Finding humility and a kind of paradise
Where I LIVE is where most of us live -- in a tract house on a block of similar houses in a neighborhood of more of the same that extends as far as the Los Angeles street grid allows. My place on the grid is at the extreme southeast corner, but that’s mostly by accident. While I reside in Lakewood, I live in Los Angeles suburbia, where my home might as well be anywhere in its thousand square miles.
I’ve lived here my entire life, in the 957-square-foot house my parents bought when the idea of suburbia was brand-new and no one knew what would happen after tens of thousands of working-class husbands and wives -- so young and inexperienced -- were thrown together without a guidebook and expected to make a fit place to live. What happened after was the usual redemptive mix of tragedy and joy.
At least suburbia wasn’t an oil company camp in Bakersfield, a walk-up tenement in a crabbed Midwestern town, or for a few, a shack at the end of a dirt road somewhere in the border South. You probably don’t regard your tract house as a place of pilgrimage, but my parents and their friends in Lakewood did. They weren’t ironists and were grateful for the comforts of a not-quite-middle-class life. For those who stayed, the aspiration wasn’t for more but only for enough.
It’s slightly more than 50 years since an idling road grader waited for the last harvesters in the lima bean fields of Lakewood, the start of a very long line that eventually scraped the rest of the county into suburbia. Despite everything that was ignored or squandered in achieving it, I believe a kind of dignity was gained. More men than just my father have said to me that living here gave them a life made whole and habits that did not make them feel ashamed. They knew what they found and lost in suburbia.
Mostly, they found enough space to reinvent themselves, and some knew they did it very badly. They lost what little adolescence they retained after the Depression, the Second World War and the Korean conflict. That loss makes them seem so remote to their sons and daughters.
Urban planners tell me that my neighborhood was supposed to have been bulldozed away years ago to make room for some other paradise of the ordinary, and yet these little houses on little lots stubbornly resist, loyal to an idea of how a working-class neighborhood should be made. It’s an incomplete idea and it doesn’t always work, but it’s still enough to bring out 400 park sports coaches in the fall and 600 to clean up the weedy yards of the frail and disabled on Volunteer Day in April and more than 1,600 to sprawl on lawn chairs and blankets to listen to summer concerts in the park. I don’t live in a tear-down neighborhood but in one that makes some effort to build itself up.
Suburbia isn’t all of a piece, of course, and there are plenty of toxic places to live in gated enclaves and McMansion wastelands in L.A. Places like that have too much -- isolation in the one and mere square footage in the other -- and, paradoxically, not enough. Specifically, they don’t have enough of the play between life in public and life in private that I see choreographed by design in Lakewood.
There’s an education in straight and narrow streets when they are bordered by sidewalks and a shallow setback of 20 feet of lawn and framed by unassuming houses set close enough together that the density is about seven units per acre. With neighbors just 15 feet apart, we’re easily in each other’s lives in Lakewood -- across fences, in front yards and even through the thin stucco-over-chicken-wire of house walls. You don’t have to love all of the possibilities for civility handed to us roughly by these circumstances, but you have to love enough of them or you live, as some do, numbly or in a state of permanent, mild fury.
I once thought my suburban education was an extended lesson in how to get along with other people and their children. Now I think the lesson isn’t neighborliness; it’s humility. Growing up in Lakewood, I can remember only one marker of relative success: the frequency with which a new car appeared in a neighbor’s driveway. Even today, it’s hard to claim moral status through personal gain, in our peculiar American way, in a suburb that is still pretty much the same for everybody, no matter what you think you’re worth.
Lakewood’s modesty keeps me here. When I stand at the head of my block and look north, I see a pattern of sidewalk, driveway and lawn, set between parallel low walls of house fronts, that aspires to be no more than harmless. We are living through a time of great harm now, and I wish that I had acquired all the graces my neighborhood gives.
My neighborhood in 1950 was the place where the suburban stories of L.A. were first mass-produced. They were stories then for displaced Okies and Arkies, Jews who knew the pain of exclusion, Catholics who thought they did and anyone white with a steady job. In 2003, the same kind of stories begin here, except the anxious, hopeful people who tell them are as mixed in their colors as our whole, mongrel L.A. The Public Policy Institute of California reported recently that Lakewood has one of the highest rates of ethnic diversification among California cities. I continue to live here with anticipation because I want to find out what happens next to the new narrators of suburban stories.
My loyalty is the last habit that anyone from outside would impute to those of us who live here; we’re supposed to be so dissatisfied. But I’m not unusual in living in Lakewood for all the years I have. Nearly 27% of the city’s residents have lived here 30 years or more. Perhaps, like me, they’ve found a place that permits restless people to be still. The primal mythmakers of L.A. are its real estate agents, and one of them told me that Lakewood attracted aspirant home buyers because “it’s in the heart of the metroplex.” Or, maybe, it’s just in the heart. I live here because Lakewood is adequate to the demands of my desire, although I know there’s a price to pay.
A Puritan strain in American culture is repelled by desires like mine and has been since a brilliant young photographer named William A. Garnett, working for the Lakewood Park Corp., took a series of aerial photographs in 1950 that look down on the vulnerable wood frames of houses the company was putting up at the rate of 500 a week. Even after 50 years, those beautiful and terrible photographs are used to indict suburbia. Except you can’t see the intersection of character and place from an altitude of 500 feet, and Garnett never came back to experience everyday life on the ground.
The everyday isn’t perfect. It confines some and leads some astray into contempt or nostalgia, but it saves others. I live where I live because the weight of everyday life here is a burden I want to carry.
D.J. Waldie is the author of “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir” and, with Marissa Roth, of “Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out.” He is also a Lakewood city official.