Oh, yeah, another rant. I watched a documentary on Levittown produced by Hofstra in 1994. Really terrrible: annoying, cloying music snips; repetitious; a bunch of acontextualized reminiscences you wouldn't care about unless you knew the speakers. Some great, rare footage of construction, though. I wanted to know so much more about the geography - why that particular area? What were the economics of building and the economies of scale? How has the town matured and changed? What have been the challenges of living there?
(Kind of a poignant note in one interview - a woman who has lived there 40 years and still hates it and hates the suburbs.)
Then I watched "Suburbs: Arcadia for Everyone," thinking it was an ironic title (Pride of Place series, RAM Stern narrating, 1986) but alas, no. Turns out that the example of 20 or so new single-family manufactured housing units dropped into the South Bronx shows that the suburbs are for everyone, even poor blacks. (They come with bars already on the windows; I am not making this up.)
There was some good footage of historical suburbs but Stern isn't a very gifted narrator and the overall premise was flawed. Not that I am bashing the suburbs (he does a little of that with the strip) so much as questioning the premise that everyone should live that way.
Posted by otto0114 at July 5, 2007 05:32 PM