Eras.

• Author: Solomon, Daniel
• Position: City planning charges in California

Most seven or eight year olds have only a dim memory of being two and a half. For them, the period five years before lies across an unbridgeable gulf of history, lost in the mists of time. If one happens to have been born in late 1939, the experience of being seven or eight years old was particularly odd, because it seemed that for everyone, grown-ups too, the period five years before lay across the same unbridgeable gulf of history. When people returned from whatever extraordinary way they had spent the years of World War II, the time before the war did not seem retrievable, nor for most Americans of the middle class was there any desire to retrieve those struggling, doubt- ridden times. In many forms of endeavor there was no going back, but in no field was the sense of a decisive break, a total severing of the distant past of five years before more complete than in town planning.

There are multiple reasons for this abrupt severing of history and many are well documented. The stories of the G.I. Bill, the Federal Highway Act of 1949, the actions of the Federal Housing Administration have been told by Kenneth Jackson in Crabgrass Frontier, later by James Howard Kunstler in The Geography of Nowhere and Mike Davis in City of Quartz. They describe the public policies that kept the nation from sliding back into depression after the War, but which also decanted the wealth of cities and built the post-war world of slum clearance, urban renewal, the suburban sub-division, the shopping center and the highway.

But these vast and influential public policies were only political and economic gasoline poured on a psychological fire. The War changed people. For so many it was an absolutely unprecedented and life-forming experience of competence. The veterans returned from war in a stupor of hyper-competence, ready to build the world anew. And the places they returned to were the dingy cities of depression neglect where whole neighborhoods had not even had a coat of paint since the 1920's.

My former teaching colleague Donn Reay was chief architect for the Royal Canadian Air Force in Greenland. By the age of twenty-six, he had built a city in a few months, a form of intoxication from which there is no recovery. My favorite movie as a little boy was "The Fighting Seebees" starring Richard Widmark as the commander of a battalion of combat engineers, hacking down jungles and building their way across the Pacific. The war economy had drawn millions of Southern blacks to these neglected city neighborhoods, and the reaction of the veterans, the Richard Widmarks with their aviator shades and...