My dad once explained to me that in the 1950s "outside Chicago" didn't mean what it means today. It's just a geographical reference, for which I know no other better term. It was nothing but farm country where he grew up.

I've traveled across the U.S. Not on the Interstate systems, but on the old U.S. highways. I've driven U.S. 50 from San Francisco (Sacramento) to D.C. U.S. 20 from Newport, OR to Boston. U.S. 90 from Florida to Van Horn, TX, and then old U.S. 80 from Van Horn to California (with some diversions). And I took my time, driving through and often visiting every little town. It took me weeks to make each cross-country trip. And I've taken other, more circuitous routes on other trips, like a cross country where we just zig-zagged north and south visiting towns and friends while taking a mostly southernly route from the east coast to the west coast.

I also grew up in various rural towns in the Panhandle of Florida, Alabama, and (very briefly) Louisiana, in addition to [once] small towns outside Chicago. In the South, the really poor, like my family, often either lived on trailers set up on the corner of someone's farm, or in some old house near the hollowed out local downtown core. I was always acutely aware of this dichotomy, as the middle-class families lived in nether regions unlike either.

I've seen plenty of the U.S. I know exactly what it looks like today, and I have a darned good sense of what it looked like before my time. And I know that small, dense downtown areas were once extremely common. Yes, people living out on small farms was also very common, but the patterns are totally different from today. Outside the downtowns was much less dense than today (because people lived on real farms growing food, not grass on a couple of acres), while the small downtowns were much more dense than today. We're simply more evenly spread out today.

Those downtowns were never as extensive as the small towns of Europe, as in most cases they only ever had several decades to grow before people either moved on or before cars became ubiquitous. But they were there. And they were walkable; infinitely more walkable than what came afterward. The pharmacy, the mill, the doctor, the insurer, the bank, the bars, the restaurant(s), many with apartments above them, and blocks upon blocks of tightly packed single-family homes. And you can walk the husks of many of them today, especially if you stay far way from the freeways, in places where areas were never redeveloped but just slowly abandoned. I've seen the same towns over and over again all across the U.S.--Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, West Virginia, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa. They're the same everywhere.[1] Before the car became ubiquitous it couldn't have been any other way. And even after the car downtowns still thrived, extending the reach of the downtown (e.g. at the time of my father, who lived in a rural area with a multi-acre subsidence "garden" but who could catch a ride into town to work at the pizza parlor). The single-family home plots grew only modestly. It wasn't really until the freeways that the pattern of American development was truly revolutionized, draining downtowns of their vitality across the country from the 1960s onward, following the migration away from the major cities from the 1940s and 1950s. And that's a relatively recent thing in American culture and politics.

[1] I think I saw the fewest downtowns in places like Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas, extremely poor states where people and services have been spread out, and even where people lived in close proximity (i.e. relatively densely packed single-family homes) you still didn't see any commercial conglomerations.