Suburbs in the 1920s
In the 1920s, the suburbs in the United States experienced significant population growth driven by a combination of social and economic factors. As urban areas became increasingly crowded and less desirable due to industrial expansion, pollution, and inadequate social services, many middle-class white-collar workers sought refuge in suburban communities. The rise of electrified streetcars and the affordability of automobiles for the middle class facilitated this migration, allowing residents to access their jobs in the city while enjoying the benefits of lower-density living. Suburban life was often idealized, characterized by green spaces, better public schools, and a perceived healthier lifestyle compared to urban centers.
Developments like Shaker Heights in Ohio exemplified this suburban boom, featuring strict building codes and a focus on maintaining a homogenous community. However, these suburbs often reflected racial and social tensions, with efforts to exclude so-called undesirable populations. Throughout the decade, suburbs became intertwined with metropolitan areas, offering a blend of residential comfort and access to urban employment, cementing their role in the American landscape. Ultimately, the 1920s were pivotal in establishing the suburban lifestyle that would shape the demographic and cultural fabric of the United States for decades to come.
Subject Terms
Suburbs in the 1920s
In the 1920s, a number of factors caused the burgeoning suburbs of many cities to experience enormous population increases. As cities grew during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they became increasingly unpleasant places to live, due to widespread economic and industrial development, waves of immigrants perceived as undesirable, and inadequate or nonexistent social services. The development of streetcar lines and the expansion of automobile ownership to the middle class supported a suburban lifestyle.
Although early-twentieth-century urban centers supported economic and cultural life, white-collar workers sought to leave cities at the end of the workday because of generally unfettered immigration, overcrowded living conditions, industrial and business expansion into residential neighborhoods, industrial pollution, and corrupt city governments. Suburbanization also benefited from the developing American idealization of rural life. The development of electrified streetcars in the late 1880s spurred the growth of neighborhoods and villages at the edges of cities, along streetcar lines.
Streetcar Suburbs to Automobile Suburbs
Streetcar lines remained critically important in the 1920s, often augmented by bus networks connecting at streetcar stops. Although automobiles had been in use since the 1890s, the 1920s was the first decade in which members of the middle class could afford cars. Private automobiles were more expensive to operate than the streetcar, limiting access and creating prestige for those who could afford suburban housing and the cost of the daily automobile commute. However, increasingly crowded streets undermined the potential speed of automobiles, spurring the development of commuter rail lines, as well as commercial and business districts, along suburban streetcar routes.
Suburban life was highly valued, with its pastoral setting, green space, low-density living, better public schools, and more direct access to private schools, country clubs, and suburban shopping enclaves. Suburbs were often initially “dry” areas, in which the prohibiting of saloons was the first official act of new communities, supporting suburban residents’ belief that suburban life was better, healthier, and less sordid than life in urban centers.
Shaker Heights
Two entrepreneurial brothers, O. P. and M. J. Van Sweringen, purchased the 1,400 acres that had been the planned community of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, commonly known as the North Union Shakers. Since the land was on the hills that form a ridge east of Cleveland, the Van Sweringens’ new development was called “Shaker Village,” and after being renamed “Shaker Heights,” it was officially incorporated as a city in 1931. Shaker Heights grew explosively during the 1920s, becoming known as a garden city of substantial homes with strict building codes that limited colors and building materials and allowed only colonial, English, and French architectural styles. Other residential limitations included uniform setbacks and lot sizes as well as deed restrictions.
Purchasing the Nickel Plate rail lines from the New York Central Railroad, the Van Sweringen brothers built a “rapid transit” to take commuters from Shaker Heights to the new downtown Terminal Tower and rail station. Commercial business was initially restricted to the Georgian revival-style redbrick Shaker Square, a New England–style town green with four quadrants of shops that were promptly deeded back to the city of Cleveland. Land was set aside for churches, private schools, and country clubs, though the development of a superior public school system was critical.
Although it became a multicultural community in the 1950s, Shaker Heights in the 1920s was homogeneously white and Protestant. When an African American physician and his family moved to the suburb in 1925, gunshots were fired at their house, and their garage was mysteriously burned. The Shaker Heights Protective Association developed in the mid-1920s to keep out so-called undesirables, and it was not until the late 1950s that neighborhood associations such as the Ludlow Community Association facilitated the peaceful integration of the suburb.
Impact
The 1920s formed a pivotal decade in the migration of Americans from rural settings to the cities and suburbs. Aside from the Shaker Heights community, 1920s suburban societies included Cleveland Heights, Ohio, as well as areas of Long Island. As suburbs developed in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, they continued to remain connected to the nearby metropolis, which provided them with access to employment and infrastructure, while generally including middle-class and upper-class residents, lower population densities, higher rates of home ownership, and communally accepted covenants and restrictions.
Bibliography
Baxandall, Rosalyn F., and Elizabeth Ewen. Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Examines the cultural, economic, and political contexts of suburban development in Long Island suburbs.
Marshall, Bruce T. Shaker Heights. Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2006. Describes how the Van Sweringen brothers established and developed Shaker Heights as an elite residential community with deed restrictions, high architectural standards and style limitations, and reliance on public transportation.
Morton, Marian J. Cleveland Heights: The Making of an Urban Suburb. Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2002. Describes the development of the Cleveland Heights suburb, including its founding in 1901, its designation as a city in 1921, and its years of rapid growth during the 1920s. Includes archival photographs.
Stilgoe, John R. Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820–1939. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990. Documents the causes of the suburban diaspora, describing the commuter residential havens that initially sought to provide a genteel lifestyle exclusively for the upper and middle classes.
Teaford, Jon C. The American Suburb: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2008. Examines the governance, commerce, and cultural dynamics of the American suburb, using government records and statistics, newspapers, interviews, city council and town hall meeting minutes.