Before they put a grid over it, and restrained the ground from indifference, any place was as good as any other.
This excerpt from D.J. Waldie’s Holy Land: a Suburban Memoir, published by W. W. Norton, is reprinted by permission of the author.
Holy Land is a memoir about the intersection of place and character on the grid of metropolitan Los Angeles in Lakewood, California. Like the better-known Levittown, Lakewood was built all at once (between 1950 and 1953) as a “planned community.”
Holy Land’s own grid is composed of 316 numbered segments that range from the ratio of sand and cement in a coat of stucco to the death of the author’s father.
43
This suburb was thrown up on plowed-under bean fields beginning in early 1950. No theorist or urban planner had the experience then to gauge how thirty thousand former GIs and their wives would take to frame and stucco houses on small, rectangular lots next to hog farms and dairies.
In Long Beach, some businessmen assumed the result would be a slum. Others wondered if it would be a ghost town.
Someone asked the eager promoter sent by the developers, “Who will you sell all those houses to — the jack rabbits?”
Had you seen the delicate houses then, going up on the tract’s light gray soil, the ground scraped clean and as flat as Kansas, you might have wondered, too.
64
Every block is divided into the common grid of fifty-by-one-hundred- foot lots.
All the houses are about 1,100 square feet.
The houses are on ground so flat that the average grade across the city’s nine-and-a-half square miles is less than a foot. Tree roots, bulging into a gutter, pond dark water down half a block.
73
In 1952, a reporter for the local paper interviewed an average resident of the new suburb. He lived on Hayter Street. He had a wife, a son, and a daughter.
He was thirty-two. He earned $4,400 a year. Including property taxes and insurance, he paid $70 a month for his three-bedroom house.
He paid $19 a month on his new television set and $48 a month for his new furniture.
His wife knew only her next-door neighbors until she joined a sewing club on her block. There she met five more of her neighbors.
He and his wife were registered Democrats, but they had voted that November for Eisenhower.
He said he and his wife were looking for a church, but they didn’t know which one.
They wanted to get involved in the community, he said, but they wanted to get the grass growing in their front yard first.
80
My house is largely a void.
The emptiness is not just in the span of the rooms or in the attic and foundation spaces. All the walls are hollow, too.
Houses in Southern California are built as sketchily as possible, while still able to shed rain.
Walls are a thin, cement skin over absence.
Roofs are important here, but only when it rains. The rest is for modesty.
215
The grid limited our choices, exactly as urban planners said it would. But the limits weren’t paralyzing.
The design of this suburb compelled a conviviality that people got used to and made into a substitute for choices, including not choosing at all.
There are an indefinite number of beginnings and endings on the grid, but you are always somewhere.
221
The students at St. Timothy Lutheran School display their models of California missions in the shopping center.
The models of the missions are grouped at one end of a reflecting pool. The pools replaced the landscaped planters down the middle of the shopping mall when it was enclosed and air conditioned in 1978.
The students made their models out of cardboard, Styrofoam, plaster, and clay. Some of the models have trees made of twigs and moss.
The roofs of the models are painted red, in imitation of the red tile roofs of the original mission buildings. The walls of the models are painted pink or tan to look like stuccoed adobe.
The models are labeled with the name of the mission they represent— Santa Barbara, San Fernando, San Juan Capistrano, and San Luis Rey. The labels are a helpful concession, because all the models look much the same—a U-shape of connected one-story rooms, a two-story church partly closing the open end of the courtyard, and a low campanile for the bells.
When I was in grade school, nearly every student in the state made a model mission as part of the required California history curriculum.
Assembling one of these models, when you were eight or nine years old, made California history seem mostly about building materials.
237
I live on Graywood Avenue.
The next street west is Hazelbrook. The first street east is Faculty. These three streets, with about 140 houses, are bounded by Hedda Street and South Street.
All of my friends came from within the rectangle of these three blocks that I could reach without crossing at an intersection.
From age six to thirteen, I spent part of nearly every day and nearly all summer in the company of my brother and other boys who lived in houses like mine.
The character of those seven years is what makes a suburban childhood seem like an entire life.
280
I tell my tenants’ oldest daughter stories about my brother and my parents.
I tell her about my brother’s first electric train set and the mysterious light it made as the train circled in our room on Christmas morning.
I tell her about the week in 1953 when it rained with no letup and all the streets flooded.
I tell her about the time my brother, not yet four, took all the knobs off the doors in our house. He used a kitchen spoon to take out the screws.
I tell her about the time my brother jimmied open the aluminum window screen in his room, jumped out, and wandered away wearing only a diaper. He was two then. Sheriff’s deputies found him walking on Clark Avenue in Bellflower, about a mile away.
I tell her what my father said, and what my mother did.
My tenants’ oldest daughter is five. She wants to hear all the stories I have.
281
It is unlawful to tell the future in my city. One of the oldest ordinances in the city code book, adopted when the city incorporated in 1954, lists the illegal practices by which the future may not be foretold.
It is illegal to furnish any information “not otherwise obtainable by the ordinary processes of knowledge by means of any occult psychic power, faculty or force, clairvoyance, clairaudience, cartomancy, psychology, psychometry, phrenology, spirits, seership, prophecy, augury, astrology, palmistry, necromancy, mind-reading, telepathy, or by any other craft, art, science, talisman, charm, potion, magnetism, magnetized substance, gypsy cunning or foresight, crystal gazing, or oriental mysteries.”
306
There was very little that distinguished the border Southerners in my neighborhood from my father, who had grown up in Manhattan, or my mother, who had lived on Long Island and worked in New York.
There was very little that distinguished any of us living here. We lived in what we were told was a good neighborhood. Our eleven-hundred-square-foot houses were nearly the same.
We shopped at the same stores. We watched the same television programs.
From September to June, my brother and I wore Catholic grade-school uniforms of dark gray corduroy pants, and light gray short-sleeve shirts.
In summer, we wore white cotton T-shirts, denim pants, and high-top tennis shoes. Every boy in my neighborhood did.
Our parents were anxious to do what was expected of them, even when the expectation was not altogether clear.
Author D. J. Waldie lives in Lakewood, California, where he is a city official. He received the 1996 California Book Award for nonfiction, the 1998 Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council.
Photo illustration by Bob Aufuldish.
Originally published late 2000, in arcCA 00.2, “Common Ground.”
