Picture Windows

In Picture Windows, Baxandall and Ewen shatter naive stereotypes of suburban life, replacing them with a clear and compelling historical analysis that situates the development of the suburbs in relation to the pivotal issues of postwar American life. They examine the years from World War II to the present, chronicling the transformation of rural lands into tidy, uniform subdevelopments that promised all of the comforts of postwar technology. The building of the suburbs, the authors argue, was conducted in the context of heated debates over the American standard of living, visionary planners and architects’ attempts to solve the “housing crisis,” women’s liberation, and racial segregation. Baxandall and Ewen use interviews with hundreds of residents of three Long Island suburbs to weave together a story about suburbs past and present, and ultimately to insist on the centrality of suburban experience in the second half of the twentieth century.