Column to be published in
Long Island Newsday

Fall 1997

Memoirs of a Suburban Pioneer Child

by James Howard Kunstler

One September day in 1954 my father and mother and I drove twenty miles east out of New York City in our Studebaker on the Northern State Parkway to meet the movers at our new house "in the country," as my mother would refer forever to any place where you cannot walk out your front door and hail a taxi. Until that time Long Island had been one of the most beautiful places in the United States, and our house was one small reason it would not remain that way much longer.
    It was in a "development" called Northwood outside Roslyn Village. The name had only a casual relation to geography. Indeed it was north of many things -- the parkway, the land of Dixie, the Tropic of Capricorn -- but the wood part was spurious since the tract was erected on old hayfields, and among the spanking new houses hardly a tree stood over ten feet tall. The houses, with a few exceptions, were identical boxy split-levels, clad in asphalt shingles of inoffensive pastel colors, but with two eye-like windows above a gaping garage door that gave the facades an unfortunate look of slack-jawed cretinism.
    Our house was one of the few exceptions, but not much better: a ranch clad in natural cedar shingles. It had a front porch too narrow to put furniture on and shutters that didn't close or conform to the dimensions of the windows. It sported no other decorative elaborations beside an iron carriage lamp on the front lawn that was intended to evoke ye olde post road days, or something like that. What it lacked in exterior grandeur, it made up in comfort inside. The three bedrooms were ample. We had baths galore for a family of three, a kitchen loaded with electric wonders, wall-to-wall carpeting throughout, and a real fireplace in the living room. The place cost about $25,000.
    Our quarter-acre lot lay at the edge of the development. Behind our treeless back yard stood what appeared to my eyes to be an endless forest like the wilderness where Davey Crockett slew bears. In fact it was the 480 acre estate of Clarence Hungerford Mackay, president and major stockholder of the Postal Telegraph Cable Company -- the precursor of Western Union. Mackay was long gone by then, his heirs and assigns scattered to the winds, and "Harbor Hill," as the property had been called, was in a sad state of dereliction.
    A lacework of gravel carriage drives overgrown by dogwood and rhododendron criss-crossed the property. At its heart stood the old mansion. I don't recall its exact style -- Shingle? Queen Anne? Railroad Romanesque? But it was much larger than any Northwood house. Juvenile delinquents had lit fires inside, and not necessarily in the many fireplaces. Yet for its shattered glass, musty odors, and bird droppings, the mansion projected tremendous charm and mystery. Even in ruin, it felt much more authentic than our own snug carpeted tract houses, and I know we regarded it as a sort of sacred place, as palpably a place apart from our familiar world. We certainly spent a lot of time there.
    This was the age before malls, and even highway strips were then still a relative rarity. My little cohorts and I spent a lot of time in Roslyn Village, about a mile by bike from Northwood. Roslyn had candy stores, a movie theater, the wonderful Bryant Library, and a splendid park with duck ponds and mill-races -- a marvelously exciting place to play. Even at eight years old, we understood very clearly that the village was a different kind of organism than our housing development, and a far superior one, too. The boring sterility of Northwood was obvious to us.
    There was also quite a bit of real countryside left in the vicinity. The horse farms, estates, and narrow dirt roads of Muttontown were easily reachable by bike a little east of Glen Cove Road, and just as we understood the difference between a real town and a housing tract, we also learned to recognize that suburbia was not really the country either -- despite what my mother said. I doubt that there is a single idea that has since become more deeply lost to our culture than the distinction between the town and the country. Three generations of suburban sprawl have obliterated it from our national psychology. We have become a cartoon nation and suburbia is our cartoon version of life in the country.
    One week in the spring of 1956, the bulldozers appeared in the great woods behind our house. Soon they had dug a storm sump the size of Lake Ronkonkoma back there, a big ocher gash surrounded by chain-link fencing. In the months that followed, the trees crashed down, the ruined mansion was demolished, new tract houses went up, and Clarence Hungerford Mackay's 480 acres was turned into another development called -- what else? -- Country Estates!
    A year later, my parents landed in divorce court, and I moved back into Manhattan with my mom, where I spent, not altogether unhappily, the remainder of my childhood.