Cities 07

Every part of Kenneth T. Jackson’s “The Drive-in Culture of Contemporary America,” is pretty spot on: his fact checking seems pretty respectable, his argument is clearly laid out, and his theme is steadily maintained. I guess the only real problem with his essay is that there is no particularly driving point (once again, I’m punning. Sorry).
Ok, let me back up real quick. Essentially, Jackson says that the advent of the automobile has radically changed the structure of the American city and, more importantly, the way Americans interact with their cities. First, cars create new needs, from the thousands of miles of highways to the garages accompanying even crappy houses. Cars also gave rise to new industries, such as the automotive insurance industry and the fast food market. Lastly, cars changed the forms of certain cultural artifacts: pushing individual stores together to form the first indoor malls (whoot Southdale), shifting the hotel from the uniquely charactered urban mode of housing to the motel, a cheap roadside locus for vacation stopovers and adulterous trysts, and even giving rise to the house on wheels, a.k.a. the mobile home.
Ok, let’s get a little more nefarious. Now that the automobile has drastically altered everything we hold dear, and our urban has sprawled, it turns out that we kind of need to own one of these things which has heretofore had the agency to change nations (commodities creating needs which in turn create the need for more of the commodity, trés Marx, eh?). Suburbs have taken over, everything is super far apart, people are being drawn out of the city center, public transit is shot (how symbolic is it, by the way, that the first person to be killed by an auto was a user of public transportation?), etc.
I’ll admit it is totally legit to write a primarily expository piece of work when one wants to just get a point across and not necessarily make some giant, controversial claim. This essay is not objective, however, it’s solidly anti-car, anti-suburb, and anti-urban-sprawl and I wish he’d just come out and say that rather than needling us with his cloaked message and passive-aggressively negative language like Aunt Edna asking when we’re going to settle down. If this were a historical piece, I could get over it, but Jackson seems to be hinting that there is some significance about the fact that is was cars particularly that sent us into a whirlwind of change. But what about skyscrapers? They have forever changed the face of the U.S. The Empire State Building, the first (or one of the first) building over 1000 feet was finished in 1931, which is during this sort of mid-World-War formative time in U.S. history about which Jackson mention repeatedly. Using up all the downtown space in a city for an application that is primarily commercial certainly could explain the popping-up and growth of suburbs. They created huge booms in the building industries (elevators, I-beams, windows, etc.) and to some extent tourism (the Empire State Building’s observation deck as destination, for example). I’m sure that there are all kinds of dirty dealings in their past, but Jackson mentions nothing of them. If cars are such a villain in our past, I want to know why, and Jackson never seems to get round to the point.
As an interesting bit of trivia, according to wikipedia (not the best source, I’ll admit), the Empire State Building’s spire was originally meant to be a dock for dirigibles. Imagine what our country would be like if those had become the main form of transportation.