third
element is the building fabric, composed of three-dimensional buildings
and structures on the land. These elements provide a means of thinking
about a suburban subdivision and development and relating the processes
and components to it.

The historic suburb can best be thought of as occurring in layers. The
first layer establishes the land use, that is the activities that occur
on the land. Second is the plan by which the land is divided and
organized and provisions are made for a circulation network, including
streets and pedestrian paths, and for utilities, including water,
lighting, telephone, and sewerage disposal. The third layer consists of
the building fabric, primarily in the form of dwellings, garages,
community facilities, walls, and fences.

**A HISTORIC CONTEXT APPROACH FOR EVALUATING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
AMERICAN SUBURBS**

**Applying the National Register Criteria**

To qualify for the National Register, a property must represent a
significant part of history, architecture, archeology, engineering or
culture of an area, and it must have the characteristics that make it a
good representative of properties associated with that aspect of the
past. Historic suburbs are historic districts comprised of sites
(including the overall plan, house lots, and community spaces),
buildings (primarily houses), structures (including walls, streets and
roads both serving the suburb and connecting it to the larger
metropolitan area), and objects (signs, fountains, statuary, etc.). A
residential suburban development is considered a historic district
because it possesses a significant concentration, linkage, or continuity
of sites, buildings, structures, or objects united historically or
aesthetically by plan or physical development.

The eligibility of a historic suburb for listing in the National
Register of Historic Places is evaluated according to the National
Register Criteria for Evaluation. Eligible properties are those:

> A. That are associated with events that have made a significant
> contribution to the broad patterns of our history; or
>
> B. That are associated with the lives of persons significant to our
> past; or
>
> C. That embody distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or
> method of construction, or that represent the work of a master, or
> that possess high artistic values, or that represent a significant and
> distinguishable entity whose components may lack individual
> distinction; or
>
> D. That have yielded, or may be likely to yield, information important
> in prehistory or history.

An eligible suburb must meet one of the above criteria and possess
integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling,
and association. Special criteria considerations, identified by the
letters A to G, also apply to cemeteries, birthplaces, or graves of
historical figures, properties owned by religious institutions or used
for religious purposes, structures, that have been moved from their
original locations, reconstructed buildings, properties primarily
commemorative in nature, and properties that have achieved significance
within the past 50 years. Because of its relevance to the history of
America\'s suburbs, this bulletin provides guidance for applying
Criteria Consideration G whereby a property achieving significance
within the past 50 years may be eligible for listing if it is of
exceptional importance. Guidance for applying other criteria
considerations can be found in National Register bulletin, How to Apply
the National Register Criteria for Evaluation.

The National Register criteria are applied within the context of the
history and development of a locality, State or the nation. National
Register nominations must show that the historic suburb is

> o Associated with an important aspect of the historic suburbanization
> of a locality, metropolitan area, region, State, or the nation, and
>
> o Retains historic integrity of those features necessary to convey its
> significance.

Historic contexts are those patterns, themes, or trends in history by
which a historic property is understood and its meaning (and ultimately
its significance) within history or prehistory is determined. For the
purposes of the National Register program, a historic context is defined
by theme, geographic area, and chronological period; identifies
significant property types; and specifies registration requirements for
National Register listing. National Register bulletin, *How to Complete
the National Register Multiple Property Documentation Form*, provides
guidelines for developing historic contexts.

In order to decide whether a historic suburb is significant within a
historic context, the following five determinations must be made:

> o The facet of history of the local area, State, or the nation that
> the property represents;
>
> o Whether that facet of history is significant;
>
> o Whether it is a type of property that has relevance and importance
> in illustrating the historic context;
>
> o How the property illustrates that history; and
>
> o Whether the property possesses the physical features necessary to
> convey the aspect of history with which it is associated.

If the property being evaluated represents an important aspect of the
area's history and possesses the requisite quality of integrity, then it
qualifies for the National Register. Historic suburbs that introduced
important trends or design principles for suburbanization that were
adopted nationally or regionally or were particularly influential as
prototypes for the design of subsequent suburbs may merit study for
designation as National Historic Landmarks.

## Elements of a National Historic Context for Historic Suburban Areas

Although adapted to local and regional conditions, American suburbs
manifest national trends related to urban and metropolitan development.
This bulletin presents a national historic context on suburbanization
that will provide the basis for interpreting the significance of
suburbanization at the local, state, and national levels of evaluation
and for identifying significant properties. The bulletin also suggests
an outline for developing historic contexts on suburbanization for a
particular State or locality.

**Suburban Historic Context Themes and Trends** - The evolution of the
American suburb is an important aspect of city and urban planning in the
United States. The history of suburbanization reflects the interplay of
five major historic trends:

> o suburban and metropolitan demographic trends,
>
> o development of urban and metropolitan transportation systems,
>
> o subdivision design and suburban development,
>
> o suburban housing and its financing, and
>
> o development of institutional, commercial, and related suburban
> properties.

Demographically, suburbanization is the growth of population on the edge
of cities. In the second half of the nineteenth century, American cities
grew rapidly as they industrialized. The increasingly degraded
conditions of the city, coupled with a growing demand for housing in an
environment that melded nature with community created pressures for
suburbanization. A succession of transportation advances, most notably
the introduction of the electric streetcar in 1888 and the mass-produced
automobile in 1910, allowed an increasingly broad spectrum of households
to suburbanize. By the first decades of the twentieth century,
suburbanization had become an important part of urban growth - generated
primarily by streetcar suburbs. In 1910, the U.S. Census acknowledged
this peripheral growth by recognizing 44 metropolitan districts, - areas
which included central cities of more than 100,000 and surrounding
jurisdictions within a 10-mile radius (Goldfield and Brownell, 289). In
one sense, suburbs are responsible for a major event in American
history - the emergence of the metropolitan area.

By the 1920s, which has been called the first suburban decade in the
United States, suburban areas were growing at a faster rate than central
cities - 33.2 percent in the decade compared to 24.2 percent. (Foster,
48) After World War II, the suburban population exploded. During the
1940s, core cities grew by an average of 14 percent while the suburbs
grew by 36 percent. For the first time, the absolute growth of the
population of suburbs outstripped that of core areas, an increase of 9
million people compared to an increase of 6 million (Judd and Swanstrom,
187). The gap increased in the 1950s when suburbs gained 19 million new
residents compared to only 6 million gained by the core cities. This was
the post-World War II suburban boom. By 1960 more metropolitan residents
lived in the suburbs than in the central city, and by 1990 the majority
of all Americans lived in suburban areas. Hence, the creation of the
historic suburban landscape reflects national population trends and the
urbanization of the United States.

Thus the process of creating suburban landscapes was initiated by a
growing demand for housing located on the rural fringe of the city, away
from its industrial pollution and urban stresses. The American ideal of
suburban life, of living in single-family houses in a self-contained
curvilinear parklike subdivision, was created by the wealthy who could
afford to build and commute to the Romantic suburban models that fueled
the aspirations of the middle and working classes. Their aspirations
were increasingly met as advances in personal transportation - railroad
to horsecar to streetcar to automobile - opened new fringe land for
development. A last barrier to broad suburbanization came down in the
1930s with the passage of legislation creating the subsidized long-term
low interest home mortgage that financed the great post-World War II
suburban boom.

**Geographic Zone** - The geographical extent of suburbanization around
cities has been defined by the limits of personal transportation in
which people could commute daily to work in the city and within the
suburban fringes. These geographical limits, the extent of the suburbs,
expanded as personal transportation became more mobile and relatively
less expensive. The extent and shape of the geographic zone is discussed
in the section on transportation trends. In chronicling the geographic
growth of the suburbs, the growth of American metropolitan areas is
described.

**Chronological Periods** - The suburban trends combine into four major
chronological periods of American suburbanization:

> 1\. Railroad and Horsecar Suburbs from 1840s to the 1890s;
>
> 2\. Streetcar Suburbs from 1888 until the 1920s
>
> 3\. Early Automobile Suburbs from the 1920s to 1945;
>
> 4\. The Freeway Suburbs from 1945 to the 1960s.

Within each period, a distinctive suburban landscape emerged with a
unique combination of transportation systems, plan of residential
development, housing types, and landscape design.

As each improvement in transportation allowed suburban development to
extend outward, each suburb type created a new tier of development away
from the city. Thinking of the succession of suburb types as a series of
tree rings around the central city provides a useful analogy, if one
recognizes that suburban development often took place unevenly at the
margins of a city.

**Property Types** - Property types are classes of historic properties
sharing certain attributes. Each historic context will have a specific
set of property types associated with it. The basic property types
associated with suburbanization\--its physical building blocks\--are the
subdivision and the single family house on its suburban lot.
Transportation facilities and related vehicles and structures are a
second type of suburban property types. Other major property types
include cultural and community structures and commercial developments.

The careful description and analysis of property types will determine
the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of
construction of properties associated with a particular aspect of a
suburbanization historic context, the type of subdivisions and houses
associated with the streetcar suburbs as contrasted with those of the
early automobile suburbs, for example. It is also through the careful
definition of property types that the integrity of individual properties
can be evaluated.

## AN OVERVIEW OF THE CHRONOLOGY OF SUBURBANIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES

This section is organized around the four major chronological periods of
suburbanization and provides an introduction to suburbanization in the
United States and a framework for beginning to place local metropolitan
areas in a national historic context.

The suburban developments that established what would become the model
for the modern subdivision were upper-class railroad suburbs. According
to Spiro Kostof, "In the United States, the picturesque suburb learned
from the example of England, especially the 18th-century garden, and the
landscaped cottages of J.C. Loudon and reinterpreted for an American
audience by Andrew Jackson Downing." Kostof believes that the first
picturesque suburb in the U.S. was probably Glendale, Ohio, founded in
1851 (Kostof, 47). The two most influential picturesque developments
were Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, designed by Alexander Jackson Davis and
built in 1857 and Riverside, just west of Chicago, designed by Frederick
Law Olmsted, Sr., and Calvert Vaux in 1869. In the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, the design principles of Llewellyn Park and
Riverside were widely emulated for the well-to-do and became the
physical embodiment of an American suburban ideal (Sies, 210). Both of
these developments were railroad suburbs from which residents commuted
to New York and Chicago, respectively.

The second stage of suburbanization was ushered in by the electric
streetcar, which was introduced in 1888. An innovation quickly adopted
by many cities, the electric streetcar fostered a suburban explosion by
1900, the first large wave of suburbanization. It also introduced a
growing class of middle and upper middle-class families to the suburban
fringes. Increasingly, working classes were catered to by developers and
joined the movement. Concentrated along radial street car lines,
streetcar suburbs formed radial corridors extending out from the city,
giving it a star shape.

The third stage of suburbanization was launched by the introduction in
1908 of the mass-produced automobile by Henry Ford. Its rapid adoption
by Americans led to the creation of the automobile-oriented suburb of
single-family houses sited in subdivisions that became the
quintessential American landscape of the twentieth century.

The fourth and largest surge of suburbanization in the United States
came after World War II and was fueled by advances in transportation
technology and a demographic event, the Baby Boom, coupled with a
housing shortage. This most rapid spread of suburbs in the nation's
history was facilitated by freeway construction culminating in the
interstate highway system. The post-World War II suburban housing boom,
manifested in the so-called freeway or bedroom suburbs, were further
creations of rubber tire transportation, as trucks joined cars to
support growing commercial and even industrial activities at the city
fringes. In this period, Federally subsidized housing mortgages,
especially for veterans, greatly spurred the growth of homeownership. By
1990, most Americans lived in the suburbs.

Each of these suburban periods produced its own characteristic landscape
with distinctive stages of physical development. Initially a
transportation system of vehicles and rights-of-way made land available
for suburbanization. Residential development of subdivisions and housing
immediately followed. The construction of public community facilities
such as churches and schools and finally the construction of commercial
facilities followed to serve the residential population. Since the
1970s, an additional stage has occurred where jobs have relocated to the
suburbs.

## Railroad and Horsecar Suburbs: 1840s to 1890s

The rapid expansion of steam railroads westward from major northeastern
cities, starting in the 1830s, was designed for the long-distance
transportation of goods between cities. By the eve of the Civil War, a
national rail system had begun to emerge, connecting major cities as far
west as Chicago (Martin, 47). Looking for new revenues, railroad
companies started to build stations for passengers where they passed
though rural villages on the outskirts of cities (Jackson, 35). These
stations became the focal points of railroad suburbs strung along the
railroad tracks radiating from cities. By the Civil War, railroad
commuting was well established in many cities including New York,
Boston, and Philadelphia. Lines extended north from New York City to
Westchester, County and New Haven, Connecticut and east to Long Island
in the 1840s and west and south into New Jersey in the 1850s (Jackson,
37). By 1850, there were 83 commuter stations within a 15-mile radius of
the city of Boston (Schuyler, *The New Urban Landscape: Redefinition of
Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century America*, 152). In Philadelphia more
than 40 trains a day were commuting to the northwest suburb of
Germantown by 1859. On the west coast in 1864, a railroad built south
from San Francisco stimulated the rapid growth of a string of five
suburban railroad towns from Burlingame to Atherton (Vance, 43).

But it was Chicago, which developed almost wholly within the railroad
era and accommodated more than 100,000 residents from 1850 to 1860
(Keating, 14), that developed the most extensive railroad suburbs.
Eleven separate railroad lines entered the city between 1847 and 1861
(Stilgoe, 140), and by 1873, there were more than 100 railroad suburbs
surrounding the city (Goldfield and Brownell, 259). A Chicago railroad
suburb, Riverside, would become the model for American suburban
development.

Railroad suburbs offered the upper middle class an escape from the city.
It was an escape that, according to Robert Fishman, gave them the
opportunity to create truly suburban communities that incorporated
natural elements into a domestic landscape. The railroad simultaneously
gave them rapid access to the center of the city while the high cost of
railroad commuting protected and insulated their communities from
invasion by urban lower and working classes (*Fishman, Bourgeois
Utopias*, 138). At the same time, influenced by the railroad, the
horse-drawn omnibus had been converted to rail, creating horsecars that
allowed horses to pull twice the load at twice the speed, revolutionized
urban travel, and became the first mass transit systems (McShane and
Tarr, 111). The horsecars extended the distance one could commute in a
half hour from two to three miles and expanded the land available for
new residential development on the edge of the city from 13 to nearly 30
square miles (McShane and Tarr, 111). Horsecar tracks followed the main
roads radiating out from the center of the city toward the emerging
wealthy, often railroad, suburbs on the periphery. While the well-to-do
were building exclusive railroad suburbs in the outer periphery, the
middle and working classes were founding new horsecar suburbs on the
city's edge.

Thus, the structure of rail transportation, to which streetcars would be
added in the 1890s, came to outline the geography of classes with each
group distributed along the system according to how far it could afford
to travel from the center and which line it could afford to take
(*Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias*, 138). John Stilgoe has called the
outermost periphery of exclusive suburban railroad towns sited on lines
radiating from the city in an otherwise rural landscape the
*borderlands*. Among the characteristics of the borderlands, according
to Stilgoe, are "houses so far apart that even in winter they cast
shadows on their own lots . . . , Are ordered about a carriage and
horseback pace, not a pedestrian one ;. . . And are distant enough from
cities to be free of pigeons." (Stilgoe, 11) It was within the
borderlands, with their protected railroad suburbs and the wealth with
which to experiment and build new suburban communities that the classic
American suburbs were created. These included not only Llewellyn Park
and Riverside but others such as Isle of the Lake in Minneapolis, Oak
Park outside of Chicago, Roland Park in Baltimore, and Scarsdale and
Brookline outside of New York and Boston respectively, to name a few.

The importance of these exclusive planned suburbs in understanding the
historic suburbs of the United States lies not only in their
prototypical design of curvilinear subdivisions of single-family houses,
but in the values they reflected. It was in these exclusive upper middle
class developments, through debate and experimentation, that the values
of the American suburban ideal were formulated between the 1870s and the
turn of the century (Sies, 199). This suburban ideal\--as reflected in a
consensus about a model suburb, the model house and life-style\--was
diffused throughout American society and would become the motivation for
suburbanization among all income and social groups. The suburban trends
of the twentieth century reflected the playing out of these values by
all classes, culminating in the post World War II boom when a veteran
could buy a suburban dream for a two percent down payment.

**Streetcar Suburbs: 1888 to 1920s**

The event that allowed the middle and even working class to begin to
suburbanize was the introduction of the electric streetcar in Richmond,
Virginia, in 1888. This electrified vehicle allowed people to travel in
10 minutes as far they could walk in 30 minutes (Knox, 89) and
inaugurated the era of streetcar suburbs from Boston to Los Angeles. As
advances in transportation increased household mobility, each succeeding
landscape was built at a lower density. Streetcar suburbs extended in
linear spokes along the streetcar lines outward from the city on these
fixed rails, creating a star-shaped metropolitan area. Houses were built
within a 5-or-10 minute walk of the streetcar line. The streetcar
neighborhoods tended to be made up of rectilinear subdivisions abutting
the streetcar line. Often the streets themselves were extensions of the
familiar grid pattern of the older city. Unlike railroad suburbs which
grew in nodes around rail stations, streetcar suburbs were continuous
corridors because streetcars could stop in each block.

Although houses of the streetcar suburbs were generally on their own
lots, the lots were small. One thing that motivated Americans to
suburbanize was the ideal of a freestanding house; by the 1840s,
reformers saw the single-family house as a means of countering the
conditions of the high-density industrializing city (Ford, 134). The
widespread adoption of the balloon-frame method of construction,
invented in Chicago in the 1830s, had reduced residential construction
costs substantially by mid-century. The balloon frame was a light
framing system in which 2-by-4-inch studs, nailed together in such a way
that every strain went in the direction of the wood, for the heavy beams
and posts of the traditional framing system. By reducing the cost of
construction, Kenneth T. Jackson believes that the balloon frame was as
important as mass transportation in making the private home available to
middle-income families (Jackson, 125). By the 1860s, the opening of new
land by the horsecar and omnibus, and later by the trolley in the 1890s,
made room for the freestanding house, although initially on very narrow
lots. New freestanding house types emerged; houses were placed sideways
on narrow lots of 25-foot fronts with their gable-ends facing the
street. In a period of numerous revival styles, the houses were
decorated in a variety of architectural motifs from Greek to Gothic to
Second Empire. As the century concluded, lot size and houses became
larger.

Streetcar suburbs ranged socioeconomically from working to upper-middle
class, with the great majority being middle class. Especially in smaller
cities of the Midwest and West that developed after 1890, the streetcar
was the primary transportation to work for all income groups.

Neighborhood-oriented commercial facilities such as grocery stores,
bakeries, and drugstores clustered at the intersections of streetcar
lines and along major routes. Barns and stables were not included in
these new residential landscapes.

## Early Automobile Suburbs: 1920s to 1940s

The mobility introduced by the automobile after 1908 spawned a new type
of residential development. Automobiles sold astronomically: in 1894,
according to the Federal Highway Administration, four motor vehicles
were in use in the United States, 16 in 1896, 8,000 in 1900, almost
one-half a million in 1910, nine and a quarter million in 1920, and
nearly 27 million in 1930 (Federal Highway Administration, *Highway
Statistics: Summary to 1985*, as quoted in Knox, 107). The automobile
allowed land between the streetcar line spokes to be developed to fill
in the star-shaped city. With commuters no longer needing to live within
walking distance of the streetcar line, new residential developments
could be built at lower densities and designed to be self-contained with
curving interior streets providing more privacy and sense of country.

The first decades of the twentieth century also witnessed a change in
suburban house types. By the end of the century, the more ornate
Victorian houses, with their complex floor plans and likely need for
servants, lost favor to a smaller simpler house with a more open floor
plan - the bungalow. Appearing in the 1890s, the bungalow reflected the
need for an affordable single-family house for households without
servants. This house type was characterized by "a compact single story
plan, a prominent hipped roof, usually with a sloping segment presented
to the street and with a spacious porch across the front of the house,
most of these houses were built during the 1920s (Rowe, 68).\" The
demand for the smaller, architecturally plainer house also reflected the
suburbanization of families with more modest incomes. These houses, and
a style known as the four-square, were also sold by catalog and were the
first mass- produced houses in the United States.

As suburbs grew faster than cities, the 1920s became known as the first
suburban decade (Goldfield and Brownell, 289). By the end of the 1920s,
a distinctive automobile suburban landscape began to take shape and the
modern curvilinear subdivision was beginning to emerge. The template of
the picturesque, upper-class residential developments such as Riverside
and Llewellyn had been modified by Garden City influences from England
and had been adapted to the automobile by experiments such as Radburn in
New Jersey.

The historic integrity of the suburban development lies in both the site
plan and the houses it holds, as well as the design relationship between
the two. As important as the development of the model subdivision site
plan in the 1920s and 1930s was its institutionalization through zoning
and subdivision regulations. In 1928, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the
constitutionality of zoning in which the exclusively residential
development of single-family houses was supported as the most inviolate
of land use zones. In 1934, the Federal Housing Administration supported
the curvilinear subdivision as the preferred layout for developments it
would insure.

Yet the subdivision was only the setting for the dominant feature of the
suburban landscape, the single-family house, and just as the form and
plan of the residential subdivision evolved during the first four
decades of this century, so too did the single-family house that it
sited. Rowe has reflected that "no other artifact is as pervasive or
carries the same emotional charge as the detached house in its suburban

garden ( Rowe, 67)." Although the streetcar suburbs made the
freestanding house more common, reaction against the Victorian style of
display and the early twentieth-century reformist pursuit of a good and
proper American home led to the development of a series of new-single
family house types. From 1900 until the 1920s, the most common suburban
house type was the bungalow.

By the 1920s, a new generation of suburban housing types emerged. An
open floor plan like the bungalow was placed in a more classically
designed, often two-story, dwelling in a variety of revival styles
including Colonial, Tudor and Dutch. Garages became respectable
structures on the residential sites. (For a history of the garage, see
Jan Jennings, "Housing the Automobile," in *Roadside America: The
Automobile in Design and Culture*) Originally located on alleys away
from the house, garages were moved closer to the house, often were built
in the same style as the house, and provided with a driveway from the
street (Ford, 156). Garages were not commonly integrated into houses
until the 1950s. A more formal building architecturally, the Colonial
Revival house was usually a compact two-story building with a square or
rectangular floor plan emulating colonial symmetry and architectural
ornament (Rowe, 69).

In the 1920s and 1930s, suburban areas began to be developed on a larger
scale and assumed identity as communities. In the early suburbs, except
those built for the well-to-do, subdivisions were small and developed
into lots separately from the construction of houses. Typically, the
developer acquired the land, developed a plan for the streets and the
layout of lots, installed the infrastructure of streets and utilities,
and then sold the lots to builders or individuals who, in turn,
contracted with a builder. The early automobile suburb saw the emergence
of the real estate entrepreneur who undertook the entire process for the
initial purchase of land to the sale of houses. These developers sought
to be community builders to sell not just houses but a whole way of life
(Judd and Swanstrom, 193).

Perhaps the most significant stimulus for suburbanization in the 1930s
was the creation of a Federal program\--the Federal Housing
Administration (FHA)\--to insure long-term mortgages made by private
lenders for home construction and sales. Before this, mortgages were
limited to one-half to two-thirds of the appraised value of the property
and required at least a 30% down payment. The FHA reduced this amount to
less than 10%, thus drastically reducing the cost of becoming a
homeowner. Nevertheless, the surge in housing starts and home ownership
would not come until after World War II in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Thus, we find the prototype of the post-World War II and contemporary
subdivision almost fully developed by 1940. What was required for the
second period of explosive growth was the post-war demand for housing,
which was facilitated by low-cost financing and the introduction of
methods for the mass production of housing.

The invention of the mechanical road and the automobile commercial
strip - In addition to the subdivision and suburban houses, two other
distinctive property types emerged with the growth of the automobile and
became important elements of the suburban landscape. These were the
mechanical road and the automobile-oriented commercial strip. One of the
most unheralded structures that facilitated the growth of the suburbs
was the perfected mechanical road. Automobiles required smooth, hard
surfaces and before 1900, even in cities most roads were unpaved.
Asphalt, introduced to mollify bicyclists in the 1890s, became the
common road surface by 1916. Hordes of untamed automobiles stimulated a
succession of innovations in traffic control devices: Philadelphia
experimented with semaphore traffic signals in 1910, Michigan laid down
road markings in 1911, and Chicago introduced stop signs in 1916. By
1920, the system of green, yellow, and red electrical signal lights had
been adopted as standard and New York City installed an integrated
system of street lights on Fifth Avenue that governed traffic at 26
intersections (Relph, 79-80). On a larger scale, Congress passed the
Good Roads Act in 1916 and the Highway Act of 1921, allowing federal
funds to be used for road construction and doubling the total miles of
surfaced highways during the 1920s (Ford, 233). The Bronx River Parkway
in New York, conceived in 1906, became the prototype of the
freeway\--the high-speed, multiple-lane, limited-access highway type
that opened up the post-World War II suburbs. Although intended for
recreational driving, it was the first highway designed for the
exclusive use of cars with long shallow curves suitable for the speeds
of automobiles, separated interchanges in which crossing roads were
bridged over, limited access, and beautiful landscaping\--and thus was
called a parkway (Relph, 77).

A distinctive automobile-oriented, commercial suburban landscape emerged
as well. Its two most distinctive elements were the commercial strip and
the shopping center. The automobile created both new types of businesses
and structures to house them\--gas stations and motels, for
example\--and new variations on older businesses such as restaurants. In
the 1920s, in an effort to attract customers speeding by at 30 mph, two
types of architecture evolved unique to the automobile strip\--signature
architecture and exaggerated regional architecture (Ford, 235). In
signature architecture, buildings were built to resemble either the name
of the establishment - such as the Brown Derby restaurant housed in a
derby-like building\--or its product, such as a market on Long Island
that sold poultry from a building shaped like a duck. Indeed, as this
commercial architecture shaped like teapots, doughnuts, frogs, and hot
dogs became popular, it was known as duck architecture (Ford, 236). A
variation on duck architecture was an exaggerated regional.

In the 1930s, a more serious commercial automobile-oriented architecture
evolved that has been called Streamline Moderne (Ford, 238). Reflecting
the design innovations that were occurring in automobiles, airplanes,
and other symbols of the new machine age, moderne buildings featured a
sleek round look and clean white tiled or ceramic surfaces (Ford, 238).
Gas stations, diners, automobile showrooms, and other commercial
buildings began to look like the automobiles that passed in front of
them.

## The Freeway Suburbs: 1940s to 1960s

During the Depression, both housing starts and birth rates declined.
World War II production, however, revived the economy while creating a
demand for the consumer goods it replaced. Marriage and birth rates also
revived. After the war, several events combined to transform American
suburban and metropolitan landscapes. Returning veterans set off a
demographic explosion by continuing to form families at a high rate,
having children and producing a baby boom unprecedented in American
history. But they also faced a seemingly intractable housing shortage.
By 1947, six million families were doubling up with families or friends
(Jackson, 232). In addition, in 1945, new housing, if it had been
available, would have been beyond the means of 75% of American families
(Goldfield and Brownell, 342). In response, the Federal government
appropriated millions of dollars for mortgage insurance through the
Federal Housing Administration and for the newly authorized veteran's
mortgage program. Housing starts skyrocketed, rising from only 114,000
in 1944 to 1,692,000 in 1950.

The post-World War II suburbs shared five characteristics (Jackson,
238-341). First was peripheral location. The scale of mass-produced
development was not amenable to a filling-in process nor would that
satisfy the "temper of the times." Second, post-World War II suburbs
were built at a relatively low density. Typical lot sizes ranged from
one-tenth to one quarter of an acre. Third, they exhibited great
architectural similarity. And the architectural similarity of a tract
house in a subdivision extended to the nation as a whole, replacing
traditional regional variation in housing types with uniformity. Fourth,
postwar housing was easily available financially because of
mass-production techniques, government financing, and low interest
rates. Finally, postwar suburbs were racially and economically
homogeneous.

Nearly all of the new construction took place outside of central cities,
except for some western cities that had legal boundaries far beyond
their built-up edge or were newly developing. In meeting demand for
housing, a new phenomenon appeared on the American landscape - the
mass-produced large-scale subdivision. Thousands of nearly identical
houses were built in nearly identical subdivisions. Whereas inexpensive
long-term housing finance gave families financial access to housing,
other factors were prerequisites for the large-scale suburban
developments: the emergence of large corporate developers, the
standardization of housing construction, the widespread adoption of
zoning, new and improved roads, and the systematic discrimination
against central city neighborhoods by lending institutions and the FHA.

In addition to the Cape Cod, two other housing types became standards
for the new post-war subdivisions\--the Colonial Revival and the Ranch
House. The Colonial Revival house continued its popularity from the
1920s into the 1950s. Usually a compact two-story building with a square
or rectangular floor plan emulating colonial symmetry and architectural
ornament (Rowe, 69), the houses were often finished in materials
reflecting local colonial vernacular materials.

It was the Ranch House, however, that became the quintessential American
suburban single-family house. Presumably tracing its origins to western
ranch houses, the architectural inheritance of this type owed much to
Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie style houses and later Usonian houses of
the 1930s. With a simple horizontal profile and a serial arrangement of
rooms, the Ranch House evolved through three phases of development from
a small modest house to a large sprawling rambler (Rowe, 73). With a
more open, less formal floor plan than the Colonial Revival or modest
Cape Cod houses, the Ranch House reflected the emphasis on family life
of the baby boom families.

By the late 1940s, the garage became integrated into the house and the
car moved in with the family. By the 1950s, the garage was frequently
placed at the end of the house, or in L-shaped range houses, located in
the L in the front of the house (Ford, 167). As two-car garages become
more common, automobile storage could take up almost one-quarter of the
area of the house.

It was the curvilinear subdivision that became the setting for these
houses and the building block of the post-World War II suburban
landscape. In the 1930s, curvilinear subdivisions gained favor among
planners and builders. They drew on the earlier picturesque plans of
Riverside and Llewellyn Park, which created privacy with their long
blocks and a park-like atmosphere. Also less dangerous in an automobile
age by avoiding four-way intersections, these subdivisions incorporated
new ideas from Clarence Perry's neighborhood unit and Radburn, N.J. In
the 1930s, the FHA, seeking to enhance the value of the properties it
insured, promulgated recommendations for subdivision design that favored
the organic, curvilinear subdivision (Rowe, 205).

Levittown was designed with a curvilinear circulation system. The
community's pattern of curving streets\--called roads and lanes\--as
self-contained, allowing no through traffic. The site plan provided for
swimming pools, playgrounds, baseball diamonds, and seven village greens
for open space and recreation (Jackson, 236). In later developments,
Levitt would provide commercial facilities. Postwar suburbanization was
not limited to huge developments around large cities, but took place
throughout the country at different scales and for different income
groups. Wherever it occurred, the arrival of the mass-produced
residential community\--bedroom suburbs\--marked a fundamental change in
the way American urban landscapes developed, a change from fine-grained
addition and infill to a process of the mass production of coarse chunks
of suburban land (Knox, 122).

In large part, the scale of the endeavor was made possible by two waves
of freeway construction after World War II. In 1939, a study by the U.S.
Bureau of Public Roads called for more limited-access highways to
accommodate the high volume and increasing speed of traffic and
suggested that most cities would benefit from the creation of a
hub-and-wheel system of high-speed roads, with the downtown encircled by
an inner beltway and series of high-speed connectors radiating out to
join an outer beltway (Knox, 119). The golden age of highway
construction in the United States was introduced by the 1944 Federal-Aid
Highway Act and solidified by the Interstate Highway Act of 1956. The
former called for 41,000 miles of interstate and defense highways,
including 5,000 miles of urban freeways, and the latter provided a means
of financing them (Rowe, 195). Just as the streetcar lines had done 60
years earlier, freeway construction multiplied the land available for
suburbanization.

More important, they facilitated the rise of an automobile and drive-in
landscape. Between 1950 and 1980, when the American population grew by
50 %, automobile ownership grew by 200% (Jackson, 246). The growth in
the metropolitan fringe of large, self-contained residential
subdivisions connected by arterial and freeways created a dispersed
landscape requiring an automobile for mobility. This gave rise to a
landscape that has been variously called a "Drive-in Culture" or
"California Suburbia," a drive-in and drive-through suburbia designed to
accommodate the automobile for virtually all aspects of daily living. As
retailing and services following the new residents into the suburbs they
formed in two major types of development the commercial strip and the
shopping center.

During the post-World War II suburban boom,strip commercial areas
flourished as extensions of older streetcar and automobile strips and
along roads in newly developing areas. What has been called the classic
automobile strip evolved from the opening of the first McDonald's
drive-in restaurant in 1948 to the gas crisis of 1973 (Ford, 240).
Although the strip was marked by a variety of individual establishments
-frequently drive-ins - strip centers assumed a coherent architectural
form. They were a linear arrangement of stores distributed along a
street, one store deep and with parking in either the front or rear, or
in both locations (Rowe, 112). Progressively, commercial strips moved
back from the street to accommodate automobile parking. The great supply
of inexpensive land made accessible for development by the new roads
reduced the percentage of land of total building costs. This made it
possible not only to support commercial activities with large parking
lots, but also to construct extensive commercial buildings such as
drive-in theaters and miniature golf courses in the middle of
suburbia(Ford, 241).

The post-World War II strip developments were marked by the arrival of
roadside franchises -including convenience stores, filling stations,
motels, and fast-food restaurants. One of their most distinctive
architectural characteristics was the standardization of design. Whereas
the \"duck\" architecture along the early automobile strips had been
unique and somewhat infrequent, franchises used standardized
buildings\--designed in a distinctive, usually exaggerated form
resembling a three-dimensional sign\--to advertise their products and to
assure the consumer a predictability in the quality of product. (For a
good description of automobile-oriented commercial architecture see,
Chester H. Liebs, *Main Street to Miracle Mile: American Roadside
Architecture*) Called "cartoon architecture" or, more gently,
"exaggerated modern", when these franchised buildings were aligned along
the roadside interspersed with oversized, neon-lit signs, they created a
scene of jumbled commercial chaos. Yet, nowhere in the post-World War II
suburbs is there a landscape more telling of the new drive-in culture.

**The Arrival of the Shopping Center** - The most purely suburban
commercial invention was the shopping center. Although many of the
hallmarks of the modern shopping center had been established by Country
Club Plaza near Kansas City in the 1920s, it was the culmination of
trends in retailing and its decentralization that had started in the
teens (The best description and analysis of the suburban commercial
landscape form is Richard Longstreth, *City Center to Regional Mall:
Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950*).
By 1947 there were only eight shopping centers in the United States due
to the continuing dominance of the central city as the major retailing
outlet in a metropolitan area. As suburban populations multiplied, by
the end of the 1940s major department stores began to move to suburbs,
providing the anchors for large new shopping centers. The first major
planned shopping center of this period was built in Raleigh, North
Carolina, in 1949. Soon, shopping centers began to be built ahead of the
anticipated suburban advance along major highways and freeways, the most
favored locations being near interchanges. Regional shopping centers
quickly assumed the form of enclosed malls consisting of a building
complex surrounded by large areas of surface car parking. Within the
complex, stores were arranged around an open, well-landscaped pedestrian
spine, often with department stores located at both ends (Rowe, 124). By
1956, with the opening of Southdale Shopping Center near Minneapolis,
the mall became enclosed and climate-controlled (Jackson, 259).

By the mid-1950s, a dispersed automobile-oriented, suburban landscape
was created. A network of highways had opened land for new large,
residential subdivisions. Commercial facilities followed, capped by the
regional enclosed mall. It was also a landscape that excluded many and
drained the central city of much of its wealth and many of its
middle-income residents. The same FHA that promoted investment in the
suburbs discouraged it in the central city through practices of
labelling central city neighborhoods as poor investments. Hence, the
historic American suburban landscape is a succession of landscapes, each
with its own unique characteristics but each created by the same
interplay of forces.

**Major Trends in the Creation of**

**Historic American Suburban Areas**

This section examines four major national trends related to
suburbanization: urban and metropolitan transportation, the evolution of
the curvilinear suburban subdivision and related housing, the invention
of long-term mortgages to finance suburban development and housing, and
the evolution of the suburban commercial landscape. Most of these trends
are reflected at the local level and relate primarily to National
Register Criteria A and B.

## Transportation Trends

Because land requires accessibility to be developed, the laying out of
new transportation routes using new technologies led the outward
movement of new suburbs. The new circulation patterns formed the
skeleton around which new land uses and suburban landscapes became
organized.

**Railroads, Horsecars, and Streetcars: 1820 to 1920s** - Although the
electrification of the streetcar in 1888 facilitated the first extensive
suburbanization for the middle class, earlier, mostly upper-class
suburbs, made possible by the commuter railroads, pioneered influential
principles of subdivision design. Nor were the numbers of suburbanites
insubstantial. In 1873, for example, Chicago was surrounded by nearly
100 railroad suburbs, and Boston's suburban population grew from 60,000
to 227,000 between 1870 and 1900. Railroads started expanding rapidly
1865 and by 1900, the United States boasted more miles of track than the
rest of the world combined (Jackson, 91). Residential developments for
the well-to-do were built along the railroad lines extending from the
city which became dubbed "mainline" suburbs, a term derived from the
Pennsylvania Railroad route west of Philadelphia. These included places
like Swarthmore, Villanova, and Radnor. Railroad suburbs that were
models of the curvilinear Picturesque design included Lake Forest and
Riverside near Chicago and Llewellyn Park in New Jersey.

Within cities, systems of mass transit\--defined as operations along a
fixed route following a fixed schedule\--began to appear in the 1830s.
With the introduction of the horse-drawn omnibus (short-haul stages),
the more efficient horse-drawn streetcars on rails were beginning to
expand the perimeters of many cities in the 1850s. By 1860, horsecar
systems were operating in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh,
Chicago, Cincinnati, Montreal, and Boston (Jackson, 39). Although
horse-drawn streetcars extended the suburban fringe of cities only very
modestly, more importantly, they established the precedent for mass
transit as a means of moving around the city. In this, they set the
stage for the rapid suburbanization stimulated by the much faster
electric streetcar.

In the spring of 1888, Frank Sprague, a former associate of Thomas
Edison, introduced an electric-powered streetcar system in Richmond,
Virginia. By 1902, there were 22,000 miles of streetcar tracks in
American cities. From 1890 to 1907, streetcar mileage, most of it
electrified, increased from 5,783 to 34,404 miles (Tarr and Konvitz,
204). The faster streetcar made streetcar suburbs possible by greatly
increasing the land available for residential development. Since
streetcar lines tended to radiate out from the old city and the new
suburban houses were built within walking distance of the new lines, the
streetcar suburbs gave the city a star shape. (Use graphic from David
Ward). Sam Bass Warner calculated that in Boston by 1900 the area open
for residential construction as a result of the streetcar was 32 times
larger than the old city of 1850 (Warner, 63).

In most cities, there was a close relationship between the development
of streetcar lines and real estate development: often the streetcar
lines were financed by residential developers. As well, streetcars were
adopted in cities of all sizes, not just large ones. In some midwestern
and western cities that had their formative periods of growth in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, streetcar systems were
not extensions of an older transportation system but integral to their
initial development, just as the automobile came to be the primary
transportation system in cities that developed later. As streetcar
systems evolved, they also developed cross-town and interurban lines
connecting surrounding small towns to the central city and to each
other. In addition to residential suburbs tied to jobs in the central
city, between the late 1880s and World War I, a number of industrial
suburbs appeared on the urban landscape, including Pullman and Gary in
the Chicago area (Foster, 16). Thus, the streetcar lines laid out a
network of transportation that was the skeleton of a circulation system
for an emerging metropolitan landscape.

Streetcar entrepreneurs facilitated outward radial growth in two ways
(Jackson, 119). Tracks would be extended beyond the built-up area
through open country to existing villages. The new trolley line would
first stimulate the growth of the village and, second, new residential
areas would be built flanking the trolley line, thus creating corridors
of streetcar subdivisions. The second way in which streetcar operators
accelerated outward growth was by generally charging flat fare with free
transfers. This encouraged households to move to the cheaper land on the
suburban periphery. Thus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, real estate interests and trolley promoters combined to
develop huge suburban areas in American cities. These areas were long
linear bands extending out from the city with the streetcar line as the
spine and development limited to a few blocks of the lines.

Streetcar use continued to increase until 1923 when patronage reached
15.7 billion (Foster, 49) and then declined rather slowly. There was no
distinct break between streetcar and automobile use from 1910 to 1930.
Cities continued to grow and as the demand for transportation increased
with that, the automobile was adopted more by the upper-middle to upper
income households while trolleys tended to serve the middle and working
class population. In spite of the rapid growth of automobile ownership,
in the 1920s trolley company executives were still confident of their
industry's future as the prime mover of the metropolitan population
(Foster, 52). By the 1930s, streetcar companies had added buses and
trackless trolleys to their fleets, making their routes more flexible,
and had become mass transit companies. But by the 1930s the ridership of
these mass transit companies began to decline and in the 1940s dropped
precipitously. The post World War II boom in automobile ownership
spelled the end of the streetcar as a determinant of American urban
form. As automobile became the major source of personal transportation,
streetcar suburbs became serviced by automobiles, and today virtually
all direct evidence of the street car has disappeared. Yet, any urban
residential area developed from the 1880s until shortly after World War
I undoubtedly started life as a streetcar suburb.

**Early Automobile-1908 to 1940s** - Henry Ford introduced the Model T
in 1908 and began to mass produce it in 1910. From 1910 until 1930,
automobile registrations in the United States increased from 458,000 to
nearly 22 million, or from one car for every 201 persons to one car for
every five (Tarr and Konvitz, 210). The explosive growth of the
automobile brought with it the need for a new transportation
infrastructure that included the construction and improvements of roads
and highways, the development of traffic systems, the building of
bridges and tunnels \[especially to facilitated cross-river
transportation\], and the widening and reconstruction of downtown
streets (Tarr and Konvitz, 211).

The automobile created a new circulation system in the metropolitan
area, a new transportation landscape. If the streetcars created a
metropolitan area of residential land use spokes radiating from a
commercial and industrial core, then the automobile first allowed new
suburban development to fill in between the spokes. As new radial
arterials were built suburban development decentralized, further
creating urban fringes of increasingly low densities. By the 1920s, the
modern automobile-dependent residential suburb or subdivision had come
into being (Tarr and Konvitz, 210). By the end of the 1930s, a hub and
wheel system of metropolitan freeways became envisioned as the future of
the highway. In this highway system, radial freeways extending from the
urban core intersected a circumferential freeway surrounding the city.

The two most intense episodes of suburban expansion stimulated by the
automobile took place from 1918 until shortly after the Wall Street
crash of 1929, and from 1945 to the present (Rowe, 4). The automobile
suburbs that began to appear in the 1920s differed in four ways from the
earlier streetcar suburbs (Jackson, 181). First, the mobility of
automobiles allowed suburban development to fill in between the
finger-shaped corridors of transit lines. Second, the average commuting
distance increased, although the automobile allowed workers to work in
the periphery of the city. Third, the mobility of the rubber-tired truck
allowed factories, warehouses, and distribution activities to begin to
move to the suburbs. Fourth, densities declined as lot and house sizes
increased. Lot sizes increased from 3,000 square feet in the streetcar
suburbs to 5,000 square feet in the automobile suburbs; residential
densities fell by half from about 20,000 people per square mile in the
streetcar suburbs to about 10,000 per square mile in the automobile
suburbs.

The Federal government became heavily involved in highway construction
after 1914. The Good Roads Act of 1915 established the Bureau of Public
Roads, and the Highway Act of 1921 set in motion the construction of a
national highway system. Most states established highway departments
during the 1920s. During the period 1921-1936, which has been called the
Gold Age of Highway Building, more than 420,000 miles of roads were
built (Seely, 67). Much of the effort was devoted to improving existing
roads to accommodate the automobile and truck. \"Total highway mileage
increased only slightly in the 1920s . . .the mileage of surface roads
increased 157 percent and high-grade surfaced roads 776 percent between
1914 and 1929 (Tarr and Konvitz, 211)." Most of the construction took
place outside of city limits, but many of the improved highways radiated
out from cities, making new land available for suburbanization by the
automobile. Much engineering effort was directed at creating designs and
standards for roads to accommodate the automobile which, by 1923,
Americans were buying at the rate of 3,000,000 a year (Scott, 186).

In the 1910s and 1920s, new parkways were being constructed in the New
York metropolitan area that would have a far-reaching influence on the
design of metropolitan systems of freeways and interstate highways after
World War II. The first parkways\--roads within parks for
carriages\--were built in the late nineteenth century in Boston on the
advice of Frederick Law Olmsted (Rowe, 187). Kansas City followed suit,
building its first parkway in 1908. These parkways were characterized by
wide rights-of-way that maintained a park-like environment and buffered
the road from adjacent development. Roadbed widths of 40 feet in the
Boston system set parkway standards well into the 1930s, although the
Kansas City system had roadbed as wide as 56 feet. However, William K.
Vanderbilt's Long Island Motor Parkway (1906-1911) was the world's
first thoroughfare restricted solely to the automobile and designed for
its needs (Jackson, 166). The first modern parkway for automobiles was
the Bronx River Parkway, which was begun in 1906 and completed in 1923.
Running sixteen miles from Bruckner Avenue in New York City to White
Plains in Westchester County, the design standards of this parkway and
the 75-mile Westchester County Parkway System of which it would become a
part were the prototype for future generations of high-speed automobile
highways in the United States. These included extensive land
rights-of-way ranging from 300 to 1,800 feet, providing complete
separation of the parkway from surrounding properties.

The highways themselves were four lanes with 40-foot roadways running in
each direction. The roadways were separated by landscaped dividers and
medians. Curves were minimized, wide shoulders provided, and cross
traffic separated from the parkway by bridges and tunnels. Extending
these concepts, the Merritt Parkway, connecting New York and New Haven,
was begun in 1926. It extended north to Hartford as the Wilbur Cross
Parkway and was the first long-distance, high-speed divided highway in
the United States. With its complete grade separation and controlled
access, it was the forerunner of the interstate highway (Rowe, 189).

Yet most cities during the 1920s and 1930s met the needs of the
automobile by extending and improving existing street systems. And in
some, such as Detroit, there were creative attempts to meld new concepts
of transit with the needs of the automobile - to create what today is
called a multimodal system. In 1923, the Detroit Rapid Transit
Commission announced a comprehensive transit plan that included a subway
system in the central area, proposed 65 miles of rapid transit that
would be integrated with 560 miles of trolley by 1950 and, most
significantly, proposed integrated rights-of-way for rapid transit and
automobiles (Foster, 80). These 206-feet-wide rights-of-way would extend
in a radial pattern fifteen miles from downtown. A center strip 84 feet
wide would accommodate rapid transit, allowing limited access highways
on either side. Although hailed as a model plan, it soon became clear
that the highway elements were attracting most of the attention and
support for the transit element of the proposal waned. A similar
proposal in Los Angeles in the 1920s also failed. In addition to the
attraction of the automobile, fixed rail facilities were very expensive
and inflexible. By the end of the 1920s, the automobile seemed to have
gained ascendancy.

In the 1930s, suburban areas continued to grow faster than central
cities and, since virtually nobody challenged the dominance of the
automobile in outlying areas, a large portion of the traffic planning
effort of the 1930s was devoted to suburban superhighway construction
(Foster, 151-152). In the 1930s, greater attention was devoted to
conceiving metropolitan systems of highways. One of the most influential
visions of the future form of the highway system in metropolitan areas
was presented at the 1939 New York World's Fair in the Futurama and
Highways and Horizons Exhibit sponsored by General Motors (Rowe, 183).
With scale models, it exhibited a metropolitan system of high-speed
limited-access highways with total grade separation and roads graduated
by speed. Radial highways connected the suburbs to downtowns where
commuters ramped into garages under their offices. A ring highway
surrounding the city connected the suburbs. In the same year, a study
published by the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads recommended that to solve
their traffic problems, most large cities would benefit from the
creation of a \"hub-and-wheel\" system of high speed roads, with the
downtown encircled by an inner beltway and a series of high speed
connectors radiating out to join the outer beltway (Knox, 119).

Thus, from the end of World War I until 1940, the first two suburban
decades, the rise of the automobile had accelerated suburbanization,
become the dominant mode of transportation in the suburbs, caused the
demise of the streetcar, stimulated the design and construction of a new
infrastructure of roads, highways, bridges, and tunnels, and laid the
groundwork for a metropolis-wide highway system that would transform the
American metropolitan area after World War II.

**Freeway Period: 1940s to 1960s** - After World War II, automobile
ownership boomed: automakers sold more than 3,000,000 cars in 1948;
total registrations jumped from 31 million to nearly 45 million between
1945 and 1949; and vehicle miles traveled increased 87 billion between
1947 and 1950 (Seely, 193). During World War II, the concept of a
National System of Interstate Defense Highways was incorporated into the
federal Highway Act of 1944. The legislation called for a limited system
of national highways of which metropolitan expressways would be an
integral part (Rowe, 194). The system was authorized in 1956 as 41,000
miles system of toll-free superhighways including 5,000 miles of urban
freeways. Highway construction authorized under the 1944 act got off to
a slow start, but by 1951, every major city was working on arterial
highway improvements and 65 percent of federal funds were being used for
urban expressways. It was not until the late 1950s and early 1960s that
the Interstate system began to be built and influence patterns of
suburbanization.

## Trends in Suburban Land Development and Subdivision Design: 1850 To 1950

This section describes trends in the design of residential subdivisions
from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1950s as the context for the
evaluation of subdivisions in terms of Criterion A and also describes
the physical characteristics of subdivisions that apply to Criterion C.
The basic landscape unit of residential suburban development is the
subdivision siting single family houses on their own lots. It starts as
a parcel of vacant (usually agricultural) land that is bought by a
developer. This parcel is large enough to be subdivided into individual
lots intended for single family houses. In addition, it is provided with
the necessary infrastructure, including streets and water and sewer and
utilities lines.

Planned and designed as a whole landscape or land development unit,
densities, placement and other characteristics of buildings are governed
by land controls ranging from restrictive covenants running with the
land to public subdivision regulations. Subdivisions range in design
from large, elaborate curvilinear site plans to simple rectilinear plats
with three or four lots bracketed by streets. Historically, subdivisions
have been relatively small. Until the advent in the 1930s of Federal
Mortgage Insurance, developers sold unbuilt suburban lots to individuals
or builders who in turn constructed the dwellings.

**Emergence of the Subdivision** - From the mid-nineteenth century,
families were motivated to move to the edge by the desire to live in the
country away from the city but close enough to commute to employment
there. The motivations were several. There was a push factor. American
cities were rapidly industrializing during the second half of the
nineteenth century, a process that by creating increasingly congested,
polluted urban environments dangerous due to disease and crime,
reenforced Americans' dislike and fear of cities. At the same time, the
Romantic Movement extolled the virtues of nature, and its picturesque
architectural illustrations sought to create romantic, naturalistic
buildings and landscapes by reviving styles from the past thought to be
more in tune with nature and hence more moral.

In the mid-nineteenth century, during a period of rapid
industrialization and urbanization in the United States, the home became
viewed as the sanctuary from the pathologies and stresses of the city.
In her popular 1841 book, Treatise on Domestic Economy, Catherine
Beecher Stowe offered the first plans for practical dwellings and, in
attempting to relate her domestic ideals to landscape design, assumed
that family life could best thrive in a semi-rural environment (Jackson,
62) . The clearest visual architectural articulation of the ideal home
was presented in 1842 by Alexander Jackson Davis in his book Rural
Residences, which featured "plans for ornamented Gothic and Italianate
villas and cottages set in a far-reaching pastoral landscape dotted with
pleasant houses. . . (Wright, )" Other architectural pattern books
followed, emphasizing the coincidence of the ideal home and the rural
residence.

The Picturesque subdivision or the residential development became the
means by which upper-income city dwellers sought to satisfy their desire
for a semi-rural environment with single-family houses within commuting
distance of the city. The prototypes for what became the suburban
subdivision ideal were built for the elite in the mid-nineteenth
century - the picturesque developments of Llewellyn Park in New Jersey
and Riverside, Illinois, near Chicago. \[Figure \-- and \-\--\]
Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, designed by Alexander Jackson Davis and
built in 1857, is commonly acknowledged as the picturesque prototype. In
its design, Davis introduced the curvilinear road and natural open space
in the center, two features, that, according to Jackson, were
unprecedented in modern residential experience (Jackson, 78). Riverside,
Illinois, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and founded in 1869, further
articulated the suburban ideal with its fluent system of curved streets,
extensive plantings, and houses on irregular, individual lots with
30-foot setbacks (*Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias*, 129). The residential
land developer became the individual that largely defined the appearance
the suburban landscape.

The historic context for American suburbs is largely defined by two
major trends: the first is the evolution of the subdivision or
residential development and the second is the development of the
single-family house. This must be undertaken at two of levels. In the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, suburbanization was
largely associated with upper- middle and upper-income households,
partly because suburbs were associated with particular designed
landscapes, such as the curvilinear subdivision design of Llewellyn Park
and Riverside. Yet, no less desired by the middle and working classes,
the achievement of the suburban ideal was constrained only by their
lower incomes. Within their limited incomes, they sought to create
physical approximations of the upper class-developments in the gridded
extension of the city.

On the one hand, the ideal models of early suburban developments were
upper-income developments such as Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, Riverside,
Illinois, Short Hills, New Jersey, Kenilworth, Illinois, and Lake of the
Isles in Minneapolis, Minnesota (Sies, 199). On the other hand, no less
suburban were the small freestanding temple-houses built in the 1870s
for middle-income families on their own narrow 25 foot lots on square
blocks on a gridded street pattern served by horse-trolleys. They met
the suburban criteria by being single-family houses on their own lots in
subdivisions removed, if but slightly, from the city. In both instances,
the common denominator was the subdivision, the large parcel bought and
subdivided with the purpose of building a uniform residential area.

What distinguished upper-class developments from those of lower incomes
was their form of individual transportation. The Riverside and Llewellyn
Park models were premised on flexible personal mobility by horse and
carriage, while the lower-income subdivisions had to function with much
more limited individual mobility in which residents walked to their
houses from streetcar lines. Only when the automobile became common,
providing personal transportation free from fixed streetcar lines, were
developers and builders able to offer curvilinear subdivisions to
middle-income households. The self-contained curvilinear subdivision
plans adapted to automobiles began to appear in the late 1920s and were
more widely built in the 1930s. They were institutionalized in most
zoning ordinances by the 1950s.

Thus, while the curvilinear subdivision layout, the picturesque model,
was the highest, most desirable form of residential development, it
contained several features that could be, and was, achieved in simpler
rectilinear subdivisions in a higher density, less costly variety along
streetcar lines. Developing several houses in a group allowed the
developer to create certain economies and suburban amenities that
individual builders could not attain. Hence, from the mid-nineteenth
century, suburban subdivisions have existed on a social and economic
continuum ranging from the most modest cottages on a few square feet on
a square street pattern to the large Riverside-like developments for the
rich.

**Subdivision Property Types** - Historically, residential subdivisions
have been of two recognizable types: rectilinear plats and curvilinear
subdivisions (Garvin, 253). Rectilinear plats were usually laid out
within a larger gridded street system whereas curvilinear subdivisions
were more self-contained and laid out with access to a main arterial,
including railroads.

**Rectilinear plats or subdivisions**.- Although the gridded city plan
has Roman origins, in the United States it served primarily as the most
profitable way to develop and sell residential land. Most American
cities laid out in the second half of the nineteenth century platted
extensive grids to guide their future growth. In fact, cities in states
surveyed by the rectilinear land surveys of the Northwest Ordinance or
the Homestead Act simply extended the surveyed grid (Garvin, 253).
During periods of rapid land speculation in the 1880s in Kansas, for
example, town sites conformed to quarter sections, or 160 acre tracts or
half-sections, or 320-acre town sites (Rowe, 198). By 1915, Portland,
Oregon, for example, had laid out a proposed street grid so extensive
that it accommodated its growth until 1970 (MacColl, 14-16). Developers
would buy land within the platted area, subdivide the land, lay out
streets according to the city street plan, install utilities, and sell
the improved lots for residential construction. Although seen today as
part of an urban fabric, as on the east side of Portland, such
rectilinear residential subdivisions are as suburban in their origins as
any curvilinear subdivision.

The first suburb planned on a plat was Brooklyn Heights, established in
1819 across from Lower Manhattan. A steamboat suburb developed by a
backer of Robert Fulton, it was a 60-acre plat divided into 200 by 200
foot blocks by 50-foot-wide streets laid out in a grid originally siting
single family houses (Garvin, 254). Suburban plats can have design
elements beyond the simple grid. Before 1856, Savannah, Georgia,
accommodated growth by adding planned rectangular wards\--each ward was
centered around a landscaped public square bounded by eight rectangular
blocks (Gravin, 253). Like Savannah, St Louis also grew by rectilinear
suburban plats, known as private places, because they were built by
private developers. They consisted of large rectangular plats,
subdivided for single-family houses, and organized around two parallel
boulevards with broad landscaped dividers (Fig\_\_) (Garvin, 258).
Before the streetcar, these developments were within walking distance,
about 1 1/2 miles, of the downtown St. Louis or Mississippi River. After
the streetcar, developers quickly began to build new residential private
places as far as six miles out along streetcar

Lines (Garvin, 257).

The streetcar broadened the income range of households that were
candidates for suburbanization to include the middle and working
classes. The gridiron remained the most efficient and inexpensive way to
subdivide and sell land in small lots. At the turn of the century, a
small average lot size of 1/17 to 1/14 of an acre (25- X 30- X 100-foot
lot) predominated in one- and two-family subdivisions on the edge of the
city (Tunnard and Pushkarev, ). Small lots were dictated in part by the
lack of long-term financing of mortgages and the need to finance and
build the house separately from the land. This created a demand for less
expensive houses, which gave rise to what one writer has called the
bungalow suburbs (Palen, 51). The persistence of the grid was especially
strong in small subdivisions intended for the middle and working
classes. Around Wilmington Delaware, 48 subdivisions were laid out
between 1900 and 1930. Of the 32 designed from 1900 to 1920, all but
three were grids of straight streets (Chase, Ames, Siders, 28).
Subdividers there did not use curved streets in any appreciable numbers
until the 1930s and then used more of a modified grid than a
self-contained subdivision.

The very influential example of the modified grid street system was the
Country Club District in Kansas City, Missouri, developed by Jessie
Clyde Nichols. A large-scale development, the first section of which was
designed in 1913, the Country Club District consists of a grid of long,
narrow rectangular blocks with curved streets and some diagonal streets.
The architects modified the stiff grid-iron system somewhat so as to
recognize existing valleys of the rolling terrain (Newton, 472). The
development is bisected by two parallel boulevards running north until
they converge at Country Club Plaza, home of the shopping center noted
earlier.

In midwestern and western cities, which grew rapidly after the 1880s,
along the lines of the rectilinear survey and after the introduction of
the streetcar, the pattern was somewhat different. Here the streetcar
lines were part of the initial transportation system, and a grid plan of
streets was often overlaid with a larger grid of streetcar lines,
creating a checkerboard of major arterial routes. In these,
suburbanization filled out into large rectangular cells created by the
grid of the streetcar lines. (Example of Sanborn map of Cedar Rapids).

This would also become the pattern of cities laid out after the advent
of the automobile. In the San Fernando Valley of the Los Angles region,
development took place after 1940 on a primary gird of arterial and
collector streets conforming to survey sections (Rowe, 198). This grid
was further subdivided in response to the intensity of development. Some
subdivisions were built next to each other while other subdivisions
developed in noncontiguous locations in a suburban process called
leapfrogging, or scatteration. Made possible by the streetcar and the
automobile highways as they radically reduced the time of
transportation, suburban leapfrogging occurs when new development leaps
over vacant land to less costly or more profitable locations beyond
existing development. As time passed, development filled in the
leapfrogged land.

Thus, in land area, most suburban development before World War II took
place on a rectilinear pattern of streets and blocks. Because it does
not fit the modern mold of curvilinear subdivisions beyond the city,
much of it has not been recognized as suburban\--occurring in
subdivisions planning as a unit with single-family houses on individual
lots. In gridded subdivisions in western cities continued to be
development well into the 1950s because of earlier rectilinear land
surveys.

**Curvilinear subdivisions** - Although the rectilinear grid remained
the dominant subdivision form well into the first three decades of the
twentieth century, the curvilinear form seems always to have been the
ideal layout to which all aspired. At the most basic level, its organic
design symbolized nature and the countryside that the prospective
suburbanite sought. Associated with the more fashionable and
upper-income developments, the curvilinear subdivision spelled prestige
for residents and higher sales values for realtors.

The curvilinear subdivisions evolved through three stages from initially
being the reserve of the elite in the nineteenth century to becoming a
regulated requirement for residential development after World War II.
These stages are summarized below: 1. Establishing the Olmsted Model
from the 1860s to the 1910s; 2. Garden City to the Radburn Idea and
Neighborhood Unit: 1900 to 1930, and; 3. Institutionalizing the
Curvilinear Subdivision: 1930 to the 1950s.

**Establishing the Olmsted Model from the 1860s to the 1910s** -
Riverside, Illinois, designed in 1868 by Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., and
Calvert Vaux, established the template for the curvilinear subdivision.
Olmsted saw the suburb not as an escape from the city, but as a delicate
synthesis of town and wilderness (Jackson, 79). The design of Riverside
became the ideal of the curvilinear subdivision and became emulated by
others. Between 1857 and 1950, Olmsted's firm, which was continued by
his son, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., planned 450 subdivisions in 29
states and the District of Columbia (Garvin, 263). It has been claimed
that some 60 years after Riverside, when Stewart Mott was writing the
first subdivision design standards for the Federal Housing
Administration in 1933, he used Riverside as a model (Rowe, 205).

Riverside expressed the Olmstedian design philosophy of subdivisions
consisting of single-family houses on lots within large irregular blocks
bounded by broad, gently curving tree-lined streets. Through his design,
Olmsted created privacy for households within a parklike setting yet at
reasonably high densities and provided with urban services. The first
design requirement of an Olmsted subdivision was a tranquil site with
trees and grass and some variation in the topography. The second
requirement was good roads and walks of, in Olmsted's own words, . . .
gracefully-curved lines, generous spaces and the absence of sharp
corners, the idea being to suggest and imply leisure, contemplativeness
and happy tranquility (Olmsted, "Riverside, Illinois: A Residential
Neighborhood Designed Over Sixty Years Ago," *Landscape* Architecture,
July, 1931, quoted in Newton, *Design on the Land: The Development of
Landscape Architecture*, 467*)*. The gently curved paved streets and
walks enclosed irregularly shaped blocks, the third element of an
Olmsted subdivision. Designed to follow the topography, the curving
roads were built without curbs and placed in slight depressions, making
them less visible from the side, and heightening the rural character
(Newton, 467).

Olmsted subdivisions were planned for single-family houses on relatively
large lots -one acre at Riverside. Olmsted placed the houses on the lots
to create a sense of privacy while heightening the sense of nature for
the residents. To create a sense of openness, houses were set back from
the road far enough to allow for large open lawns and arranged to limit
the number of houses within each resident's line of vision (Garvin,
265). That houses on facing lots were offset was another feature of
curving streets. As well, the use of shrubs and trees lining the streets
shielded structures from direct view, making greenery the predominant
feature of an Olmsted subdivision. Trees were planted at irregular
intervals to create a sense of spontaneity (Jackson, 80). As pioneered
in Riverside, Olmsted residential subdivisions also featured a series of
small parks possessing, in Olmsted's words, \"the character of informal
village greens, commons and playground. (as quoted in Jackson, 80) \"
Hence, the genius of the Olmsted curvilinear subdivision was to maintain
the essential features of an urban community - relatively high density,
movement and communication, and community facilities - in a designed
landscape that incorporated nature and seemed in all details to be the
opposite of the city. The Olmsted firm designed many curvilinear
developments that also become models for upper and upper- middle class
development. These included Tarrytown Heights, New York (1870-1872),
Parkside in Buffalo (1872-1886), and Sudbury Park and Roland Park
outside of Baltimore (1876-1892 and 1891-1914).

By the turn of the century, curved roads began to be seen in otherwise
gridded subdivisions. This was an aesthetic and practical influence as
flat land became scarcer, curvilinear subdivisions were more adaptable
to hillier terrain, at least in some places. In many places, the
cumulative effect of different engineers adapting the grid to local
terrain resulted in a rather relaxed grid of uneven block sizes that
vary in size and shape\--such as the streetcar suburb of Elmwood in
Berkeley California (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 102).

**Garden City to the Radburn Idea and Neighborhood Unit: 1900 to
1930** - If upper class residential developments provided the design
template for the curvilinear subdivision, it was the Garden City
movement and company town experiments that modified it for households of
modest incomes. In 1898, as an antidote to the intensely overcrowded,
featureless industrial city, English social reformer Ebenezer Howard,
proposed a new urban form\--the Garden City\--intended to combine the
best aspects of town and country (Crawford, 70).

To be planned as a whole and not left to grow in a chaotic manner
(Garvin, 319), Howard diagrammed his Garden City as a series of
concentric circles devoted to bands of houses and gardens for residents
of mixed income and occupations. A large park, public institutions and
commercial shops formed the center of the city, while an outer ring
provided for industrial activities, an agricultural college, and social
institutions and linked the community to outlying agricultural land. The
Garden City diagram was so compelling an image of community in 1911 a
Portland, Oregon, developer adopted the plan for a large subdivision
known as Ladd's Addition.

In England in 1902 and 1905, Howard's conceptual diagrams were
translated by Barry Parker and Howard Unwin to the design for the new
towns of Letchworth and Hampstead Gardens. Parker and Unwin used the
planning principles that,

> o A Garden City was to be a complete, socially integrated community,
> comprehensively planned, but limited in both area and population to
> promote stability.
>
> o Low densities, open space, greenery, and fresh air, spaciousness
> were key to marrying town and country,
>
> o The land was to be held in trust in community ownership and leased
> to residents to prevent speculation and to retain community control
> over all of the land for planning.
>
> o Although individuality among residents was to be encouraged,
> planning encompassed the design of both the landscape and buildings.

The aspect of the Garden City concept that made it so adaptable to
suburban applications was that, in modern terms, it was modular. Howard
called for the town to be divided into six equal parts or wards, each
with a population of about 5,000 and a public school, and specified it
should be in some sense a complete town by itself (Newton, 455).
Conceptually, these subareas became the planning units for applying
Garden City planning principles to the design of communities on a scale
smaller than a city or town.

To provide a Garden City environment for working-class residents, Parker
and Unwin designed naturalistic residential areas at far higher
densities than the planners of American Picturesque developments. To do
this, they used several planning concepts that became fundamental to
Garden City design and were later adapted at Radburn, New Jersey.

> o They designed a hierarchical circulation system extending from
> pedestrian paths to thoroughfares and designed to discourage through
> traffic. The circulation system at Hampstead Gardens, for example,
> dwindles and descends from roads and streets to the lane and way, then
> to the pedestrian close and walk, and finally to mere paths (Creese,
> 239).
>
> o They allowed through traffic only on a few major streets which were
> laid out to frame large, irregularly shaped blocks, which became known
> as superblocks. Local vehicular circulation was possible through a
> series of narrow dead-end streets or cul-de-sacs.
>
> o Architectural spaces were created to alternate with and complement
> natural areas. The interiors of blocks were left as common natural
> space, enclosed and shielded with town houses and apartments thus
> creating a large-scale architectural space.
>
> o Variety was created along the streets by the use of courts\--in
> which three-sided groups of houses faced each street and formed
> smaller architectural spaces. Subtle changes in scale, landscaping,
> setbacks, and architectural design further added to variety.
>
> o A interconnected system of pedestrian walkways, completely separate
> from the vehicular system, was designed to penetrate the interior
> natural areas. Fishman observes that Unwin and Parker's plans for
> Letchworth and Hampstead Gardens achieved a level of naturalism that
> left many visitors and even some residents unaware that it was a
> planned community (Fishman*, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century*,
> 69).

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, several large model
towns, workers\' housing developments, and garden suburbs were designed
and built adapting Howard's Garden City model and Parker and Unwin's new
town designs. Many housing reformers and other Progressives adopted the
Garden City as a model for workers' housing and industrial villages such
as Carnegie Steel's company town of Homestead, Pennsylvania (Crawford,
68).

The first major influence of Letchworth and Hampstead Gardens in the
United States was reflected in the 1909 design of Forest Hills Gardens,
a model suburb outside of New York (Barnett, 77). Its design was a
collaboration between the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted,
Jr., and architect Grosvenor Atterbury. Whereas the parks and curving
road system reflect the Picturesque prototypes, the central axis of
community facilities and open spaces enclosed by an encircling avenue
reflects the Garden City influence. The Garden City concept is
especially visible in the architectural spaces Atterbury designed at the
community\'s center near the railroad station and in the use of courts
to group houses (Figure 53).

After Forest Hills Gardens, Garden City concepts were next applied to
the design of World War I emergency workers\' housing developments. One
of the best of these projects\--Union Park Gardens in Wilmington,
Delaware, built in 1918\--was designed by John Nolen, a pioneer in
American city planning and disciple of Unwin and Parker. Intended to
house 500 shipyard workers and their families, Nolen created a plan
where two neighborhoods flanked both sides of a landscaped parkway that
extended from a large park at one end to a community center with shops
at the other (Figure 54a). In 1923, Nolen also applied Garden City
principles to the design of the new, full-scale company town at
Mariemont, Ohio, where the town center reflects the radial street
pattern of Letchforth and a strongly defined architectural space flanked
by community buildings. (Figure 54b).

It was the work of Henry Wright and Clarence Stein in the 1920s,
culminating in the design of Radburn, New Jersey, that permanently
imprinted the Garden City principles on the American suburban landscape.
The larger goal of Howard's Garden City proposal was to decentralize
congested industrial cities by building regional clusters of the new
towns. In the United States, the pressure for solutions to urban
congestion and associated problems led to the First National Conference
of City Planning and the Problems of Congestion in Washington, D.C., in
1909. This conference laid the groundwork for the development of modern
urban planning practice, including comprehensive planning and zoning.
Concern for regional planning emerged, and, in 1923, a group of
planners\--Lewis Mumford, Henry Wright, Clarence Stein, and Clarence
Perry, among others\--formed the Regional Planning Association of
America (RPAA) (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 60).

Setting out with the purpose of building an American garden city, Wright
and Stein designed Sunnyside Gardens in New York City in 1924 as a model
community for moderate-income families. Later in 1928, they planned
Radburn, New Jersey, as the American equivalent of Letchworth (Barnett,
82). Compelled to adhere to the gridiron street system, Wright and Stein
were able to plan with entire blocks because the area was zoned
industrial and not required to be subdivided into residential lots.
Treating them like miniature superblocks, the designers placed narrow
single- and two-family houses around the perimeter of each block,
permitting the core of the block to be devoted to common use while
allowing for small private gardens (Stein, 24). The inner courts were
connected to form a greenway system along which children could walk to
school without crossing streets.

By the 1920s, planners had to deal with a new, and lethal, element of
city congestion - the automobile. Not only were cars killing more and
more pedestrians in the city, but, according to Clarence Perry, a
leading planner of the time, traffic was cutting the gridded city up
into isolated cellar blocks and undermining community cohesion.
Americans bought cars by the millions - 2,274,000 in 1922, more than
3,000,000 annually from 1923 to 1926, rising to nearly four and a half
million in 1929, right before the stock market crashed (Scott, 186).
Outside the city, the automobile and the paved highway were rendering
earlier decentralization proposals moot, spreading urban population over
the surrounding countryside, absorbing old satellite communities,
forming congeries of business centers, open fields, suburban villas . .
.but having little effect on central city congestion and social
conditions (Boyer, 173). It was in this context that the RPAA had been
formed and that Radburn was designed to create a new form of suburban
community -A Town for the Motor Age.

To many planners and others, the automobile was seen as a major threat
to community cohesion and safety. Indeed, Stein wrote that the purpose
of " \'The Radburn Idea\' \[was\] to answer the enigma How to live with
the automobile, or, if you will, How to live in spite of it . . .
(Stein, 41)" Before Radburn was designed, however, Clarence Perry
proposed a planning concept he called the Neighborhood Unit as the basic
urban residential unit of development. In devising the Neighborhood
Unit, Perry drew upon Garden City ideas and several years of studying
residential areas and living in Forest Hills Gardens(Figure 55).
Intended to protect the community from traffic and speculation, the
neighborhood unit was based on six principles. They were that the
neighborhood should contain just enough residents to support an
elementary school\--about 5,000 residents; that no through traffic
should be allowed; that about 10 percent of the neighborhood's land
should be in open space; that the school and other institutions should
be at the center of the neighborhood; that local shops should be located
on the edge of the neighborhood; and finally, that the streets of the
neighborhood should have a varied layout and be only wide enough for
local traffic. Defined in this practical way, the neighborhood unit
became a basic design template for laying out residential neighborhoods
in North America, Great Britain, and Australia.

Wright and Stein incorporated the neighborhood unit concept into their
design for Radburn in 1928 (Relph, 65). Even more so than the
neighborhood unit, Radburn was designed to incorporate the automobile
into residential development in the safest way possible. Located 16
miles from New York City in the Borough of Fairlawn, Radburn was planned
according to the Radburn Idea as three interrelated neighborhoods of up
to 10,000 residents (Figure 56a). The five interrelated elements of the
Radburn Idea were the superblock, specialized roads, separation of
pedestrian and automobile traffic, houses turned to front the park, and
the park as the backbone of the neighborhood (Stein, 41 and 44).
Although none of the elements of the Radburn Idea were completely new,
their synthesis and integration into a comprehensive layout was a
breakthrough in the subdivision form (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 64).

Radburn was organized around a series of superblocks with parks at their
core, as had been Letchworth and Hampstead Gardens. Partly to
accommodate the automobile, as well as to provide more parks, the
superblocks in Radburn were increased in size to from 30 to 50 acres.
Located along cul-de-sacs that penetrated the superblocks from perimeter
feeder streets, Houses Turned Around had floorplans with living rooms
and bedrooms facing the gardens and park while kitchens and service
rooms fronted the cul-de-sac and automobile access (Stein, 47). The
parks in the superblocks joined together to form a town-wide park.

The specialized roads\--inspired partly by Olmsted's separation of
routes in Central Park for carriages, horsemen, and strollers
afoot\--restricted residential streets to local traffic for the first
time in the United States (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 65). The
four-level hierarchy of roads ranging from service roads for access to
buildings to parkways for connection to outside communities minimized
traffic throughout Radburn by restricting cars in an area to those that
had a destination there. With the exception of a few sidewalks,
pedestrian circulation was restricted to the greenways in the center of
the superblocks.

Unfortunately, the Depression forced the developer of Radburn into
bankruptcy and left the community only partially completed. Yet, so well
designed was the community that the Radburn Ideal became the fundamental
premises of suburban community planning from the 1930s to the 1960s. The
broad objectives of the Radburn Idea of decentralized, self-contained
settlements, organized to promote environmental considerations by
conserving open space, harnessing the automobile, and promoting
community life (Birch, 123) became some of the strongest and most
enduring intellectual streams in urban planning and a major design
influence on the modern curvilinear subdivision and suburban community
design.

Many of the design aspects of Radburn were applied to the Greenbelt
communities built by the federal government in the 1930s, including the
use of loop roads and cul-de-sacs, or motor courts leading off major
collector streets (Rowe, 201). However, unlike Radburn, the houses were
turned around to face the cul-de-sacs and common parkland allocated to
individual lots. The curvilinear subdivision combined the hierarchy of
roads with the older practice of houses on individual lots. The clearest
prototype of this layout that would become the standard subdivision was
an idealized street design proposed by the Los Angeles Regional Planning
Commission in 1929. (Fig. 57) It featured houses on irregularly shaped
lots facing a cul-de-sac or motor court with service alleys behind the
houses (Rowe, 202).

Out of these developments in the 1920s and 1930s evolved the curvilinear
subdivision layout that became the standard site plan of post-World War
II subdivisions. Descended from the organic curves of the
nineteenth-century Picturesque developments, the curvilinear plan, when
compared to the grid by its advocates, provided greater privacy, could
be adapted to a greater variety of topography, and avoided dangerous
four-way intersections.

**Institutionalizing the Curvilinear Subdivision : 1930 to the 1950s** -
In spite of the Garden City and Radburn experiments, until the 1930s
developers continued to use the rectilinear grid of streets and blocks
for most residential development. Responding to the collapse of the
housing market and foreclosures caused by the Depression, the federal
government undertook a series of actions to help the housing industry
recover and produce affordable housing. The first of these was the
Presidents Conference on Homebuilding in 1931, which put forth a number
of proposals that shaped the future of government intervention in
housing. Its thirty-one member committees endorsed Perry's neighborhood
unit concept enthusiastically, citing it 25 times in the published
conference proceedings (Hise, 32) ^(^ Fig. 58a). In 1934, the Federal
Housing Administration was established to restructure the collapsed
private home financing system through mortgages insured by the federal
government. The FHA proved enormously influential and by 1959 had
insured more than five million homes (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 82).

To qualify for federal financing, developers had to meet certain
standards set by the FHA. In their standards for subdivision design, the
FHA rejected the gridiron plan and supported the town and neighborhood
planning concept of Unwin, Perry and Stein and was influenced by the
picturesque suburban schemes of Olmsted and Vaux. (Fig.58). FHA
recommended curvilinear, cul-de-sacs and courts as appropriate
residential street layouts. FHA's comprehensive subdivision review
process made the curvilinear subdivision design the standard of both
good real estate investment practice and local planning. It also became
the standard of local subdivision regulations throughout the country.

Zoning emerged during the 1910s and 1920s as a means of controlling land
use and new development for the health, welfare, and safety of a
community (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 88). Zoning was declared
constitutional by the United States Supreme Court in 1926. By 1941,
thirty-two states had delegated the police to localities power to zone.
Based on a comprehensive land use plan - that allocates land to certain
uses such as residential, commercial, and industrial - zoning is the
division of an area into zones within which specific uses are legally
permitted (Cullingworth, 77). Of all the zoning categories,
single-family residential is the most protected. Within a zoning
ordinance, subdivision regulations govern the division of undeveloped
land into parcels for the purpose for sale or development - as from
agriculture to residential. As the FHA financed more and more new
residential development, local planning commissions adopted some form of
the FHA subdivision standards as their own subdivision regulations.
Thus, by the late 1940s, the curvilinear subdivision had descended from
the Garden City model and Radburn Idea and, promulgated by the FHA, had
become the legally required form of new residential development in a
majority of localities in the United States.

The curvilinear subdivision layout was further institutionalized as the
building industry came to support national regulations that would
minimize the variability of local building regulations and reduce
unpredictable development costs. The most influential private
organization representing the building industry was the Urban Land
Institute (ULI), established in the 1939 as an independent nonprofit
research organization in urban planning and land development (Southworth
and Ben-Joseph, 88). Sponsored by the National Association of Real
Estate and a consultant to the National Association of Home Builders,
ULI provided information to developers about community developments that
supported the FHA approach and promoted coordinated metropolitan
approaches to development. In 1947, the ULI published the Community
Builders Handbook, which provided detailed instructions for community
development based on the curvilinear subdivision and neighborhood unit
approach. It became a basic reference for the community development
industry and by 1990 it was in its seventh edition.

Thus, by the late 1940s, a standardized curvilinear subdivision design
\-- distilled from the Picturesque developments of the nineteenth
century, the Radburn idea and neighborhood unit concept both descended
from the Garden City model \-- had become institutional in planning
practice and development that, in endless repetition, would create the
post-World War II suburban landscape.

**The Development Process** - Central to residential development were
the developers and the ways in which their developments were financed.

**Types of Developers** - Whether rectilinear or curvilinear, large or
small, built for the well-to-do or the working class, the process by
which subdivisions were built and sold was much the same. And, as the
way land development and houses were financed and marketed evolved, the
development process and the appearance of subdivisions also changed. The
land development process, as Anne Keating has written, "consists of two
distinct procedures: the initial subdivision and improvement of a tract
of land, and the actual construction of buildings (Keating, 124) " From
the early subdivisions of 1870s to the post-World War II suburban boom,
the subdivision land development process went through three overlapping
stages. These can be called The Subdivider Stage from the 1870s to the
1920s,The Home Builder Stage from the late 1920s to the 1940s,and the
Community Builder Stage from the 1930s to the present.\"

In the Subdivider Stage from the 1870s until the 1920s, the building and
selling procedures were done by separate individuals. Developers, or
subdividers, acquired land, surveyed it, developed a plan, laid out
building lots and roads, and improved the site with certain amenities
and services (Chase, 119). The range of improvements provided varied
from subdivider to subdivider. The lots were then sold either to
prospective owner-residents who contracted with a builder, to
speculators, or to builders who bought a few parcels, building one or
two houses at a time (Chase, Ames, and Siders, 90). These early land
developers maintained control over many aspects of the layout of the
subdivision and the character of the housing through the use of deed
restrictions (Weiss, 41). These restrictive covenants legitimated the
idea the private owners should surrender some of their individual
property rights for the common good, including their
own\...\[and\]\...were the principal vehicle by which subdividers and
technicians refined and tested the methods of modern landuse planning
(Weiss, 68). In Riverside in 1869, for example, Olmsted and Vaux
included deed restrictions that designated lot sizes, established
building lines, set minimum dwelling values, banned fences, and required
the dwellings to be owner-occupied. Deed restrictions were commonly used
in middle- and working-class subdivisions. The great majority of
subdividers also operated on a small scale, laying out, improving, and
selling lots on only a few subdivisions a year (Warner, 122).

The home builder phase of development began when subdividers began to
build homes in their subdivisions. Subdividers competed in the market
with the number of improvements they offered, such as graded and paved
roads, sidewalks, landscaping with trees, and railroad depots. By the
turn of the century, developers learned that they could enhance the
marketability of their subdivisions by building houses on at least a
portion of their lots. At a time when there was a great deal of
speculation and fraud in subdivision development, constructing a few
houses helped convince prospective buyers that a subdivision was more
than a paper plan (Keating, 70). But developers saw themselves in the
business of selling land, not houses. And although more developers began
to add houses to their subdivisions, it was not until the subdivision
boom collapsed in the 1926 and lot sales and prices fell precipitously,
that subdividers became home builders on a wide scale (Weiss, 41). In
Los Angeles, for example, subdivision activity doubled from 1920 to
1921, when developers filed 607 tract maps; by 1923, 1,424 tracts were
recorded, but in 1925 the number dropped to 684 (Hise, 24). The scale of
operations for most home builders remained small, fewer than 10 houses
built a year.

Community builders were, according to Marc Weiss, "subdividers who
changed the nature of American land development during the early decades
of the twentieth century, (Weiss, 45)" and were, to Leo Grebler,
"large-scale operators who developed integrated communities with
especially designed street patterns and commercial and other facilities
(Grebler, 62). "Community builders acquired large tracts of land that
they developed in stages according to a master plan. The first and most
influential of these community developers, Jessie Clyde Nichols,
introduced long-term planning as a way of developing large-scale
suburban communities. He exhibited his principles in building the
Country Club District near Kansas City\--a community that would
ultimately house 35,000 residents in 6,000 homes and 160 apartment
buildings (Jackson, 177). As the centerpiece of the County Club District
in 1925, Nichols built the first automobile-oriented planned regional
shopping center in the United States. He created a new form of retailing
and service center that, along with the single-family house, would
become the icon of the post-World War II suburban landscape.

The term *community builder* came into use during the 1910s and 1920s in
connection with city planning or large-scale private subdividing and
residential developments. Community builders\' developments incorporated
the latest planning ideas in subdivision design. By \"communities,\"
planners, housing advocates, and the leading community builders meant
"neighborhood-scale developments with dwellings, schools, commercial
centers, recreational facilities, religious structures and civic

institutions . . . (Hise, 25)" Examples from the 1920s included Palos
Verdes Estates (outside Los Angeles), Shaker Heights (Cleveland), River
Oaks (Houston), and the Country Club District (Kansas City) (Muller,
43).

Community builders were generally strong advocates of zoning and city
planning because they wanted to promote predictability in the land
market and protect their investments. Indeed, the deed restrictions they
used to control development within their subdivisions were a form of
private zoning. On the other hand, planners supported community builders
because they operated on a large scale and could implement the type of
developments planners thought necessary to create new communities, such
as embodied in the neighborhood concept of Clarence Perry.

The community builder, then, was an individual developer who operated on
a large scale, controlled all aspects of a development, and was
concerned with developing a complete residential community. Community
builders greatly influenced the form of the post-World War II suburb and
were responsible for shaping the character of the post-World War II
metropolis. The idea of selling both a home and a lifestyle was not
simply a marketing ploy by developers to ensure sales, it represented
the integration of the suburban ideals of homeownership and community in
a single real estate transaction. The collapse of the housing industry
in 1928 and the Depression that followed (in which residential
construction fell 90 percent from 1928 to 1933) made the resurrection of
the construction industry, the reemployment of its workers, and the
provision of affordable housing national goals of the highest order.
Federal housing programs enacted in the 1930s would revolutionize and
dramatically expand the financing and construction of subdivisions and
owner-occupied housing.

**Financing Suburban Residential Development** - The long-term federally
subsidized mortgage was not invented until the 1930s. Before that time,
homeownership was difficult and expensive to finance. In the nineteenth
century, because of the stigma attracted to mortgages, well-established
families were expected to purchase their houses outright (Jackson, 196).
For the less well-to-do, mortgages commonly were short three- to
five-year renewable loans with interest rates of two to five percent
calculated semiannually (Warner,). As paying off a mortgage within its
term required a large payment at the end, most homeowners counted on
renewing their mortgages several times before paying for their house and
lot. This was a reasonable expectation when the economy was growing, but
periods of economic downturn, such as the Depression, led to many
foreclosures.

First mortgages were made on less than 50 percent of the value of the
property, thus requiring more than a 50 percent down payment. Second
mortgages on improvements could be made on 20 percent of the property,
but first and second mortgages rarely combined for more than 50 percent
of the value of the property (Warner, 119). These were the terms
available to subdividers and homebuilders alike. Subdividers would buy
the land they intended to develop with cash or a short-term mortgage. To
finance the improvements such as roads, they would take out a short-
term mortgage on the market value of the land after the improvements had
been made. Once the improvements had been made, the subdivider was
anxious to sell the improved lots to retire his mortgage and collect his
profits. Subdividers did not build dwellings because as small-scale
operators, most did not have the necessary capital or the time under the
short terms of the mortgage practice.

The subdivider would sell lots to builders, to real estate brokers, and
to individuals wanting to build their own homes. In order to finance the
construction of a house, builders and prospective homeowners would take
out a mortgage on the value of the lot as improved with the house. Once
construction was well along, a second mortgage would be taken out to
complete the construction. Many individuals with less capital for a down
payment would first buy the lot with a mortgage and, after paying off
the lot in several years, use it for collateral for a mortgage to
construct a house. Thus, it was many years before some subdivisions were
completed. After World War I, mortgages became a more typical way to
finance home ownership because of rising costs and consumer debt
(Jackson, 196). The impact of the Depression collapsed this system of
home financing. In 1933, half of all the home mortgages in the United
States were technically in default and foreclosures were taking place at
a rate of 1,000 a day.

To help rebuild the home construction industry, Congress passed the
National Housing Act of 1934, which established the Federal Housing
Administration (FHA), to stimulate moderate-cost housing. FHA\--and
after World War II, the Veteran's Administration\--insured long-term,
low-interest mortgages made by private lenders against loss. This both
revolutionized the home finance industry and expanded the number of
potential homeowners by lowering both the down payments on a house and
the ongoing monthly payments. The necessary down payments were reduced
from 30 percent to 10 percent of a house's appraised value by raising
the amount that could be loaned from 50 percent to 90 percent of that
value. Monthly mortgage payments were reduced by extending loan periods
from 15 to 25 or 30 years. Mortgages insured under the VA after 1944 to
benefit veterans often required no down payments and even lower mortgage
payments.

Having fallen to 93,000 units in 1933, housing starts rebounded to
332,000 in 1937 and 619,000 in 1941 (Jackson, 204 and Wright, 240-241).
But the FHA regulations were prejudiced against African-American buyers
and central city locations and heavily favored suburban locations. The
agency would not insure loans in city neighborhoods threatened by "Negro
invasion" because it felt their presence made the loan a bad risk.
Indeed, it "red-lined" and refused to make insured loans on any property
in entire neighborhoods the agency felt were threatened. This caused a
chain reaction as private lenders then would not grant loans in redlined
neighborhoods (Jackson, 209 and Wright, 247). These policies lead to the
decline of many stable city neighborhoods. At the same time, in new
suburban subdivisions, the FHA encouraged restrictive covenants
prohibiting African-American occupancy until 1949\--two years after the
Supreme Court ruled that racial restrictive covenants were
unconstitutional. Favoring new construction and biased against city
locations, the FHA was the primary force in the development of
post-World War II suburbs.

**Mass Production: Post-World War II Subdivisions and Zoning** - As it
was structured before World War II, the home building
industry\--consisting of small local builders handbuilding a few houses
or small developments a year\--could not have met the postwar demand for
housing. However, after World War II, in addition to insuring homes to
up to 95% of their value, the FHA agreed to provide large builders with
billions of dollars of credit---(Goldfield and Brownell, 343) leading to
the rise of the large-scale corporate developer. The FHA and the war
also streamlined housing production techniques. During the 1930s, the
minimum standards promulgated by the FHA for the houses it would insure
were influential in shaping the floor plan, ceiling heights, and other
features of the single-family house (Rowe, 102). As well, during the
1930s and early 1940s, new materials and construction technologies had
been developed but little used. They included plywood, concrete slab
foundations, prefabricated window units, drywall and plasterboard, and
aluminum sliding glass doors (Ford, 161). During World War II, in
efforts to mass-produce worker housing, government contractors
experimented by prefabricating components of housing, applying
production-line techniques to their construction at the site and using
new management techniques. Thus, after the war, faced with a backlog of
some four million dwellings, supplied with massive construction
financing, and possessing new building materials and techniques,
developers moved to mass-produce a new landscape.

Huge developments were built rapidly. The most famous one, Levittown,
begun on Long Island, New York, in 1948, pioneered the new techniques of
mass production, providing homes for 82,000 residents in more than
17,500 houses (Jackson, 235). Levitt and Sons, the developers, sped
construction by simplifying the house and turning the construction site
into a production line. The basement was eliminated, and much of the
house was preassembled off site. Construction was divided into 27 steps
with specialized crews for each step. During peak production, 32 houses
were being completed a day. The houses were 750 square-foot, four-room
Cape Cods with a practical and well-designed floor plan. These
mass-production techniques were adopted elsewhere as in the Lakewood
Park complex built south of Los Angeles, which eventually housed 100,000
people (Knox, 121).

Levittown was not unique. A small number of large developers built an
increasing share of post-war housing. By 1949, the year when the
post-World War II housing boom really began, 45 percent of all new
housing units were built by just four percent of all builders and
developers (Weiss, 161). The housing in these subdivisions built by the
community builders, single developers who were responsible for the
complete development of a subdivision from the acquisition of land to
the construction and selling of houses, tended to be uniform. Indeed,
one of both the hallmarks and critiques of the post-World-War II
subdivisions was the uniformity of their housing. Yet, these tract
houses reflected the developers\' attempts to keep prices down. They did
so by standardizing on a single model and by preassembling major
components of the house \-- roof trusses, side panels, kitchen and
bathroom plumbing units\-- off site. This was as important in lowering
construction costs as the shift from post-and-lintel to balloon frame
construction a century earlier (Vance, 449).

It was this combination of low-cost, long-term financing and lowering of
construction costs that brought home ownership in the suburbs to a
majority of Americans.

## Trends in Suburban Housing: 1850 to 1950

While the subdivision has been the building block of the suburban
landscape and the creation of developers, the motivation of families to
suburbanize has focused on the house - their suburban home.

The Evolution of the Single-Family Suburban House - In the second half
of the nineteenth century, as rapid industrialization and growth made
cities increasingly congested and polluted, the family became seen by
many Americans as the vehicle for reforming society, giving rise to a
"cult of domesticity." The expansion of professional jobs with higher
incomes expanded the middle class, enabling more men to become the sole
financial support of their wives and children. The single-wage-earner
family, in which only the father had to go to work daily, had more
freedom to choose a residential location away from work, allowing
families to take advantage of mass transit, affordable land, and houses
in the city's fringe. As a family-centered Victorian society elevated
the woman as mother and wife to be the creator and guardian of the home,
responsible for perfecting an alternative to the commercial world where
her husband and sons had to work (Clarke, 100), that alternative was a
suburban home. It was to be a private refuge, a place of peace and
inspiration and reward for diligence and thrift.

The trends in the evolution of the suburban home involved the design of
the house itself, the character of its immediate lot, and its placement
in the larger subdivision and landscape. By the 1870s, it was taken for
granted by family reformers, plan book writers, and architects that the
suburban home and its setting should be the antithesis of the urban
center (Clarke, 100). If the city ignored and destroyed nature, the
suburban home celebrated it, sheltered in a landscape of green lawns,
shrubs trees, and birds. If the city seemed a chaotic mix of frenetic
activity, of immigrants and poorer groups, of disorder and crime, the
suburban subdivision and neighborhood offered order, boundaries, and
rules of behavior. And if the impersonality and competitiveness of the
city squelched creativity, the suburbs supported personal growth and
creativity (Clarke, 100). The ideal suburban home came to be defined as
much by the character of its landscape context\--from parcel to
subdivision to semirural location\--as by its architectural
characteristics.

The quest for the natural surroundings of the suburbs as a healthier
place to live did, in fact, reflect a realistic fear of the city as a
source of disease. As late as the turn of the twentieth century, in
spite of advances in public health, epidemics of tuberculosis, cholera,
smallpox, and typhoid fever still beset urban populations, especially
children (Gowans, 28). And in the Victorian mind, disease was also tied
to the lack of morality of the city. The greater natural purity of the
suburban environment was seen as an antidote to disease. Indeed,
increasingly Victorians saw the city and suburbs as separate moral
spheres in which the suburban home became an important means of
sheltering the family from the corrupting influences of the city. The
suburban home became the locus of these values.

The discussion of trends in American housing in the second half of the
nineteenth century often focuses on a collection of eclectic
architectural styles generally called Victorian. This was a period of
exuberant styles, of complex shapes and elaborate detailing including
Second Empire, Stick, Queen Anne, Shingle, Richardson Romanesque, and a
variety of eclectic vernacular variations. In part, these new forms
reflected the impact of the Industrial Revolution on residential
architecture. The balloon-frame method of construction, using 2x4s and
wire nails, lowered the cost of housing, simplified its construction,
and permitted a greater variety of shapes and forms to be built.
Industrialization allowed many architectural elements\--doors, windows,
siding and decoration\--to be mass-produced and shipped by railroad
through the country. By the end of the century, entire prefabricated
houses were being sold by mail-order catalog.

However, the central theme in understanding the historical significance
of houses built in the suburbs in the second half of the nineteenth
century is not found in the trends in architectural styles but in how a
new type, and new form, of housing emerged\--the suburban house. This
house reflected the aspirations and resources of those that moved to the
suburbs; its evolution reflected two major themes. The first theme was
that the creation and evolution of suburban house plans and types
reflected changing concepts of the ideal family that the house was
designed to support. Indeed, as Alan Gowans points out, the Victorian
house was a visual metaphor for the family (Wright, 111). The many rooms
and intricate floor plans, for example, reflected the hierarchical
Victorian family with a need for distinct zones for different activities
(Gowans, 29). Later, the more open plans of suburban bungalows in the
early twentieth century reflected a movement toward a more egalitarian
family living more informally. The Ranch House of the 1950s, organized
around a recreation room with the garage built into the house, was
equally a manifestation of the concept of family then current.

The second theme is the role the suburban house played in creating a
landscape in complete contrast to (and rejection of) that of the city,
both as a building and as an element of the landscape. If the urban
landscape was rectilinear, hard-edged, and unnatural, covered with rows
of monotonous row houses, the irregular-shaped houses in the suburbs,
finished in colorful textured natural materials, consciously symbolized
an organic counterpoint. As we have seen, the goal of designing the
placement of the house in a subdivision was to enhance the illusion of a
natural landscape. Yet, a new concept of house was required to fulfill
this role, "a dwelling intended to sit on its own plot of ground, like
the rural houses of earlier America, yet also related to other houses on
a street, like older urban row houses." (Gowans, 29) The significance of
the suburban house should be interpreted within the historic context of
changing conceptions of family and the constant ideal of the suburban
landscape as a semirural retreat from the city. Alan Gowans has tried to
capture the essence of the new suburban house as "the comfortable
house."

At mid-nineteenth century, as horsecar lines began to push out from the
walking city, the suburban house had yet to be invented. Housing choices
were largely limited to high-density urban row houses or walkups or
rural farm houses, although prototypes of what would become suburban
houses could be found in small towns. The central motivation for the
invention of the suburban house was the desire to own a single-family
house in a semi-rural environment away from the city - what would become
The American Dream. The invention of the suburban house required and
reflected several elements:

> o The availability of affordable land for suburban development created
> by successive improvements in transportation, as was discussed
> earlier;
>
> o The lowering of housing construction costs, accomplished with the
> invention of the balloon-frame method of construction in the 1830s;
>
> o The creation of a ideal house and landscape model of suburban living
> to which people could aspire (first visually and verbally articulated
> in the 1840s by Andrew Jackson Downing and other advocates of rural
> romantic cottages and villas built in the urban fringe to escape the
> city);
>
> o The transformation of that ideal into a suburban house\--an
> individual house set on its own lot and separated from other houses,
> which could be built at moderate to relatively high densities while
> giving a sense of being a part of the natural landscape; and
>
> o The design of a house floor plan thought to support and reenforce
> the ideal family.

**Stages in the Evolution of the Suburban House** - From the 1860s to
the 1950s, there are three broad periods in the evolution of the
suburban house. They are:

1\. The Victorian Villa and Homestead Temple House: 1860 to 1900;

> 2\. The Practical Suburban House: The Bungalow, Four Square and
> Revival Houses: 1900 to 1940;
>
> 3\. Post-World War II Suburban Houses: The Cape Cod, the Ranch House
> and other Types: 1940s and 1950s

All of these house types are a manifestation of changing concepts and
styles of family living and of creating a house as part of the ideal
suburban landscape.

**Suburban Prerequisite: The Invention of the Balloon-frame Method of
Construction** -

As important as cutting the costs of suburban living and improvements in
transportation was the revolutionary invention in the 1830s of the
balloon-frame method of construction - a new technology of assembly that
both lowered the cost of a house and sped its completion (Gowans, 125).
Before the balloon-frame method was invented, most houses were built
using the post-and-beam system of construction. With this method, the
frame of the building consisted of heavy horizontal beams held up with
thick vertical posts strengthened by angled cross-braces, all joined
with mortise and tenon. It was expensively labor intensive because the
heavy, bulky materials had to be assembled and framed on the ground and
raised into place. In addition, the construction of post-and-beam frame
required specialized knowledge and carpentry skills that often were in
short supply in a growing area (Gowans, 125).

The balloon-frame method of house construction substituted much lighter,
precut 2x4 inch studs for the heavy, preferably oak, post and beams. The
studs were joined with nails to create a box-like frame that attained
its strength by spreading the stress over a large number of light
boards. This method required fewer workers and much less time and
expense to complete (Wright, 87). Using precut, dimensioned lumber and
mass-produced cut nails, the balloon-frame was a product of the early
factory system. Because the method relied on manufactured parts of
lightweight, precut lumber and mass-produced nails, building materials
could be transported to construction sites some distance from the source
of materials. The rails of mass transit played the double duty of
bringing construction materials to new residents in the areas they
opened up.

By using lighter materials that could be nailed together in a variety of
shapes, the balloon-frame allowed architects and builders to build with
greater variety in form, shape, and decoration than was possible with
the older post-and-beam and masonry methods of construction. It was a
medium well suited for building the Romantic and Picturesque
architecture of the second half of the nineteenth century.

**The Victorian Suburban Villa and the**

> **Homestead Suburban Temple House: 1860 to 1900**

**Adapting the Villa to the Suburbs** - In 1842, Andrew Jackson Downing
published Cottage Residences , one of a number of pattern books (Davis
1842; Shaw 1843) in which he and others introduced the Gothic country
cottage and villa set in a semi-rural environment as the ideal place to
live. Downing\'s books made several contributions. His illustrations
gave detailed architectural expression to the ideal of living in the
countryside. This was achieved by Downing\'s use of romantic, rustic
architectural styles and detailing that were associated with nature and
organic design. The pattern books not only provided plans for the house,
but gave advice on the style of landscape appropriate to each type of
dwelling (Schuyler, *The* *Apostles of Taste*, 58). Downing appealed not
only to the well-to-do with villas, but to the working class with
smaller cottages of inexpensive designs. The villa introduced a new
concept of a house\--\"a place with a yard. (Jackson, 58)\"

By the 1860s, the single-family house was rapidly becoming the visible
symbol of material achievement and the paragon of middle-class housing
(Jackson, 50). Stylistically, Downing was concerned with the evolution
of an American aesthetic in architecture. Although he realized it would
take some time to evolve, he favored romantic styles such as the
Italianate, bracketed, and Rural Gothic as the most complementary to the
rural and semi-rural sites he promoted (Schuyler, *The Apostle of
Taste*, 128). The character and size of the land on which the house was
sited, creating separateness in a private space while providing a
verdant buffer to the surrounding world, became integral to the suburban
ideal. Initially the parcel was thought of as roughly natural and
semi-rural, but by the 1870s, it had been transformed and simplified
into a green, grass lawn.

The natural imagery so vital to the suburban ideal of a semi-rural
location was provided as much by the house as by the landscape. Even the
middle-class family that bought a small suburban plot in a rectilinear
subdivision near the streetcar line could find natural imagery in the
house. According to Gwendolyn Wright, the natural qualities of the
suburban Victorian house were reflected in a number of ways. First, the
irregular shape of the house was considered organic. Second, the
combined use in a single facade of rough limestone, wide clapboards, and
cedar shingles gave the look of natural materials and venerable age to a
house. Third, colors were used to simulate the hues of nature, including
the reds and golds of autumn, the greens of plants, and the soft browns
and grays of weathered woods. Fourth, porches were designed to emphasize
the relationship of the house to the natural environment, and most
suburban dwellings had more than one porch (Wright, 106-107). To make
the house more open to the natural suburban landscape system of which it
was a part, by the late 1870s windows had become much larger and were
often grouped together to bring more light into the house and present an
open vista to the outside.

For the upper and upper-middle classes, the villa on its own parcel
became an expression of individuality and economic attainment. As rooms
were provided for individual roles and family activities, which often
reflected gender, the villa grew larger and more complex. To promote
family unity houses, the living room with a fireplace\--a popular symbol
of domesticity (Wright, 108) - was designed to be the center of the
house (Sies, 205). As overseer of the home sphere, the wife required
rooms for her own domestic obligations such as the kitchen with a
pantry, rooms for sewing and for laundry, and a parlor for her own rest
and reading and for tutoring of children. When possible in the
child-centered family, children were given their own rooms to encourage
individuality and self-discipline. In addition, specific rooms satisfied
the needs of the husband, such as a study, and the suburban home
contained a variety of nooks and crannies for privacy, to counter for
the loss of individual expression that seems endemic to mass urban
society (Sies, 205). Thus, the interior of the suburban villa was
designed in appearance and layout as an idealized alternative to the
city. At the same time, the villa was a part of the large suburban
landscape. The Victorian villas in the planned subdivisions of the late
nineteenth century were the most complete architectural statements of
suburban ideal, and the values they embodied would serve as models of
the suburban house.

**The Homestead Suburban Temple House** - Although the well-to-do were
able to build the most complete architectural statements of the suburban
ideal in planned subdivisions, less affluent middle- and working-class
families sought separation from their neighbors and the city in the ways
that they could afford - which were much more modest and small scale. We
will call the modest suburban houses they built homesteads in contrast
to the more elaborate and expensive villas of the well-to-do. A
homestead is a house primarily intended to raise a family and only
secondarily to proclaim social status, whereas a mansion is intended to
express social status (Gowans, 32). Middle- and working- class families
faced the difficult problem of building individual houses on small,
rectangular lots in gridded subdivisions while retaining some sense of
separation and feeling of the natural environment.

Until the 1860s, most houses in the United States were either
freestanding farm houses, housing of the elite, or urban row houses
sharing party-walls and a common facade. Most free- standing houses
presented their wide side to the street as the front. However, the Greek
Revival style, popular from the 1820s to the 1860s, presented an
alternative\--the temple house. The core architectural form of the Greek
Revival style was the Greek temple, a colonnaded structure with its
front on the gable or narrow end\--well suited for narrow urban lots
fronting the street. A proper Greek temple was freestanding. This led to
the development of a rectangular Greek Revival residential building with
the front, and principle decoration, on the narrow gable end. By the
time of the Chicago boom in the 1850s, nearly all urban houses were
built with the narrow gable end to the street and freestanding, although
crowded on narrow lots (Ford, 140).

The temple house evolved into a new suburban form by being designed with
essentially three facades: front (street), back, and side (Gowans, 33).
An ad by the Chicago Wrecking Company for mail-order houses called their
temple houses a combination of country and city home. They deviated from
the city form of house by not being completely street-oriented. They
lacked the identical facades of row houses and were freestanding on
small lots. With distinctive side and back facades, they retained
individuality as a scaled-down version of the suburban villa or country
house. Although built at higher densities than the suburban villa, and
certainly the country house, temple houses were part of a rectilinear
subdivision (summarized from Gowans with additions).

The gable-ended suburban house was built in a variety of forms ranging
from the simplest one-story version, called shotguns or small cottage,
to elaborate one and a half- and two-story versions finished in the most
ornate eclectic style. It was the simplest of the homestead temple
houses that allowed the working class to suburbanize. For example, of
the 7,000 suburban houses he built from 1880 to 1892, Samuel Eberly
Gross of Chicago built as many simple workers\' cottages for \$800 as he
did the more expensive \$3,000 to \$4,000 homes for middle class
families (Wright, 100). From the 1840s, with the publication of pattern
books extolling romantic country cottages, until the 1890s, the ideal
suburban home took a distinctive shape and form that was widely
understood and aspired to by Americans of all incomes. The major vehicle
for the dissemination of the ideal suburban home was the booming
business in pattern books.

**Building the Suburbs with Pattern Books** - In the nineteenth century,
the suburbs were constructed primarily by developers, or subdividers,
who divided the land, installed utilities to some degree, and sold lots
to individuals. These individuals might be households or builders with a
client or building on speculation. In either event, whether built by the
owner or contractor, the major source of designs and instructions for
suburban homes construction was the pattern book, of which there was a
great outpouring from 1860s until the turn of the century.

Unlike the earlier builders' guides, the pattern books that emerged in
the 1840s, led by Downing's example, were oriented to the client, the
consumer of the house. The books showed completed houses in their
landscaped settings accompanied with floor plans, instructions for
unusual architectural elements, and suggestions for landscaping and
plantings. A client could choose a design and take it to a local builder
who would follow the instructions to build the house as desired by the
client (Schuyler, *The Apostles of Taste*, 58). The pattern books
increased exponentially the houses families could visualize. Pattern
book images were often published in other forms of literature. Some 450
model house designs were published Godey's Ladies Book between 1846 and
1898 and provided the plans for more than 4,000 houses in a single
decade (Wright, 82).

The pattern books of the second half of the nineteenth century provided
both the vision and technical assistance to many households, ranging
from those who wanted to buy their own suburban homes in a land market
in which land is sold on short-term mortgages to aspiring households who
must build their own houses as economically as possible. And while the
curvilinear, upper-class models of Riverside and its progeny articulated
the more complete suburban ideal, at all income levels the suburban
house of the nineteenth century was designed to reflect its own natural
imagery essential to the suburban ideal. This ideal was aggressively
promoted by pattern books and mail-order architecture across all income
groups.

The demand for housing was great as urban growth was explosive
throughout the country, including small cities. Wilmington, Delaware,
for example, grew from 4,000 in 1840 to 110,000 by 1910. After the Civil
War, and partly in response to the demand for housing, a new generation
of pattern books appeared, exemplified by the work of Henry Hudson Holly
and the Palliser brothers (Clark, 74). Both tried to heighten the
picturesque quality of new suburban housing while lowering its cost.
Holly suggested the picturesque quality of middle-income homes could be
heightened if families clubbed together in developments designed to
respond to the topography and create shared vistas and views.

Holly and the Palliser brothers also incorporated a greater eclecticism
in architectural style in which the visual and artistic effect of the
house was more important than an adherence to tradition, as in the case
of Downing and earlier pattern book writers. Holly introduces
irregularities in the housing form and shape to increase the contrast
between light and shade. Likewise, his designs feature a variety of
colors, diversity of surface treatments, and large decorated chimneys
(Clark, 75). George and Charles Palliser present an even looser, more
interpretive eclecticism in their best-selling plan books, beginning in
1876 with the publication of Model Homes for the People, a Complete
Guide to the Proper and Economical Erection of Buildings. But the great
innovation of the Palliser brothers was the introduction of mail-order
architecture. By filling out a request form and sending it to the
Pallisers\' office, along the appropriate fee, a prospective client
could get detailed construction plans for the house he liked. And unlike
other pattern books, the Palliser book was printed inexpensively and
cost only twenty-five cents (Clark, 77). The Palliser brothers
democratized the availability of quality architectural plans for a house
that embodied the Victorian ideals of family and suburban living. As the
second half of the nineteenth century progressed, the suburban ideal was
actively promoted not only as an abstract ideal for the elite, but to
many income levels and in many styles.

Writing about Boston, Warner observes that the majority of new housing
construction turned to suburban styles by the 1860s and 1870s (Warner,
145). By the last third of nineteenth century, even the wealthy are
building suburban houses on smaller lots and no longer depend on rural
allusions or estate-sized lots for their effect but rather on building
large houses arranged in big masses on relatively small lots (Warner,
149). The reality was that most suburban development was a variation on
a rectilinear subdivision, ranging from the Private Places in St. Louis
to Gross' workers cottages in Chicago.

The introduction of the streetcar multiplied both the land available for
suburbanization and the demand for housing. It also allowed for greater
outward movement of the middle and upper classes to the further reaches
of the streetcar line. This created a greater segregation of
neighborhoods by income and class, as reflected in newer and more modern
homes on larger lots as one traveled outward in the streetcar. But the
new housing was also about progressive ideas and "modern" advantages
such as indoor toilets and electricity (Palen, 38). The subdivisions
provided utilities and amenities not yet available in the city.
Consequently, the movement to the suburbs in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries was as much a movement toward new housing with
the latest utilities and appliances as much as a movement away from the
city.

It was the period from 1860 to the 1890s that the suburban house was
developed. First appearing as a suburban villa for the well-to-do, it
was adapted for households of more modest incomes as suburbs were
desired by a broader spectrum of the population. The suburban ideal, as
a place on the edge of the city, was intentionally designed to be the
opposite of the city physically and to serve as a therapeutic refuge
from the city. This ideal was aggressively and persuasively articulated
through pattern books, the writings of home and architectural reformers,
and popular magazines. In the 1890s, however, the suburban ideal and the
suburban landscape began to change.

## The Practical Suburban House: The Bungalow, Foursquare and Revival Houses: 1900 to 1940

The coming of the streetcar in the 1890s coincided with fundamental
changes in the perception of the ideal family and a revision of what
constituted the best suburban home. Changing ideals stressed a less
hierarchical, more informal, spontaneous family pursuing a more relaxed
life-style. Families were smaller and women's roles as wives and mothers
changed. The Victorian aesthetic that valued richness and complexity was
replaced by one stressing "practicality and simplicity, efficiency and
craftsmanship (Clark, 132)." This, in turn, was converted into new
principles of architectural design based on simplicity and honesty
(Clark, 134). The function of the suburban home as a place of rest and
tranquility and a refuge from the city, however, remained constant.

The elaborate Victorian house was replaced with a house of structural
simplicity, balanced proportions, and minimal decoration. Its epitome
was the low-profile, cleanly designed, horizontal bungalow. As with the
Victorian house, it was the floor plan that best reflected new family
values: the many specialized rooms of the Victorian suburban
house\--entrance hall, front and back parlors, and others\--were
replaced with an ideal of simplified design and standardized layout -
with fewer multipurpose spaces in a more standardized design (Clark,
163). The first floor was generally laid out from front to rear with a
small front porch, living room, dining room, and kitchen. All of the
first floor rooms were intended to be multipurpose. The living room was
to combine the functions of the front and back parlors, the hall, and
the library. To accomplish this, built-in architectural features
maximized efficient use of space. Living rooms were provided with a
fireplace, built-in books shelves, and englenooks. Dining rooms were no
longer considered rooms used only for eating. Kitchens were designed
with great attention to efficiency and cleanliness, reflecting the
principles of the new science of home economics, and also included
"dinettes" where families could eat more quickly and informally (Clark,
163).

The ideal house layout preserved the circular pattern of movement on the
first floor. However, because of the smaller size and multipurpose
rooms, the ideal house often had several ways to enter and to move
around within it. A departure from the Victorian house was the
elimination of the back staircase due in part to the decline in the
availability of household servants, to the increasing numbers of new
suburban households that could not afford servants, and to the new ideal
stating that the housewife should be able to run this new, smaller, more
efficiently designed house by herself.

In addition to the desire for more efficiency, the trend toward building
smaller houses reflected the increasing costs of building suburban
houses. The many technological innovations that were introduced to
improve household life, such as central heating, gas hot water heaters,
indoor plumbing, and electricity, entailed expensive mechanical systems
that increased the cost of construction. The reduction in floor space
combined with a standardized plan helped offset increased construction
costs in an aesthetically minimalist house.

Of the new types of suburban housing that appeared during the streetcar
era beginning of in the 1890s and the early automobile period in the
1920s, the most important were the Bungalow and the Foursquare. The
homestead temple house continued to evolve and be popular. Making their
appearances in 1910s and 1920s, Revival houses would come to be the most
common suburban house by the 1940s.

**The Open Plan and Bungalows**- Hardly known in the 1890s, the bungalow
by 1910 had become the ideal suburban home and was being built by the
thousands, giving rise to what one writer called The Bungalow Suburbs
(Palen, 51). Influenced by the prairie school movement around Chicago,
(Rowe, 68) the bungalow typically was a one-story, side gable house,
with a wide, shallow-pitched roof extended with overhanging eaves. If it
was a story and a half, the second floor was hidden under the roof and
revealed only by low dormers in the front. The low profile and
overhanging roof of the bungalow symbolized shelter and safety (Clark,
173). The wide open front porch, the second most important feature of
the ideal bungalow, made the home open to nature. The ideal bungalow
emphasized its relationship to nature by using natural materials that
would help it blend into its site.

The floor plans were divided into two zones of a family living and
entertainment area\--living room, dining room, and front porch\--and
private bedrooms. In the one-story bungalow, the family-entertainment
areas were located in the front and the private bedrooms in the rear. In
one-and-a-half story versions, the private areas were upstairs. Most of
these houses averaged 1,300 to 1,400 square feet (Rowe, 69). The simple
form of the bungalow was a reaction to the ornateness and complexity of
the Victorian houses. As suburbs became available to more middle- and
working-class families, the bungalow reflected the need for smaller
houses that could be maintained without servants.

Bungalows also came in smaller cottage form, or what some called a
California beginner bungalow, which was a low gable-end house of one
story (Gowans, 82). It was the most inexpensive of the bungalow form.
Although frequently associated with the Craftsmen style, bungalows were
built in a range of styles, which was part of their appeal. All
bungalows were placed in the middle of their lots.

**The American Foursquare and Revival Houses** .- The American
Foursquare was a second new type of suburban house that made its
appearance in the 1890s. By the 1930s, it was a fixture of the suburban
(and national) landscape. The foursquare is two-story house on a raised
basement with a one-story porch across the front. Topped with a
pyramidal roof with a front dormer, the floor plan consists of four
equally sized rooms on each floor (Gowans, 84). Although usually to the
side, the staircase may be centered in more strictly Colonial Revival
models. Some call the type Colonial Revival (Rowe, 73), and, in fact,
its ancestor is the eighteenth-century Georgian mansion. Although the
Foursquare was built in a variety of architectural styles, it is
referred to here as the Foursquare. The house was organized into two
areas of use with the first floor devoted to the more public and formal
functions of living room, dining room, and-often-den. The second floor,
containing bedrooms and bathrooms, was the private realm of the house
(Rowe, 73). There is also a one-story version of the Foursquare known as
the Workingman's home, or the small Foursquare. This version generally
lacks a porch or veranda. The small Foursquare usually has one or two
bedrooms.

In the 1920s, revival styles, especially Colonial, became very popular,
and the Foursquare was modified into a more traditional rectangular
classical shape with a symmetrical facade and a gable roof. The
popularity of revival styles was partly stimulated by the invention of
inexpensive techniques in the 1920s for adding brick veneer to a balloon
frame house (McAlester, ). With a gambrel roof, the house became a Dutch
Colonial. It was converted into a Tudor form by the addition of a
sloping roof and half-timber decoration.

**Mail Order Suburban Housing** - A fundamental characteristic of
suburbanization in the United States has been the drive to lower the
cost of suburban houses while improving their quality and diversity.
During the periods of rapid urban growth in the late nineteenth century
and the early decades of the twentieth century, suburbanization was
reflected not just in a household choice to live outside the city but as
a means of modern affordable housing. Suburbs arose partly in response
to a overwhelming demand for new housing.

As we have seen, until the 1940s, developers by and large supplied only
the subdivided land, laid out by plan and prepared to varying degrees
for construction with utilities. Housing choice and construction were
the responsibility of either the household buying a suburban plot or
speculative builders who built one or two houses at a time. Thus,
suburban builders were a mix of amateur self-help owners who served as
their own general contractors, small-scale builders, and carpenters.
They were provided with increasingly complete architectural technical
assistance beginning with Downing\'s pattern books in the 1840s. These
books catered to the housing consumer by providing floor plans,
elevations, and three-dimensional renderings to guide construction. In
the 1890s, the Palliser brothers offered complete architecture plans and
specifications and a mail-order consulting architect to customize plans.
One of the most prolific and influential of the publications was the
Ladies Home Journal (Gowans, 46, see Roth VAF). Although its plans were
mostly Colonial Revival, it did publish two Prairie houses by Frank
Lloyd Wright. By the turn of the century, complete prefabricated,
disassembled, and boxed houses could be ordered by mail (An excellent
bibliographical source for mail order houses is Stevenson and Jandl,
*Houses by Mail: A Guide to Houses from Sears Roebuck and Company*).

Although ordering ready-made parts of buildings out of
catalogs\--hardware, doors, and all manner of trim, steps, fireplaces,
and, especially for Victorian houses, jig-cut and scrolled wooden
ornament of all types\--had been going on since the 1860s, the first to
market mass produced prefabricated buildings seems to have been the E.F.
Hodgson Company of Dover, Massachusetts, in 1892 (Gowans, 48). However,
the first company to offer full build-it-entirely-yourself services was
the Aladdin Company in 1904. Sears, Roebuck and Company entered the
business in 1907, followed soon after by its major mail-order
competitor, Montgomery Ward Company (Gowans, 52). In addition to these
giants, a host of smaller companies sold prefabricated houses by mail.

The efficiencies of mass production and the reduction of on-site work
helped reduce the cost of housing. Sears and Montgomery Ward also sold
their kit houses on credit, which helped make them even more affordable.
Thousands of prefabricated houses were sold and shipped annually. They
occupy a significant portion of the suburban landscape that was built
during the 1910s and 1920s. Thus, the notion that the post-World War II
suburban boom ushered in the first mass-produced suburban housing in
developments like Levittown is not true. The mail-order houses were
mass-produced and, unlike the uniformity of housing produced after World
War II, the mail-order subdivisions were architecturally diverse because
builders were ordering from catalogs with a great many choices in type,
style, and price range. Sears alone offered approximately 450
ready-to-build designs ranging from bungalows to mansions. (Stevenson
and Jandl, 19) Sears\' sales reached 30,000 houses by 1925 and 50,000 by
1930.

With the coming of the Depression in the 1930s, housing starts,
including mail-order suburban housing, declined precipitously, coming
almost to a standstill. There was a great deal of discussion and
experimentation, however, about the ideal small house that would
influence post-World War II design.

**Post-World War II Suburban Houses:**

**The Cape Cod, the Ranch House, and Other Types, 1940s to 1950s**

By 1945, the lack of new housing, continued growth of the population,
and 6,000,000 returning men and women veterans eager to start families
combined to produce the largest building boom in the nations history,
nearly all concentrated in the suburbs. From 1944 to 1946, single-family
housing starts increased eight-fold from 114,000 to 937,000. Yet,
households still formed faster than new houses could be built, and the
shortage worsened (Wright, 246). It was not until after 1949 that
suburban single-family home ownership exploded. In 1950, an all-time
high of 1,692,000 single-family houses were built (Jackson, 233).

The immediate response to the housing shortage after World War II was to
built rental housing. The first 6,000 units begun in 1947 in Levittown
on Long Island, for example, were rental units. Designed to relieve the
housing shortage, the Federal Housing Act of 1949 authorized billions of
dollars of construction credits for developers and greatly liberalized
home purchase terms with both the FHA and the VA. The down payment
necessary for an FHA mortgage was lowered to 5 percent, and no down
payment was required for a VA mortgage. The repayment period was
extended to 30 years (Kelly,). A veteran could own a house with no down
payment and \$60.00 a month\--cheaper than renting.

These actions temporarily reversed the historic trend of suburbs being
settled by refugees from the central city. After World War II, the
suburbs offered the only available affordable housing. Little decent
housing could be found in cities both because of the housing shortage
and the redlining of urban neighborhoods by the FHA and the VA. The only
new housing being built was on the cities' periphery, as developers
bought extensive undeveloped tracts\--often farms foreclosed on during
the Depression\--on which to build the new, large- scale subdivisions.

In another change in a historic trend, and counter to the image of
suburbs being overwhelming middle class, the majority of the suburbs
built immediately after World War II were primarily working- and
lower-middle-class. Settled by young couples at the beginning of their
family and work cycles and whose incomes were modest, they were only
able to afford suburban, if any, housing because of the extensive
federal subsidies and new economies of construction. These households
were able to act on middle-class values they could not yet afford and
become middle income as the economy and their incomes grew.

The two suburban housing types\--the Cape Cod followed by the Ranch
House\--sheltered most of the post-war growth into the 1950s. Built by
the thousands in hundreds of similar curvilinear subdivisions across the
United States, they formed a suburban landscape that drew intense, even
vicious, condemnation from a legion of critics, including planners,
architects, social scientists, and journalists (Kelly, 16). The houses
were criticized, even in song, as "little boxes" in "rows of
ticky-tacky" which, censured as poorly constructed and badly designed,
were even credited with undermining family life. Yet, both the Cape Cod
and the Ranch House were radically new, carefully thought-out housing
types. As did preceding generations of suburban house types, they
reflected changing family values and the attainment of the American
Dream for most who bought them.

**Transforming the FHA Minimal House to the Cape Cod** - The Cape Cod
that eager prospective renters lined up to inspect in Levittown on Long
Island in June 1947, was a one-and-one-half story house with an attic
and no basement. Its 700 square feet of living space was divided into a
living room, a kitchen, and two bedrooms. Set on a lot of 7,000 square
feet, the exterior of the house\--with a steeply pitched gable roof
pierced by two dormers above a clapboard first story with neocolonial
trim\--was a variation on a Cape Cod cottage. Beneath its traditional
exterior, however, the interior four-room floor plan with no basement
was a significant departure from prewar suburban housing and represented
more than two decades of research and experimentation by the federal
government and private parties to develop a low-cost, single-family
house for moderate-income American families.

Home ownership had long been promoted in the United States as a source
of social stability. As president of the Better Homes movement in the
1920s, Herbert Hoover argued that home ownership was a guarantee that
our society will continue to develop rationally as changing conditions
demand (Kelly, 48, See also Hutchinson). The Depression, with the
collapse of homebuilding and foreclosure on thousands of mortgages,
brought new urgency to the desire to promote home ownership. In the face
of popular unrest, home ownership was also promoted by the government
and others as protection against involvement in socialist movements. In
1948, at the beginning of the Cold War, William Levitt restated this
view, claiming that "no man who owns his house and lot can be a
Communist; \[because\] he has too much to do (Kelly, 49)." More
fundamentally, the Housing Act of 1949 declared "the goal of a decent
home and suitable living environment for every American family."

The Housing Act of 1934 had also called upon the FHA to promote
affordable housing. As with subdivision design, the FHA published
standards of the types of houses it would insure, one of which was FHA's
minimum four-room-plus-bath house. Not the FHA's invention, the
standards for the minimum house was the synthesis of research by housing
reformers using the new tools of scientific analysis to design a new,
small, efficient, low-cost house. To create a house that a majority of
American wage earners could afford, the scientific housers pursued a
three-fold strategy of simplifying the house itself, streamlining the
construction process with labor-saving equipment and materials, and, to
produce it, applying principles of modern industrial management (Hise,
57).

Challenging traditional house types by conducting time-and-motion
studies of how space was actually used and applying new scientific
behavioral knowledge, the design of a new, efficient, low-cost house
took shape. After lengthy analysis, the four-room plan gained consensus
as the best layout. The basement, as 15 percent of the construction
cost, was jettisoned as wasteful and expensive. The dining room was lost
to a new approach that favored frequently used multipurpose rooms over
less used single-purpose rooms. The move to fewer multipurpose rooms was
also thought to respond to a trend to more informal families. In sizing
the house, the researchers allowed 400 cubic feet per occupant and to
discover how big the rooms should be, the U.S. Housing Authority
actually constructed a full-scale, four-room study house with exterior
and interior walls on movable tracts (Hise, 63).

Based on this research, the FHA's minimum house prototype was a 624
-square-foot building. The public multipurpose spaces of a small kitchen
and larger living room were laid out across the front of the house. The
private spaces - two bedrooms and the bathroom - were located across the
back and side. A small hall divided the bedrooms from the bathroom and
provided a passageway from the public to the private realms of the
house. The location of the kitchen in the front of the house facing the
street was a important departure from traditional layouts. Beyond its
floor plan, efficiency in the minimum house meant the inclusion of new
labor-saving technologies, including a kitchen replete with appliances
and an integrated mechanical system in a utility room replacing the
basement furnace (Hise, 69). It was this FHA minimum house decked out in
colonial trim that became the generic Cape Cod house of post-World War
II suburbs.

Lowering the cost of the house by streamlining production was integral
to the development of the minimum house. Reformers had long considered
the traditional on-site manufacture and assembly of a house by craftsmen
as too costly. To reduce costs, they looked to the off-site
prefabrication of major components of a standardized house\--including
plumbing and mechanical systems, wall units and roof trusses, and other
components of the building shell. The economies of scale of mass
production in a factory would lower the cost of the components. The
house was even sized in multiples of four feet to use standard 4 x
8-foot dry wall panels with a minimum of cutting (Clark, 220). The
houses would be assembled on site. Once all of the components of the
house were on site, they were to be assembled through an adaption of
assembly line methods to the construction site called horizontal or
serial production (Hise, 47 and Kelly 59-65). The tasks, skills, and
manpower needed to assemble the standard house were precisely defined.
Work crews, with each member having specific assigned and repetitive
tasks, would move through the site sequentially assembling their
assigned part of the house.

To build a standardized house achieving the economies of prefabrication
required an enormous increase in the scale of production and the use of
industrial management techniques to direct the process, resulting in the
emergence of the large-scale developer. In building his Levittowns,
William Levitt actually perfected a building and a construction process,
ultimately completing a house every fifteen minutes, that had been in
the making for more than two decades. Other developers did the same.
Thus, the vast subdivisions of Cape Cods and later Ranch Houses, mocked
by critics as suburban wastelands, in fact represented not only an
unprecedented building boom, but the concerted and organized effort by
many groups, including the federal government, to create a single-family
house that a majority of Americans could afford and a revolution in
construction methods and suburban development.

The minimum house was also built in different and expanded variations.
Frequently, the living room was enlarged with a front facing gable,
creating an L-shaped floor plan. Fireplaces and chimneys were added as
well as basements. The houses were built in a variety of materials.

**The Suburban Ranch House** - In contrast to the proscribed character
of the minimal Cape Cod designed by experts, the Ranch House reflected
consumer preferences, and growing incomes, after 1948. Originated in the
1930s by California architects (McAlester, 479), and drawing inspiration
from Frank Lloyd Wright's prairie houses (Rowe, 72), the horizontal,
one-story silhouette and rambling floor plan of the Ranch House
reflected Americans fascination with the West Coast and its informal
life-style (Clark, 211). It also reflected changing functional needs of
families. From 1936 on, magazines such as *Ladies Home Journal*, *House
and Garden*, *Better Homes and Gardens*, *Good Housekeeping*, and
*Parents' Magazine* conducted social science surveys of the housing
preferences of their readership. A 1946 survey of 11,428 families found
that they wanted more space and favored the low rambling style called
Ranch House which had come out of the southwest (Clark, 201).
Specifically, they wanted their space on one floor and to include at
least three bedrooms, a multipurpose room for hobbies and recreation,
and a basement for laundry and other utilities.

By 1948, the Baby Boom was in full swing, creating larger families and
needs for more space. The birthrate increased from 2.2 births per women
in 1933 to 3.51 by the 1950s, producing a population growth rate of 33
percent for the 1940s and 1950s. As well, by the late 1940s the housing
market began to soften as the first wave of demand was being met and
developers turned to the Ranch House to boost sales. By late 1949, even
Levitt had modified the Cape Cod into a ranch-like house called "The
Forty-Niner." Leaving the floor plan intact, the house was given an
asymmetrical facade, and horizontal accents were created by shingling on
the lower half of the front wall and adding new horizontal sliding
windows (Kelly, 82).

The true Ranch House was a single-story, rectangular structure
longitudinally located across its site. With an average floor area of
1,500 to 2,000 feet, the house was laid out in three areas, which
included a private zone of bedrooms and bathroom, a family living and
entertainment zone, and the kitchen and housework center. The horizonal
profile of the house was often extended by a garage attached at the end.
The kitchen\--located at one end of the house, usually next to the
garage\--was designed as a multipurpose room in keeping with what was
thought to be the multiple roles required of women after World War II.
Often built in a U shape, the kitchen was commonly separated only by a
counter from the living room. The middle zone of the house consisted of
the family living and entertainment area. In smaller ranch houses, it
consisted of a multipurpose living room and in larger ones included a
recreation room as well. Meals were eaten in a dining el off the living
room. The private zone of bedrooms and bathrooms was sequestered at the
other end of the house. Small half-baths or powder rooms were added to
the family area so that guests did not have to enter the private zone.

In the 1950s, as families grew larger with teenagers, households traded
up to larger ranch houses in which the zones within the house were more
separated. The split-level ranch created barriers between the zones by
moving the bedrooms, the private zone, to a half-floor up and the
all-purpose room to the lower floor. With the introduction of television
and inexpensive "high-fidelity" photographs, noise levels became higher
within the house and the need for more soundproof zones grew.

As with the homes of earlier eras, the Ranch House was seen as having
created a relationship to nature. Large sliding glass doors created,
according to one writer, an indoor/outdoor unity\--the changing seasons
became a wall decoration. With the rising costs of construction
restricting house size, the sliding glass door on patios and the use of
large windows enhanced the sense of spaciousness. Patios were marketed
as "outside rooms." The arrival of small air-conditioners in the late
1940s, coupled with more efficient heating, meant the Ranch House, with
all its glass exterior surfaces, could be built in any

climate (Clark, 212-213). Finally, with its rambling floor plan and
longitudinal placement on the lot, the Ranch House used more land than
any of its predecessors. Because of expanded highway construction and
the rapid growth of the automobile, lavish use of land became possible
(McAlester, 477). The Ranch House in variation configurations, including
the split level, continued as the dominant suburban house well into the
1960s.

## Other Post-World War II Suburban House Types

For all of the emphasis on the large-scale subdivisions near larger
cities, suburbanization also boomed around smaller cities. There,
smaller developers adopted what they could and built variations of the
minimum and Ranch Houses. For middle and upper-middle-income families
around all cities, especially in the East, prewar revival styles such as
Colonial Revival continued to be built using traditional construction
techniques until the 1950s. Not all developers built uniform houses, and
some even hired architects to design innovative plans reflecting
modernist architecture (Hayden, 248). The FHA, however, did not favor
houses with modern designs and instructed their evaluators to lower the
ratings of such architecture.

**IDENTIFICATION**

Identification activities locate properties that may eligible for the
National Register and evaluation activities apply National Register
Criteria to those properties to determine which ones are eligible for
listing. Identification entails three activities: developing a historic
context, conducting archival research, and surveying the properties
identified as being appropriate by the historic context and supporting
research. There are two levels of survey: reconnaissance and intensive.
A reconnaissance survey collects data to refine the historic context and
identifies all resources within a designated geographic zone or property
types and collects information sufficient to determine whether a
resources is potentially eligible for the National Register. The
intensive level survey evaluates the data from the reconnaissance
survey, determines which resources are potentially eligible, then
resurveys those properties, collecting information detailed enough to
make a final determination of eligibility. Subdivisions are the primary
historic resources surveyed in the identification phase. Because of
their large and increasing numbers, suburban historic properties present
a great challenge to identification activities, especially in conducting
field surveys.

**APPLYING THE HISTORIC AMERICAN SUBURBS HISTORIC CONTEXT FRAMEWORK**

**TO A METROPOLITAN AREA**

This bulletin has presented a framework for understanding the history of
suburbanization in the United States and for developing historic
contexts on suburban development at the State and local level. Suburban
property types have also been identified. The elements of a historic
context are theme(s), geographical limits, and chronological period. The
major theme, suburbanization of the United States, is defined as the
process and product of predominantly residential land development on or
near the edge of an existing city within daily commuting distance. The
four subthemes are 1) demographic trends, 2) transportation trends, 3)
trends in land development and subdivision design, and 4) trends in
suburban housing. The broad chronological period of suburbanization
extends from 1840s to 1950 and is subdivided into four sub-periods:
railroad and horse car suburbs from the 1840s to 1890s, streetcar
suburbs from 1888 to the 1920s, early automobile suburbs from the 1920s
to the 1940s, and the freeway suburbs from 1940s to 1960. (Table \_\_)

+-----------------------+----------------------+-----------------------+
| Historic Context      |                      |                       |
| Framework Based on    |                      |                       |
|                       |                      |                       |
| Historic Theme of     |                      |                       |
| Suburbanization of    |                      |                       |
| the United States     |                      |                       |
+-----------------------+----------------------+-----------------------+
| Major Subthemes       | Chronological        | Geographical Zone     |
|                       | Periods              |                       |
+-----------------------+----------------------+-----------------------+
| \*Demographic Trends  | \*Railroad and Horse | The residential       |
|                       | car Suburbs\--1840s  | subdivision is the    |
| \* Transportation     | to1890s              | basic building block  |
| Trends                |                      | of the historic       |
|                       | \*Streetcar Suburbs  | suburban landscape    |
| \* Trends in Land     | \-- 1888 to 1920s    | and geographic zone   |
| Development and       |                      | is the area within    |
| Subdivision Design    | \*Early Automobile   | which subdivisions    |
| \*Trends in           | Suburbs \-- 1920 to  | have been built       |
| Suburbanization       | 1940s                | within the            |
|                       |                      | chronological         |
|                       | \*Freeway            | period(s)             |
|                       | Suburbs\--1940s to   |                       |
|                       | 1960s                |                       |
+-----------------------+----------------------+-----------------------+

Property types link the themes of a historic context to actual historic
properties and are groupings, or classes, of individual properties that
share physical or associative characteristics. The two basic physical
property types of the historic suburban landscape are the subdivision
and the suburban house. Taken together, single-family houses set in
subdivisions within daily commuting distance of a central city, make up
the third property type of the suburban landscape itself. Associative
property types may include transportation facilities, commercial
properties, and other historic properties directly associated with
suburbanization (Table 1). Identification activities are divided into
two phases:

> **Phase I**: Development of Historic Context, Reconnaissance Survey,
> and Determination of Goals and Evaluation Criteria for Intensive Level
> Survey, and,
>
> **Phase II**: Selection of Properties to Be Surveyed From
> Reconnaissance Survey, Collection of Information Detailed Enough to
> Make Eligibility Determinations in Evaluation Phase.

PHASE I: DEVELOPMENT OF HISTORIC CONTEXT, RECONNAISSANCE SURVEY, AND
DETERMINATION OF GOALS AND EVALUATION CRITERIA FOR INTENSIVE LEVEL
SURVEY

The objectives of identification activities are to identify the range of
properties in a metropolitan area that may be associated with historic
suburban landscapes and to gather information to determine which
properties in an area are significant. From these identification
activities, the elements of a suburban historic context framework can be
adapted to reflect unique aspects of the local suburbanization process
and associated property types. The primary identification activities are
research, field survey, and analysis.

1.  Applying the suburban historic context framework to determine major
    elements of a historic context on regional or local suburbanization.
    This will determine the chronological sub-periods that a local
    suburban area may represent and predict generally the types of
    subdivisions and suburban housing that may be present.

+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+
| Primary Property      |                       |                       |
| Types for Historic    |                       |                       |
| Context for American  |                       |                       |
| Suburbs               |                       |                       |
+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+
| ## Subdivision        | ## Suburban House     | ## Suburban Landscape |
+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+
| A parcel of           | Primarily             | A zone near the edge, |
| undeveloped land that | single-family house   | and within daily      |
| has been bought and,  | site on their own lot | commuting distance,   |
| with some level of    | within a subdivision. | of a central city     |
| planning, subdivided  | Other housing can be  | comprised primarily   |
| into residential      | considered suburban   | of residential        |
| building lots and     | if is located in a    | subdivisions          |
| provided with         | suburban subdivision  |                       |
| facilities including  | and associated with   |                       |
| internal              | suburban trends       |                       |
| transportation and    |                       |                       |
| utilities             |                       |                       |
+-----------------------+-----------------------+-----------------------+

> 2\. Undertaking archival and library research can take place in two
> stages. In the first stage preparatory to field survey, the
> geographical extent of suburbanization is determined by defining the
> evolution and extent of transportation networks used for commuting and
> identifying subdivisions by location, size and date of platting. After
> field surveys are conducted, additional library and archival research
> is conducted on a variety of topics related to more fully
> understanding the evolution and significance of subdivisions as
> designed landscapes.
>
> 3\. Based on the findings of library research, reconnaissance field
> surveys are undertaken of selected subdivisions and associated housing
> to collect information necessary for completing a historic context on
> local historic suburbs and/or to collect information on the
> significance, integrity and boundaries sufficient to permit the
> evaluation of its significance. Field surveys may include informant
> interviews.

4.  The analysis activities are those associated with analyzing the data
    from the reconnaissance survey, undertaking additional archival
    research to develop final historic context with property types and
    setting objectives for carrying out identification and evaluation
    activities.

**Research Steps in Adapting National Context Framework for Suburban
Landscapes to State and Local Historic Landscapes**

Archival research takes place before and after the field survey. The
purpose of the archival research listed in Steps 1 and 2 is to set out
the general parameters of the historic context, delimit the general
boundaries of the suburban geographic zone or study area, identify
general property types, and locate subdivisions to be surveyed in a
reconnaissance survey. After the reconnaissance survey is completed,
additional archival research may be conducted to gather more
documentation for determining property types. A primary source of
research in developing a local suburban context are the real estate
sections of local papers where the subdivisions were advertised and
sometimes described.

1\. Determining the Chronological Periods for the Local Historic
Context.-

After establishing the date of the incorporation of the central city, an
initial estimate of the chronological period of significance can be
determined by plotting a graph showing population growth of the central
city and, separately, the adjacent counties (or smaller jurisdictions if
the data is available for them) in ten-year intervals through 1960 using
data from the U.S. Census. Although not precise, such a graph will give
a sense of when suburbanization is likely to have occurred for that
metropolitan area and the beginning of its suburban chronological
period. For example, an older eastern city may have experienced rapid
growth beginning in the 1840s spurred by industrialization, a midwestern
city may have seen its growth begin in the 1880s, while a western city
may not have expanded until the early twentieth century. As for applying
chronological periods, the older metropolitan areas in the eastern
United States are likely to contain the full spectrum of suburban
property types; ones in the Midwest are likely to include streetcar and
automobile suburbs; and the those of the West can be predicted to
contain early automobile and freeway suburbs. Table 1 summarizes the
periods of suburbanization and selected characteristics of each period.

2\. Determining the Suburban Geographic Zone of the Local Historic
Context by Determining Extent of Historic Transportation Systems and
Locational Patterns of Subdivisions

Whereas demographic trends can document the approximate growth and
extent of suburban areas, the trends of transportation and travel time
from the central city define the limits of suburban property types for
each chronological period. The best method for delimiting transportation
and subdivision development is through the comparative analysis of
historic maps of the city and its larger hinterland. A series of period
maps should be assembled, if possible, which reflect major points in the
suburban chronology but that are far enough apart to be able to capture
significance changes in the landscape. Sanborn and other fire insurance
maps are excellent sources after the mid-1880s.

The purpose of mapping transportation is to define the evolution of the
network of transportation rights-of-way. Key dates are suggested for
assembling maps to document each transportation period: maps from the
mid 1880s are preferred when considering railroad suburbs, for which
peak development occurred in the 1870s and 1880s; maps from 1910 to 1920
should document the extend of street car lines, which expanded rapidly
from 1890 to 1910; maps from the late 1930s on will help document the
early automobile period. A useful final product would be a large base
map with the historic sequence of transportation network plotted in
overlays.

3\. Determining Trends in Subdivisions and Housing and Property Types of
Local Historic Context

The number and distribution of subdivisions can be identified in several
stages. First, they can be identified from the general historical maps
and many of the maps showing transportation facilities. Secondly, more
detailed information can be gathered from the records of local
assessment and deed office. The objective of this research is to develop
a list of all subdivisions in the study area, with addresses, dates of
construction, and key characteristics such as size, number of lots,
types of original improvements and so on which can be used as the basis
for doing field surveys. Fire insurance and road maps often carry the
name of subdivision from which a preliminary list can be made. Streetcar
suburbs can be difficult to identify both because streetcar lines have
largely disappeared; the current city-limits. A streetcar route map is
the key resource for identifying streetcar suburbs.

The key maps that should be obtained for each subdivision are a
one-to-one copy of the original plat prepared by the developer showing
street layout and the subdivision of parcels, fire insurance maps, such
as Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, drawn as soon after the completion of the
subdivision as possible, and a current parcel and building outline map
attained from the local planning or assessment office. Also, since the
1930s many areas have been systematically recorded in aerial
photographs.

Identifying whether the subdivision was developed by a subdivider or by
a community builder, that is whether the developer only sold lots or
also constructed houses, should be done at this stage. The name(s) and
companies of the developers should be recorded. This is an important
indicator of the variety of housing to be expected.

The subdivisions should be categorized by sub-period yielding a profile
of suburbanization for the local historic context. By comparing this
profile to the trends for subdivision development and suburban houses,
one can get a preliminary idea of the range of resources that might be
expected in the local suburban landscape. Other sources that are useful
for studying the history of suburban areas include: historic
photographs, census records, state, county, and local histories,
newspaper archives, oral histories, local planning documents, family
histories, and local real estate records.

In preparation for the reconnaissance level survey, a subdivision survey
form should be designed and a computer data base should be constructed
listing all of the subdivisions with their key attributes derived from
archival and cartographic analysis and survey form.

**Reconnaissance Survey of the Suburbs**

The next identification activity is to conduct a reconnaissance field
survey. A reconnaissance survey is a general survey intended to collect
information necessary for developing a historic context. Its purpose is
to determine the range of variation in the property types for
subdivisions and housing and to develop a classification system of key
property types. Another objective is to confirm that the types of
subdivisions indicated by the archival research are present and meet the
general characteristics for the property type.

It is through the reconnaissance survey that you will begin to identify
both how your area relates to the larger national trends as well as what
aspects of suburban design and development are unique to your area. The
basic unit of observation in a survey of the suburbs is the subdivision.
However, subdivision boundaries are often invisible from the field and
even on street maps, this is especially true of older rectilinear
suburbs which tie into the larger street pattern. Also in older, mostly
pre-World War II subdivisions, in which houses were built by
individually or in small clusters, there will be no break between
subdivisions signaled by changing architectural style.

List subdivisions by age from oldest to newest. Organize the itinerary
for the survey so that you move from the oldest to the newest in order
to gain a sense of the range of variation you can expect to find. The
reconnaissance survey should be done in two stages. In the first stage,
simply drive through as many subdivisions as possible, noting detailed
observations and taking photographs. In surveying a subdivision, looking
at three things: 1) the site plan and layout, 2) housing as a design
element in the site plan, 3) housing as architecture.

Subdivision site plan and layout.- The site plan and layout include such
items the overall size, the degree to which the streets follow a
rectilinear or curvilinear pattern, the internal circulation system,
overall density and lot size, vegetation, and so forth. In surveying
subdivisions, one can expect to find an huge variation in size and
design. Remembered that most subdivisions were relatively small in size
up until World War II or, in small cities, even later. Table 2
illustrates that range. Something as small as short, straight streets,
with a few facing houses qualifies as a subdivision if it meet the
criteria of having been subdivided from a single parcel of land.

Many subdivisions will fall into the transitional area and are difficult
to categorize. In developing a historic context for the suburban areas
around Wilmington, Delaware, Susan Chase dealt with the problem of
classifying the variety of subdivisions by classifying them in terms of
streets, access, and architectural variety. Streets in a subdivision
were categorized in terms of whether there was a single street or
multiple streets and whether they were straight or curved. Access to the
subdivision was classified as to whether it was limited to a single
entrance or multiple entrances, and architectural variety could be
limited, moderate or high. Although these variables could be combined to
define 24 types of subdivisions, she found that over half of the 182
subdivisions she surveyed fell into four categories. Two categories were
variations on a rectilinear subdivision in a larger gridiron street
patterns of multiple straight streets/multiple access. One group
exhibited moderate architectural variety while the other group displayed
high architectural variety. Her third category was a transitional
curvilinear subdivision set in a larger street pattern which was
described as multiple curving streets, multiple access/moderate
architectural variety. The fourth was a class of single straight
street/limited access/high architectural variety (Chase, et al, 33-34).
Thus, surveying subdivisions in terms of attributes allowed the
construction of a definitive set of property types which reflected local
variation in a way that could be related to national trends.

Table 2. Variation in Subdivision Property Types

  ---------- -------------------- -------------------- --------------------
  **Size     Continuum of                              
  Range**    Subdivision Property                      
             Types                                     

             Rectilinear          Transitional         Curvilinear

  Smallest   Single straight                           Single curved street
             street with few lots                      with few lots/houses
             facing streets                            facing streets

  Larger     Grid pattern ranging Modified grid in     Self contained
             from of few small    which overall grid   subdivision with
             blocks with small    pattern maintain but three of four to
             lots to many large   with curved streets  many curvilinear
             blocks with large    ranging from few     streets
             lots                 blocks to many       
  ---------- -------------------- -------------------- --------------------

**Housing as Subdivision Design Element**.- Housing, considered in
aggregate, is an important design element in a subdivision. Even in
earlier subdivisions where housing was built individually, through
restrictive covenants, developers controlled the location of housing on
the lot, its size, massing, and often its quality by specifying a
minimum cost. Thus even what appears to be a great deal of architectural
variation associated with subdivision where only lots were sold homes
were built according to some form of design requirements.

Conversely, a great deal of subtle architectural variation can be found
in large post-World War II curvilinear subdivisions in which only one or
two basic housing types are found. Developers often created variation by
reversing floor plans, orienting houses differently on lot (some side
gable, some end gable) and by using different architectural decorative
trim. Consequently what appears to be repetition of housing type, upon
closer inspection, appears to be a variation of a pattern. Such patterns
are a part of the overall subdivision design and an important aspect of
their integrity.

Thus the subdivision survey forms should be designed to describe and
measure some of the aggregate aspects of housing as a design element in
the subdivision.

**Housing**.- The historic context framework focused on the evolution of
the single-family house, divided suburban housing trends in the three
major categories: 1) 1860 to 1900: The Victorian Suburban Villa and
Homestead Suburban Temple House; 2) 1900-1940: The Practical Suburban
House: The Bungalow, Foursquare and Revival House, and 3) Post World War
II Suburban Houses: the Cape Cod, the Ranch House and others. The
purpose of surveying housing in the reconnaissance survey is to
establish the range in types of housing found within the subdivisions
and from this to develop trends in housing development and property
types. Because of the great variation in type of housing that occurs, it
is important to describe and photograph housing so that property types
can be developed in the analysis phase. For the reconnaissance surveys,
use property types that reflect local and regional variations rather
than already developed detailed classifications of housing types.

Analyzing the Data from the Reconnaissance Survey, Undertaking
Additional Archival Research to Develop Final Historic Context with
Property Types and Setting Objectives for Carrying out Identification
and Evaluation Activities.

The data from the reconnaissance survey should be analysis to determine
the trends in subdivision and housing design, in developers, development
practices and financing. Additional archival research should be done,
especially in the real estate sections of local newspapers. This will
yield information on the nature of the original housing and subdivision,
the income market for which it was built, and other factors important to
interpreting its significance. The product of phase one should be the
local historic context, defined property types with evaluation criteria
and a listing of subdivisions that are potentially eligible for the
National Register (Level 1), those subdivisions that are not eligible
but may provide information (Level 2), and those that are not eligible
based on the developed criteria (Level 3).

##  PHASE II: INTENSIVE LEVEL SURVEY

The purpose of an intensive level survey is to gather information on the
appearance, significance, integrity and boundaries of each property
sufficient to permit an evaluation of its significance and eligibility
for the National Register. The general steps include:

1\. Select Level 1 and Level 2 Subdivisions for Intensive Level Survey.
Based on realistic assumptions about the availability of staff, time,
and funding, subdivisions should be selected for intensive level survey.
In so far as possible, they should be selected to reflected the broadest
range of type and chronological period.

2.  Intensive Level Survey Methodology and Survey Forms Developed. A
    survey form for subdivisions should be designed that reflects the
    criteria devised at the conclusion of Phase 1. Because some suburban
    surveys can involve literally hundred of properties, prior decisions
    need to be made about how many houses in a subdivision need to be
    surveyed and retain integrity for the entire subdivision to be
    considered eligible.

3\. Intensive Level Survey of Subdivisions and their Housing Conducted.

Figure \_\_\_\_. Integrity Aspects of a Subdivision

+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| **ASPECTS OF INTEGRITY**          | **APPLICATION TO SUBDIVISIONS**   |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| 1\. LOCATION is the place where   | Suburbs are by definition located |
| the historic property was         | in the periphery of a central     |
| constructed or the place where    | city and were separated from the  |
| the historic event occurred       | city by rural land when           |
|                                   | developed. Located near           |
|                                   | transportation facilities         |
|                                   | connecting to city.               |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| 2\. DESIGN is the combination of  | A subdivision is a designed       |
| elements that create the form,    | landscape because it is planned   |
| plan, space, structure, and style | as a whole on a single parcel of  |
| of a property. It results from    | land to attain specific           |
| conscious decisions made during   | objectives. The essential         |
| the original conception and       | characteristics present in the    |
| planning of a property and        | ideal curvilinear subdivision,    |
| applies to activities as diverse  | which other forms attempt to      |
| as community planning,            | approximate, include:             |
| engineering, architecture, and    |                                   |
| landscape architecture. Design    | \*\*\*\*A large parcel of land    |
| includes such elements as a       | subdivided at one time with the   |
| organization or space,            | goal of building a low density    |
| proportion, technology,           | residential development.          |
| ornamentation and materials. For  |                                   |
| districts, it also applies to the | \*\*\*\*Housing as single-family, |
| way in which building sites, or   | detached dwellings on its own lot |
| structures, are related.          |                                   |
|                                   | \*\*\*\*Variation in range of     |
|                                   | house types and diversity of      |
|                                   | architectural design usually      |
|                                   | planned                           |
|                                   |                                   |
|                                   | \*\*\*\* Subdivision should be    |
|                                   | self-contained with interior road |
|                                   | system for vehicular traffic and  |
|                                   | limited access to exterior        |
|                                   | streets.                          |
|                                   |                                   |
|                                   | \*\*\*\*Park like landscaping     |
|                                   | reflected in open space in lawns, |
|                                   | shrubs, and other ornamental      |
|                                   | plantings and landscaping by      |
|                                   | developer as part of overall site |
|                                   | plan.                             |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| 3\. SETTING is the physical       | In contrast to city, ideal        |
| environment of a historic         | setting was semi-rural            |
| property and refers to character  | environment within commuting      |
| of the place in which the         | distance of the city. Semi-rural  |
| property played its historic      | character was also created within |
| role. It involves how, not just   | subdivision by designing an open, |
| where, the property is situated   | low-density, park like            |
| and its relationship to           | appearance. Often surrounded by   |
| surrounding features and open     | buffer of trees or built between  |
| space.                            | local streams.                    |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| 4, MATERIALS are the physical     | Materials should be considered    |
| elements that were combined or    | for the subdivision as a          |
| deposited during a particular     | landscape in terms elements such  |
| period of time and in a           | as road and sidewalks, community  |
| particular pattern or             | facilities such as parks, and     |
| configuration to form a historic  | vegetation. Materials should also |
| property.                         | be considered for housing and     |
|                                   | reflect the period when the       |
|                                   | subdivision was developed and, in |
|                                   | the case where housing was built  |
|                                   | by individuals, the time over     |
|                                   | which it was built. Whenever      |
|                                   | built, the great majority of      |
|                                   | dwellings in the subdivision must |
|                                   | retain the key exterior           |
|                                   | materials.                        |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| 5\. WORKMANSHIP is the physical   | Workmanship is reflected in the   |
| evidence of the crafts of a       | design of the subdivision and the |
| particular culture or people      | attention to detail in the        |
| during any given period in        | infrastructure, landscape         |
| history or prehistory             | features, and in the construction |
|                                   | of housing and other buildings.   |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| 6\. FEELING is a propertys       | The feeling of subdivision        |
| expression of the aesthetic or    | results from the presence of      |
| historic sense of a particular    | physical features that, taken     |
| period of time***.***             | together, convey the propertys   |
|                                   | historic character. For example,  |
|                                   | a streetcar suburb retaining      |
|                                   | original streets, lot sizes,      |
|                                   | variation in housing type and     |
|                                   | materials will relate the feeling |
|                                   | of suburban life in the late 19th |
|                                   | and early 20th century, whereas   |
|                                   | later automobile suburbs with     |
|                                   | lower densities, more             |
|                                   | architectural uniformity, and     |
|                                   | features reflecting the           |
|                                   | automobile such as garages and    |
|                                   | driveways will communicate the    |
|                                   | feeling of mid-20th century       |
|                                   | suburban landscape                |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| 7\. ASSOCIATION is the direct     | Subdivision must be associated    |
| link between an important         | with major trends or persons      |
| historic event or person and a    | identified in the historic        |
| historic property***.***          | context                           |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+

Table \_\_. Chronological Periods of Suburban Development and Associated
Property Types

+-------+------+---------+-------+------------+---------+-----------+
| **    | Rail |         | Stre  |            | **Early | **Freeway |
| Chara | road |         | etcar |            | Aut     | Suburbs:  |
| cteri | and  |         | Sub   |            | omobile | Late      |
| stics | Hors |         | urbs: |            | S       | 1940s to  |
| of    | ecar |         | 1890s |            | uburbs: | 1960s**   |
| Sub   | Subu |         | to    |            | 1920s   |           |
| urban | rbs: |         | 1920s |            | to      |           |
| La    | 1    |         |       |            | 1940s** |           |
| ndsca | 850s |         |       |            |         |           |
| pes** | to   |         |       |            |         |           |
|       | 1    |         |       |            |         |           |
|       | 890s |         |       |            |         |           |
+-------+------+---------+-------+------------+---------+-----------+
|       | *H   | *R      | *     | *          |         |           |
|       | orse | ailroad | Assoc | Associated |         |           |
|       | car* | and     | iated | with Newer |         |           |
|       |      | Bord    | with  | Cities*    |         |           |
|       |      | erland* | Older |            |         |           |
|       |      |         | Ci    |            |         |           |
|       |      |         | ties* |            |         |           |
+-------+------+---------+-------+------------+---------+-----------+
| *     | Ped  |         |       | P          | St      | Mixed     |
| *Core | estr |         |       | edestrian/ | reetcar | streetcar |
| T     | ian/ |         |       |            | may be  | and       |
| ransp |      |         |       | animal     | d       | a         |
| ortat | an   |         |       | powered    | ominant | utomobile |
| ion** | imal |         |       |            |         |           |
|       | pow  |         |       |            |         |           |
|       | ered |         |       |            |         |           |
+-------+------+---------+-------+------------+---------+-----------+
| **    | Hors | R       | Stre  |            |         | Inc       |
| Conne | ecar | ailroad | etcar |            |         | reasingly |
| ction |      |         |       |            |         | a         |
| to    |      |         |       |            |         | utomobile |
| c     |      |         |       |            |         | on        |
| ity** |      |         |       |            |         | arterials |
+-------+------+---------+-------+------------+---------+-----------+
| **Re  | Co   | O       | R     | Radial and | Both    | Mostly    |
| latio | ntig | utlying | adial | gridded    | con     | separated |
| nship | uous | bor     | exte  | extension  | tiguous | from city |
| to    | e    | derland | nsion | of         | and     |           |
| c     | xten |         | along | streetcar  | se      |           |
| ity** | sion | se      | stre  | lines,     | parated |           |
|       |      | parated | etcar | both       | from    |           |
|       |      | by      | lines | adjacent   | city:   |           |
|       |      | rural   | from  | to core    | be      |           |
|       |      | areas   | city  | and        | ginning |           |
|       |      |         | core  | separated  | of      |           |
|       |      |         |       | by rural   | sc      |           |
|       |      |         |       | areas      | attered |           |
|       |      |         |       |            | s       |           |
|       |      |         |       |            | uburban |           |
|       |      |         |       |            | deve    |           |
|       |      |         |       |            | lopment |           |
+-------+------+---------+-------+------------+---------+-----------+
| **Sub | E    | Station | R     |            |         | Scattered |
| urban | xten | -c      | ectil |            |         | sub       |
| f     | sion | entered | inear |            |         | divisions |
| orm** | from | e       | su    |            |         | toed to   |
|       | city | xisting | bdivi |            |         | arterials |
|       | by   | town    | sions |            |         | by roads  |
|       | sub  | with    | with  |            |         |           |
|       | divi | subdi   | wa    |            |         |           |
|       | sion | visions | lking |            |         |           |
|       |      |         | dis   |            |         |           |
|       |      |         | tance |            |         |           |
|       |      |         | of    |            |         |           |
|       |      |         | stre  |            |         |           |
|       |      |         | etcar |            |         |           |
+-------+------+---------+-------+------------+---------+-----------+
| **S   | R    | Curv    | R     |            |         | Inc       |
| ubdiv | ecti | ilinear | ectil |            |         | reasingly |
| ision | line | /medium | inear |            |         | cu        |
| t     | ar/s | to      | and   |            |         | rvilinear |
| ype** | mall | large   | mod   |            |         |           |
|       | lot  | lot     | ified |            |         |           |
|       |      |         | c     |            |         |           |
|       |      |         | urvil |            |         |           |
|       |      |         | inear |            |         |           |
+-------+------+---------+-------+------------+---------+-----------+
| **Sub | Grid | Curv    | Gr    |            |         |           |
| divis |      | ilinear | idded |            |         |           |
| ion** |      | in      | tied  |            |         |           |
|       |      | subd    | to    |            |         |           |
| **s   |      | ivision | stre  |            |         |           |
| treet |      | gridded | etcar |            |         |           |
| patt  |      | in      | line  |            |         |           |
| ern** |      | towns   |       |            |         |           |
+-------+------+---------+-------+------------+---------+-----------+
| **D   | D    |         |       |            | De      |           |
| evelo | evel |         |       |            | veloper |           |
| pment | oper |         |       |            | sub     |           |
| proc  | su   |         |       |            | divides |           |
| ess** | bdiv |         |       |            | p       |           |
|       | ides |         |       |            | arcels, |           |
|       | parc |         |       |            | i       |           |
|       | els, |         |       |            | nstalls |           |
|       | inst |         |       |            | roads   |           |
|       | alls |         |       |            | and     |           |
|       | r    |         |       |            | ut      |           |
|       | oads |         |       |            | ilities |           |
|       | and  |         |       |            | and     |           |
|       | u    |         |       |            | sells   |           |
|       | tili |         |       |            | lots    |           |
|       | ties |         |       |            |         |           |
|       | and  |         |       |            |         |           |
|       | s    |         |       |            |         |           |
|       | ells |         |       |            |         |           |
|       | lots |         |       |            |         |           |
+-------+------+---------+-------+------------+---------+-----------+
| **P   | Wor  | Upper   | Wo    |            | Middle  | Working,  |
| redom | king | and     | rking |            | and     | middle    |
| inant | and  | upper   | and   |            | upper   | and upper |
| Soc   | mi   | middle  | m     |            |         | class     |
| ioeco | ddle |         | iddle |            |         |           |
| nomic |      |         |       |            |         |           |
| cl    |      |         |       |            |         |           |
| ass** |      |         |       |            |         |           |
+-------+------+---------+-------+------------+---------+-----------+

# EVALUATION

Evaluation entails three major activities: defining significance,
assessing historic integrity, and selecting boundaries. Information
gathered through historic research and survey is related to the study
area\'s historic contexts to determine the extent to which identified
properties possess the characteristics of a historic suburban property
type and are associated with important events in the growth and
development of a community. Significance, integrity, and boundaries
depend upon the presence of landscape features such as organization
according to an overall general plan of development or the conscious
design and arrangement of dwellings according to a distinctive principle
of design or important historic pattern of development. Historic period,
relationship to transportation corridors, cohesive planning principles,
or architectural character usually give a historic suburb its
distinctive character and distinguish it from surrounding development.

Historic suburbs can be identified on local maps for a given period of
time and are often documented by general development plants on file with
a local planning office, private developer, or archival collection.
Historical facts and survey data should verify the presence of
significant features such as the street patterns, housing styles and
types, set-backs, street and domestic plantings, parks and open space,
sidewalks, and community facilities such as schools and playgrounds.
Consideration should be given the historic design intent of the suburban
development and the evolution of the plan throughout its history,
keeping in mind that changes occurring in the execution of the plan may
be significant. Identification of the specific type of suburb early in
the evaluation process will help the researcher to formulate ideas about
potential areas of significance. The period during which the suburb was
created and the dwellings constructed should be defined early in the
process, so that the researcher has an understanding of the relationship
of the district to the National Register\'s fifty-year rule and can
determine if a case for exceptional significance is needed for more
recent suburbs. As a general guideline, if the plan for a suburban
district was realized and a majority of the dwellings were completed
fifty or more years ago, the district may be considered to satisfy the
fifty-year requirement. Circumstances may exist that make it reasonable
to extend the period of significance within the less-than-fifty-year
period and thereby classify as contributing resources that are within
the defined period of significance but are less than fifty years of age.
In general, the significance of the district and the construction dates
of dwellings and other resources possessing historic characteristics or
reflecting the subdivision\'s design intent should be considered to
determine the appropriate period of significance. All resources designed
and built outside the period of significance are considered
noncontributing unless they individually meet the requirement for
exceptional significacne under Criterion Consideration G.

Properties related to the same historic contexts may be compared to
identify those eligible for listing in the National Register and to
determine the relative level\--local, state, or national, at which the
property is significant. Although most historic suburbs will be eligible
at the local level as reflections of the outward development of urban
centers, those that established a precedent or influenced subsequent
development regionally or have particularly distinctive or
representative aspects of design for their plans or their architectural
character, may have importance at the State level. Suburbs whose plan,
landscape design, or architectural character introduced important
innovations in design or are associated with developers or designers
whose ideas had an impact on design nationwide may be important on a
national level.

## Defining Significance

Facts concerning the development and design of a particular historic
suburb are examined to define the periods of time and aspects of
development in which the district achieved historical significance. This
information is considered in relationship to the broad themes, or
historic contexts, important to a community, State or the nation, and to
the National Register Criteria for Evaluation.

**1. Apply the National Register Criteria**

To be eligible for National Register listing, a historic suburb must
possess significance in at least one of the four aspects of cultural
heritage specified by the National Register Criteria. Because of their
reflection of the outward spread of metropolitan areas and the growth
and development of communities, historic suburbs are commonly evaluated
under Criterion A for their association with community planning and
development. Historic suburbs may also be eligible under criterion A for
association with specific groups of people (not specific individuals)
who resided there who may have made important contributions collectively
to a locally important industry or to the area\'s identity (e.g.
government or education for residential neighborhood that served
employees of a nearby university or county government) or Criterion B
for association with specific important individuals (for example,
Llewelyn Park as home of inventor Thomas Edison). A historic suburb may
also meet Criterion B for its direct association with a developer or
designer who made important contributions to the history and development
of a community or metropolitan area or who introduced important
innovations of design through their role in the suburb\'s creation.
Historic suburbs are evaluated under Criterion C for their embodiment of
distinctive characteristics of a type, period, style, or method of
construction, or representing a significant and distinguishable entity
whose components may lack individual distinction. Qualifying physical
characteristics, under Criterion C, may be present in the overall plan
for the suburb, the architectural design of dwellings and other
buildings, and the landscape design of the overall subdivision or of
individual homes, parks, or parkways within the suburb.

## Evaluation under Criterion C

The overall design and the organization of space within a suburb\'s
design may be defined by the arrangement of streets, the size and
location of housing lots, the siting of dwellings within a building lot,
and the disposition of common spaces such as walkways, playgrounds, or
parks. These design features may reflect picturesque naturalistic style,
elements of the garden city or country club movements, or curvilinear
patterns distinctive of the 1940s and 1950s. Distinctive architectural
design may be present in a variety of building types, primarily
dwellings, but also garages, carriage houses, community buildings,
gatehouses, and sheds. Buildings may reflect a cohesive architectural
type and style with some variation (e.g. Cape Cod or four square) or
they may reflect a variety of period styles such as revival or
bungaloid. Homogeneity or diversity of housing types and style may be an
important architectural characteristic and be an important indicator of
the overall design intent of the suburb as well as its historic
evolution. Information about the developer and the various architects
and landscape architects and their interrelationship is important to
understanding the evolution of the suburb and its design significance;
it is also important for placing the suburb in the overall history of
suburban development in the United States. Suburban districts may also
be significant for the relationship of their design to existing
topographical or scenic features or for specific characteristics such as
street lighting, stone curbing, tree plantings, creation of vistas,
building set-backs, or conservation of natural features that add to the
overall quality of design. Significance under Criterion C will generally
be based on design characteristics and require that distinctive design
features remain intact. The recognition of important patterns may
require researching local planning records or the records of development
or architectural firms as well as a comparison to other suburban
developments in a metropolitan area for the same or similar period of
time.

## Evaluation under Criteria Consideration G: Less than Fifty Year Old Properties

With the beginning of the post-World-War-II building boom in residential
suburbs, which was spurred by the Federal Housing Act of 1949 and
legislation extending housing benefits to veterans, there will be
increasing pressure in coming years to evaluate vast numbers of freeway
suburbs constructed in the 1950s. These suburbs are likely to reflect
institutional standards in both the curvilinear design of roadways and
the size and types of dwellings. Many took several years for completion
and may include dwellings dating from 1949 to the end of the 1950s and
beyond. In cases where exceptional importance can be shown\--for the
design of the overall plan or architecture of the housing, or based on
outstanding events in local history\--a suburb of this period may be
nominated before the area as a whole reaches 50 years of age or before
the majority of the resources making up the district reach 50 years of
age.

Regional contexts should be developed for communities where
suburbanization was widespread and numerous planned subdivisions took
form during the postwar era. Such a context can help establish a
chronology of the region\'s suburban development, target neighborhoods
to be surveyed, and identify exceptional examples that may be nominated
before the majority of dwellings reach fifty years of age. To determine
exceptional importance within a local, metropolitan, or regional
context, it is necessary to consider the potential district\'s history
in relationship to the overall local trends of post World War II
suburbanization, to identify the best examples (most representative,
earliest, most innovative, quality of design of overall plan and of
housing design) for the relevant geographical area, and to consider the
degree to which notable examples possess historic integrity.

To determine whether or not an argument for exceptional importance needs
to be presented, the dates when the overall plan was established and
housing took form need to be considered. Also, the date when the suburb
was laid out and the majority of buildings constructed needs to be
determined. An explanation of these dates should be given in the
nomination to support the period of significance and to indicate whether
or not a justification of exceptional significance is needed. As a
general rule, a majority of resources (more than 50 percent) must have
achieved fifty years of age before the district as a whole can be
considered to meet the fifty year requirement. The nomination of a
suburban district whose design was begun and substantially completed
more than fifty years ago, although some resources within the district
were built within the last 50 years, does not require a justification of
exceptional importance. For further guidance you many wish to refer to
the National Register bulletin, Guidelines for Evaluating and Nominating
Properties that Have Achieved Significance Within the Past Fifty Years.

**2. Select Areas of Significance**

Area of significance is that aspect of history in which a historic
suburb through design, use, physical characteristics, or association
influenced the identity of a community or region. The following are the
most common areas applied to historic suburbs having importance for
their design and role in community development:

> o Community development and planning applies to areas reflecting
> important patterns of physical development, land division, or land
> use.
>
> o Landscape architecture applies when significant qualities are
> embodied in the overall design or plan of the suburb and the artistic
> design of landscape features such as paths, roadways, parks, and
> vegetation.
>
> o Architecture is used when significant qualities are embodied in the
> design, style, or method of construction of buildings and structures,
> such as houses, garages, carriage houses, shed, bridges, gatehouses,
> and community facilities.

The design of historic suburbs often depended on the expertise and
effort of developers, architects, and landscape architects working in
cooperation. For this reason the significance of these districts can
often be ascribed to a combination of three areas\--community
development and planning, architecture, and landscape architecture.
Nominations should recognize the contributions of individual designers
representing each profession. Properties may be important under
Criterion C for their reflection of important design characteristics or
as works of a master, but also for their contribution to the theory of
landscape design and suburban development under Criterion A.

Other areas of significance may apply when a historic suburb is closely
related to other themes important to a community\'s historic growth and
development or when it possesses historical associations with important
events and persons. For example:

> o Government may apply to those that reflect early or particularly
> important responses to government financing, adherence to government
> standards, or the institution of zoning by local governments.
>
> o Industry may apply when a suburb, by design or circumstance, served
> the need for housing for workers in a particular industrial activity,
> such as defense industry during World War II.
>
> o Education, medicine, or government may be areas of significance when
> a significant concentration of residents were associated with a
> locally important center of government, hospital, or university.
>
> o Social history recognizes the contributions of a historic suburb to
> the improvement of living conditions through the introduction of a
> type of housing and a neighborhood environment.
>
> o Ethnic Heritage recognizes the significant association of a historic
> suburb with a particular ethnic group.

**3. Define period of significance**

Period of significance is the span of time when the historic suburb was
associated with important events, activities, persons, cultural groups,
and land uses or attained important physical qualities or
characteristics. While suburbs significant under Criteria A and B may
have historic periods spanning many years corresponding to the duration
of important historic associations, districts under Criterion C may have
shorter periods of significance corresponding to the actual years of
design and construction. The study of period plan(s) and maps will be
useful for gaining an understanding of how a suburb evolved and for
determining the corresponding period of significance.

Generally a historic suburb\'s period of significance will begin with
the date when construction began and extend to the date when the plan
was fully realized or the construction of the majority of homes
completed. Local economic factors as well as worldwide events such as
the Great Depression and World War II may have influenced the length of
time it took for a historic suburb to develop or the extent to which a
plan was carried out or modified. Such factors should be considered in
defining an appropriate period of significance.

For historic suburbs where the street system, utilities, and house lots
were laid out initially but the construction of homes occurred over the
course of many years, the period of significance may cover the entire
period of construction provided the later construction is in keeping
with the historic design intent or reflects the evolution of
historically important patterns of design or physical development. Where
development was interrupted resulting in lengthy periods when no
construction occurred (for example, a decade or more), it may be
appropriate to define several periods of significance and closely
examine the suburb\'s significance for each period.

To determine an appropriate closing date for the period of significance
on the basis of the construction of contributing resources, several
questions should be answered: Are the more recently constructed
dwellings of the district, by their location, size, scale, and style,
consistent with the suburb\'s overall historic plan and earlier housing?
To what extent do the dwellings, by their architectural style or
landscape design, contribute to the historic character of the district?
To what extent do they reflect more recent aspects of suburban
development or community history and to what extent are these important
patterns or aspects of change?

We are just entering into a period when many suburban neighborhoods,
spurred by the post World War II demand for housing, are approaching
fifty years of age. Professional judgment should be applied to determine
the period of significance for these districts and determine whether or
not a justification for exceptional importance is required for
nominations. If a majority of resources date to the less-than-fifty year
period, the suburb must be evaluated under Criterion Consideration G
(see discussion above) and exceptional importance demonstrated.

**Assessing Historic Integrity**

Historic integrity is the composite of seven qualities: location,
design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association.
Decisions about historic integrity require professional judgement about
whether a property today reflects the spatial organization, physical
components, and historic associations that it attained during its period
of significance. A district\'s period of significance becomes the
benchmark for measuring whether subsequent changes contribute to the
historic suburb\'s physical evolution or alter its historic integrity.

Historic integrity requires that the various features that constituted
the historic suburb historically are present today in the same
configuration and similar condition as they existed historically. This
applies to principal dwellings as well as roadways, open spaces,
garages, and other aspects of the historic design. Because vegetation is
an inherent feature of historic suburbs, the maturity or loss of planted
trees, shrubs and other vegetation may have altered the historical
setting or erased intended vistas. The general character and feeling of
the overall plan, however, must be intact. Historic and contemporary
views may be compared through old photographs, correspondence,
newsclippings, and promotional brochures. The presence of certain
characteristics may be more important than others. For a suburb having
an important plan, the integrity of the original boundaries, circulation
pattern of streets and walkways, and the division of housing lots will
have primary importance. For an architecturally significant suburb, the
design and materials of individual houses will have the greatest
importance. Elements such as walls, plantings, walkways, roadways, park
land, ponds, statuary, and fountains may likewise contribute strongly to
the importance of a suburb in landscape architecture.

The amount of infill or subdivision and other changes that a suburban
landscape can withstand before losing integrity will depend on its size
and scale, the presence of significant features, and the suburban
context in which it developed. The subdivision of home lots beyond that
specified in historic

plans threatens a historic suburb\'s integrity of design and will be
viewed as a compatible pattern of development only if the subdivision
occurred as a result of historically important events during the period
of significance.

**1. Apply the qualities of Integrity**

The seven qualities of integrity called for in the National Register
criteria can be applied to historic suburbs in special ways:

Location is the place where significant activities that shaped the
suburb took place. This quality requires that to a large extent the
boundaries that historically defined the suburb define the historic
district

being nominated; it also requires that the subdivision of the suburb and
the arrangement of dwellings on individual housing lots reflect the
suburb\'s historic configuration. Location frequently relied upon
proximity to transportation corridors (streetcar lines, commuter
railroads, parkways, or highways) and accessibility to places of
employment. In many cases these factors have spurred growth and
development of the rural open space that may have historically
surrounded the suburb. While the presence of historic transportation
systems may add to a district\'s historic significance their loss or
relocation will not detract in a major way from the integrity of the
district.

Design is the composition of natural and cultural elements comprising
the form, plan, and spatial organization of the suburb and the
construction of dwellings and other buildings. Design results from
primarily conscious decisions about the nature of the overall plan and
the design of individual housing lots, often according to an overall
design or plan. Integrity of design can be affected by changes to the
size of housing lots by subdivision and changes to individual dwellings
by additions, siding, window replacements, and other alterations. Small
scale additions, such as modest porches or garages, may not detract in a
major way from the historic character of individual buildings and the
neighborhood. Large scale additions, however, that double the elevation
or add substantially to the mass of a historic house and alter the
spatial relationship of house to street generally threaten integrity of
design.

Setting is the physical environment within and surrounding a suburb.
Integrity requires that a strong sense of historical setting is
maintained within the nominated boundaries. The setting outside many
historic suburbs is less likely to retain its historic characteristics
as a semi-rural environment due to subsequent development. The
relationships that historic suburbs had to early streetcar or railroad
systems may in large part have disappeared. Small scale elements such as
individual plantings, gateposts, fences, swimming pools, playground
equipment, and parking lots may contribute to the historic integrity of
setting within a district if they date to the period of significance.

Materials include the construction materials of dwellings, roadways,
walkways, fences, garages, curbing, and other structures as well as
vegetation planted as lawns, shrubs, trees, and gardens. The presence of
particular building materials, e.g stone, stucco, brick, or horizontal
siding, may be important indicators of architectural style and methods
of construction and often give cohesive character to a historic
neighborhood. Original plant materials may enhance the integrity, but
their loss does not necessarily destroy it. Vegetation similar in
historic species, scale, type and visual effect will generally convey
integrity of setting. The vegetation and other landscape features of
common areas such as avenues, parkways, or parks may reflect an overall
planting plan while the domestic plantings of home lots are more likely
to reflect the tastes of individual owners and popular gardening trends.

Workmanship will be most evident in the ways builders fashioned the
dwellings for functional and decorative purposes.

Feeling although intangible, is evoked by the presence of physical
characteristics that reflect the historic scene. Feeling results from
the cumulative effect of setting, design, materials, and workmanship and
creates a historic district\'s sense of past time and place. Alterations
introduced since the end of the period of significance generally detract
from integrity of feeling.

Association is the direct link between a property and the important
events or persons that shaped it. Integrity of association requires a
property to reflect its historical relationships. Continued domestic use
and occupation help maintain a suburb\'s historical associations,
however, additions and alterations that expand or change the character
of use may threaten historic integrity.

**2. Classify contributing and non contributing resources**

Buildings, structures, objects, and sites are classified as contributing
if they were present during the period of significance and possess
historic integrity for that period. Those resources not present during
the historic period, not part of the historic suburb\'s documented
significance, or no longer possessing historic integrity for the period
of significance are noncontributing. Resources that are less than fifty
years of age may contribute as integral parts of districts if they
relate, by date and function, association, or character to the historic
significance of the overall district or reflect important aspects of the
suburb\'s history or physical evolution. A 1952 colonial revival house
on a half acre lot that was subdivided in the 1920s according to an
important plan might be considered contributing if it is consistent with
the suburb\'s historic design intent and if the suburbs\'s historic
period of development is shown to extend into the early 1950s. A 1960
ranch house on newly subdivided lot in the same neighborhood would be
non-contributing because its design departed from the suburb\'s original
plan and traditional revival-style architecture and its construction
occurred outside the period of historic significance.

**3. Weighing overall integrity**

The final decision about integrity is based on the condition of the
overall district and its ability to convey significance. The integrity
of historic characteristics such as the overall spatial design,
circulation network, and vegetation as well as the integrity of
individual homes should be considered. Integrity depends to a
substantial degree on the context of a metropolitan area\'s pattern of
suburbanization and the condition of comparable suburbs in the area. The
loss or relocation of a few features usually does not affect the
integrity of a historic neighborhood, however, the loss of entire
streets or sections of the plan, cumulative alterations and additions to
large numbers of dwellings, nonhistoric subdivision of lots, and infill
construction all threaten the integrity of the historic plan and the
district\'s overall historic character.

## Selecting boundaries 

Boundaries for historic suburbs are usually defined by the extent of the
historic plan. In most cases, historic districts will be clearly defined
on the basis of physical characteristics, historic ownership, and
community identity as a neighborhood. In cases where a plan was only
partially completed, the district boundaries should correspond to only
the area where the plan was realized. Areas annexed or added to a
historic plan may be included in the boundaries if such additions are
shown to be historically important aspects of the overall suburb\'s
evolution or themselves possess historical significance. If sections of
a historic suburb have lost historic integrity, it is necessary to
determine, whether lacking a cohesive plan, the property still retains
significance and, if so, if the sections lacking historic integrity can
be excluded from the boundaries without further denigrating the
district\'s historical integrity.

In cases where a suburb developed in several stages, perhaps as a single
farm was sold and subdivided in segments, it may be reasonable to
document, evaluate, and nominate each section separately or to
differentiate the various stages of development and document each stage
separately in a single nomination. Areas laid out and developed within
the past fifty years should be excluded from such boundaries unless they
can be shown to be integral parts of the historic plan and development
or to have exceptional importance. Peripheral areas that have lost
integrity, for example, the portion of a historic neighborhood lying
along a recently zoned commercial corridor where the relationship of
individual dwellings to housing lots has been lost, should also be
excluded from the boundaries. Individual dwellings by noted architects
or areas such as a park or parkways may be nominated individually if
they have special importance that meets the National Register criteria.
Natural areas such as ponds or woodlands may be included in the
boundaries when they have recreational or conservation value and are
integral aspects of the historic plan. Pre-existing resources such as
farmsteads may be included in the boundaries when they are integral to
the design of the subdivision and were clearly designated for
preservation in the historic plan.

Lines drawn on historic plats, legal boundaries, rights-of-way, and
changes in the nature of development or spatial organization are
generally used to define the edges of historic suburbs. In general, the
boundaries should be drawn along historic lot lines or boundary streets.
An explanation of the relationship between the historic plan or
subdivision and the proposed National Register boundaries should be
given in the boundary justification.

## Documentation and Registration

Nominations are made on the National Register Registration Form
(NPS-10-900) and processed according to the regulations set forth in 36
CFR Part 60. Where the study of a metropolitan area identifies several
historic suburbs related by a common historic context that are eligible
for listing, the National Register Multiple Property Documentation Form
(NPS-10-900-b) may be used to document the context, property types, and
methodology. Individual registration forms are then used to document
each eligible district and are completed according to the instructions
in the bulletin, Guidelines for Completing National Register of Historic
Places Forms. Guidelines for documenting nationally significant
properties are found in National Register bulletin, How to Prepare
National Historic Landmark Nominations.

The following guidance supplements the National Register bulletin,
Guidelines for Completing National Register of Historic Places Forms,
and is organized according to the sections on the registration form. The
form is intended as a summary of the information gathered during
identification and a synthesis of findings concerning significance,
integrity and boundaries.

## Classification 

A historic suburb is generally classified as a historic district because
it is a collection of buildings, structures, and other features. The
land covered by the overall plan is generally counted as a single site,
and all buildings and structures substantial in size or scale therein
are counted separately as contributing or noncontributing resources.
Landscape features such as curbing, roadways, paths, tree plantings,
ponds, and storm drains are generally considered integral features of
the overall site and are not counted separately unless they are
substantial in size and scale or have special importance such as a
central landscaped avenue or a designed park that created a major focal
point for the district.

## Description 

The description defines the historic suburb being registered and
describes the physical evolution and current condition of the
development. The narrative describes 1.) overall plan and its
outstanding landscape features such as roadways, paths, green spaces,
and recreational areas; 2.) the subdivision of the suburb into lots for
dwellings and other community buildings; 3.) architectural types,
styles, and methods of construction evident in the buildings. It also
dates and describes any alterations to the plan or to the dwellings and
other buildings, noting the types of changes and the degree to which
alterations affect the integrity of individual resources. The
description should describe:

> 1\. Natural and manmade features comprising the district, including
> prominent topographical features, structures, buildings, sites,
> objects and other kinds of development. Appearance of the district
> during the period when it achieved historical significance and any
> changes or modifications since.
>
> 2\. Architectural styles or periods represented and predominant
> characteristics, such as scale, proportions, materials, color,
> decoration, workmanship, and quality of design. Identification of
> principal dwelling types. General condition of the buildings,
> including alterations, additions, and any restoration or
> rehabilitation activities.
>
> 3\. General physical relationship of dwellings to each other and the
> overall plan, including facade lines, set backs, street plans, open
> space, density of development, landscape elements, principal
> vegetation, and important natural features. Presence of schools,
> churches, commercial centers, railroad stations, and community
> buildings that exist within the boundaries of the historic
> neighborhood.
>
> 4\. General principles of landscape design characterized by the
> overall plan or by specialized areas within the plan. Any changes to
> the relationships of plan and buildings. The extent to which these
> principles remain evident.
>
> 5\. Identify the developers, architects, and landscape architects
> involved in the design and construction of the suburb and describe
> their roles. Note improvements provided by the developer, such as
> infrastructure of roadways, water and septic systems, or the local
> jurisdiction such as schools or parks.
>
> 6\. A list of contributing and noncontributing resources keyed to a
> sketch map for the entire district. This list should provide the
> address, date, and condition for all principal buildings, as well as
> streets, avenues, parks, playgrounds, and recreational areas that are
> part of the historic neighborhood. Housing may be classified by type
> based on housing models, architectural style or period, or other
> descriptive means. The work of principal architects and landscape
> architects should be identified.

## Significance

The statement of significance explains the ways in which the historic
district relates to the theme of suburbanization locally and reflects
the national trends presented in this bulletin and sets forth the
reasons the district is significant within this context. The statement
addresses the National Register criteria, and if applicable, criteria
considerations. The greater the importance of certain features \--such
as the overall plan and circulation network\--the more detailed the
explanation of how these are important should be. The reasons for
selecting the period of significance and the areas of significance in
which the district meets the National Register criteria must be
justified.

Unless provided on a related multiple property form, a statement of
historic context should identify one or more themes to which the
property relates through its historic uses, activities, associations,
and physical characteristics. The discussion of historic context should:

> 1\. Explain the role of the property in relationship to broad historic
> trends, drawing on specific facts about the property and its
> community.
>
> 2\. Briefly describe the history of the community where the suburban
> neighborhood is located and explain the various stages in the
> community\'s suburbanization, the factors leading to the development
> of suburbs, and the local characteristics of historic suburbs locally
> or regionally. Explain how local trends and examples relate to the
> national context for suburbanization.
>
> 3\. Ascribe the importance of the suburban neighborhood in each area
> of significance by showing that it is unique, representative, or
> outstanding when compared to other neighborhoods of the same period or
> type or with similar historical associations.

For districts significant under Criterion A, an explanation should be
given on how the events or pattern of events related to suburbanization
and reflected by the district made an important contribution to the
history of the community, State, or nation. For districts significant
under Criterion B the statement should explain how the person with whom
the property is associated is important in the history of the community,
state, or Nation. For districts significant under Criterion C, context
may be developed along three lines: type, period, style, or method of
construction, work of a master, and high artistic values.

## **Maps and Photographs**

Include photographs that generally represent the character of principal
streetscapes, the representative dwelling types, non-residential
buildings, and noncontributing buildings or structures. Include copies
of the historic plan or historic views of the district if possible.
Period plans that show the extent to which housing was completed at
various intervals during the history of the suburb\'s physical evolution
are also desirable for describing graphically the ways in which the
suburb evolved.

(sidebar)

## Suburbs as Designed Landscapes

Many of America\'s historic suburbs resulted from the collaboration of
developers, planners, architects, and landscape architects. The
contributions of these professional groups, individually and
collectively, give American suburbs their characteristic identity as
historic communities, collections of residential architecture, and
designed landscapes. The following list of landscape characteristics can
be used to survey and identify the component resources and other
significant features that make up a suburban landscape and to understand
the interrelationship of the varied professional groups that shaped a
particular suburb. A knowledge of landscape characteristics related to
the suburban development in a metropolitan area may also lead to the
development of typologies for suburban planning, domestic architecture,
and landscape design. For further guidance in evaluating the
significance of a suburb as a designed landscape, refer to the National
Register bulletin, How to Evaluate and Nominate Designed Historic
Landscapes.

## Overall Design/Spatial Organization

Since the mid-19th century, the overall design of a residential suburb
has based on a general plan, drawn up in advance, which identifies the
land to be developed for residential use or for functions supporting
residential use. The general plan shows the location of the streets,
walkways, and common spaces and indicates how the suburb will be divided
into individual housing lots and common spaces such as parks and
playgrounds. The general plan may reflect significant trends or
principles in suburban planning or landscape design or be the work of a
noted landscape architect or planner.

Although the suburb as a whole forms a cluster predominantly residential
in use and character, specialized areas within the suburb may form
clusters or zones dedicated for special uses, such as recreation,
education, or commerce. These areas are characterized by function,
architectural type, and vegetation.

Written specifications may accompany a general plan to describe design
requirements such as the distance to which buildings must be set back
from the street; the size, style, or value of houses to be built; and
any restrictions on the use of land or the design of individual housing
lots. Such requirements may also appear as covenants or restrictions
that are attached to the deed of sale for individual homes. Since the
1920s, local zoning rules may also have influenced the characteristics
of a suburb, including the density, or number of dwellings per acre, the
height of dwellings, the distance between dwellings, distance from the
street, and the provision for public utilities. By definition suburbs
are predominately residential in use, they may, however, contain zones
for commercial, educational, and recreational activities that support
and complement the residential use.

## Circulation Network

A system of roads and walkways provide circulation for automobiles and
pedestrians within the historic suburb. In addition to roads,
circulation networks may include sidewalks, trails, traffic circles and
medians, parking lots, and driveways. Historic suburbs commonly
illustrate distinctive street patterns that may reflect the designer\'s
response to the natural topography of an area, adoption of well-known
plans, or evolving trends of suburban design. Curvilinear streets,
cul-de-sacs, and traffic circles and medians may be important aspects of
a suburb\'s historic design. Typically a hierarchy of roads will exist,
whereby certain roads provide entry into and circulation through the
suburb, while others form tiers, spur roads, or cul-de-sacs. Entry roads
provide important links to the surrounding community, metropolitan area,
and local and regional systems of transportation, including highways,
parkways, train lines, subways, and streetcar lines. Circulation
networks may contain specific features such as embankments, planted
islands or medians, sidewalks, curbing, culverts, bridges, and gutters,
that contribute the aesthetic as well as functional design of the
suburb.

## Boundary demarcations 

Fences, walls, and planted screens of trees and shrubs may separate a
suburban neighborhood from surrounding development. A gate, gatehouse,
pylons, signs, or plantings may denote the entrance to some historic
suburbs. A sense of enclosure may also be created by the pattern of
streets and the arrangement of individual housing lots along streets,
some of which may end in cul-de-sacs. Boundaries between housing lots
may be marked by fences, walls, hedges, gardens, or sidewalks; in others
demarcations may be absent or merely suggested by spacing of dwellings
on open or tree-shaded lawns.

## Vegetation

Trees, shrubs, and other plantings in the form of lawns, shade trees,
hedges, foundation plantings, and gardens may contribute to the historic
significance and setting of many historic suburbs. Vegetation may have
resulted from decisions by planners and developers to retain preexisting
trees\--often native to the area, to plant streets and common spaces for
ornamental or shade purposes, and to create screens between housing
lots. While the plantings of individual yards typically reflect the
tastes and interests of homeowners, they may reflect once popular trends
in domestic landscape design as well as decisions by landscape
architects and planners to create a homogenous and harmonious setting
within the suburb through a unified program of plantings. In the later
case, similar elements, species, and patterns of plantings may repeat
throughout the district although variations will likely occur from one
property to the next. Vegetation within American suburbs is frequently
dominated by the grassy lawn, occasional specimen or shade trees, and
flowering trees and shrubs. Regional horticultural practices as well as
historic trends may be reflected in the choice of native species or
introduced or exotic species adapted to the local conditions and
climate. Plants may have a strong thematic appeal for their seasonal
display, e.g. flowering apple trees, magnolias, azaleas and
rhododendrons, oleanders and crape myrtles, sugar maples, palm trees,
and golden rain trees. Vegetation may reflect a conscious program of
civic improvements by a municipal or local government or community
association. Parkland, playgrounds, public buildings such as schools,
community buildings, and recreational areas within a suburb may have
specially designed plantings. In addition, individual properties within
the suburb may be notable examples of domestic landscape design or the
work of master landscape designers.

## Buildings, Structures, and Objects

Although dwellings will predominate, historic suburbs may contain other
kinds of buildings and structures as well. Garages, carriage houses, and
sheds may accompany dwellings on domestic lots. Bridges and culverts,
tunnels, and grade separations, may be present on roads and paths,
especially in areas having rugged topography cut by streams and ravines.
Some suburbs will include schools, churches, shopping centers, and
community halls. A gatehouse or even a train station may be present in
some suburban districts.

Dwellings may conform to a typology of models, styles, or methods of
construction specified in the plans or initial architectural designs for
the suburb, or they may reflect prevailing trends and styles related to
the period in which the suburb was developed. Depending on the suburb\'s
history, one or more architects may be associated with the design of the
dwellings. The relationship between the developer or planner of the
suburb and the architect or designer of individual or groups of homes
should be explained. The date, condition, and physical characteristics
of all dwellings should be considered in the identification of
contributing and noncontributing resources. Garages, sheds, and other
buildings of substantial size, scale, or importance should be included
in the inventory and resource counts.

## Small-scale elements

Small scale elements in the general layout of a suburb may include
lampposts and lighting, curbs and gutters, stairs and stairways,
benches, and signs. Swimming pools, patios, outdoor fireplaces,
trellises, fountains, and statuary may be present in individual yards or
common areas.

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