Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town Read online

  Duckworth and I have been friends for more than a decade, and we usually have lunch after the class. He’s in his early fifties, with longish hair and a beard that he’s recently been growing and shaving off with disconcerting regularity. Today he’s bearded. I tell him that I’m sure the students appreciated his comments since many of them want to be real estate developers. I ask him what attracted him to the field. “I studied mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh,” he says, “and after graduating I got a job with Sun Oil in Philadelphia. After a few months I realized that my future was not in engineering, and I decided to get an MBA and go into business. Like most of my Wharton classmates, I wanted to be an entrepreneur and run my own company. In most fields, that meant spending years working your way up the corporate ladder and then, if you were lucky, having one shot at being CEO. I didn’t want that. I was already married with kids, and I was in a hurry. I looked around at business sectors where someone like me, with a college education and an MBA, had an advantage. I came across commercial home building, which I didn’t know anything about. It was a field that seemed to have many family-run businesses. I thought that I could bring modern business practices to bear and make my way.”

  Eventually, he landed a job with Toll Brothers, the largest home builder in the Philadelphia area. His responsibility as assistant to the president was finding and buying land and getting approvals. He learned the business but after nine years left the company. “I realized that I was never going to be a brother,” he jokes. He moved to Realen Homes, one of Toll Brothers’ smaller competitors. “Realen was a reputable company that owned apartment buildings that generated good cash flow, but the home-building side of the business was not doing well. It had lost money on a deal that went sour, the employees were demoralized, and there were no projects in the pipeline.” Duckworth was brought in as president and CEO to revive the operation. Using his Toll contacts, and Realen’s credibility as a company, he immediately optioned more than three thousand lots. “Over the next decade I built up company sales from twenty million dollars a year to a hundred million, making Realen the second-largest home builder in the Philadelphia area, after Toll,” he tells me.

  I know that Duckworth has recently left Realen to start his own real estate company, and I ask him about the projects he mentioned in class. “We’re in the middle of trying to get several of these village-type developments off the ground, which requires townships to change their zoning to allow smaller lots. It’s an uphill battle,” he says. “There is one project that looks promising, though. It just came to me through another developer, Dick Dilsheimer. I’ve known Dick a long time. He and his brother are old-fashioned merchant builders, that is, they buy land, subdivide it, build reasonably priced houses, and market them to buyers. For the last year they’ve been trying to get permission to build a small subdivision in southern Chester County. It’s nothing special: eighty-six houses on ninety acres of rural land. Dick’s problem is that the township doesn’t like his project. They keep telling him that they want something different, with smaller lots and more open space.”

  Duckworth calls Dilsheimer’s proposed development “as of right,” that is, it follows local zoning exactly and does not require a variance, or special approval. Nevertheless, the township is blocking him. “He could sue and probably win, but confrontation is not Dick’s style. Instead, he’s approached me to see if I would be willing to take the project off his hands. I’m interested, but it’s still too early to know how serious the township really is.”

  I’ve heard architects and city planners argue for more density and open space, but here the demand is coming from the citizens themselves. I ask Duckworth if he knows what has pushed the township in this direction. “I’m not sure,” he says. “It may have been their planning consultant, Tom Comitta.”

  I happen to know Tom. We share an interest in garden suburbs. He introduced me to Yorkship Village in Camden, New Jersey, which was built during World War I to house shipyard workers, and I repaid him by showing him Roanoke Court and some of the other residential groups in Chestnut Hill. If he’s involved, that might explain a lot. I decide to pay him a visit and find out more about this unusual township.

  Tom Comitta lives and works in the town of West Chester, the seat of Chester County. His office occupies half of a brick Victorian twin on Chestnut Street. The sign on the door says, THOMAS COMITTA ASSOCIATES, TOWN PLANNERS & LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS. Though he is trained as a landscape architect, much of Comitta’s business is advising small rural municipalities that need professional help with planning, zoning, transportation, and other development issues. One of his clients is Londonderry Township, the site of Dilsheimer’s proposed subdivision, which Comitta calls the Wrigley tract. “Londonderry is a small rural township in southern Chester County, at the edge of the Brandywine Valley,” he tells me. “They originally hired me to advise them on a large subdivision of three hundred town homes called Honeycroft Village. It’s a nice name, but it was an unimaginative plan with identical houses in groups of threes and fours.” The township supervisors were dissatisfied with the layout. “What else can we do?” they asked Comitta. He suggested a visit to a new planned community in another part of the county that would give them an idea of an alternative approach to residential planning.

  Considering it was a Saturday morning, the turnout was surprisingly good, he told me. The group included the three township supervisors, the township engineer, members of the planning commission, and a representative of the developer. The new community consisted of large houses, two-car garages, front lawns, and attractive landscaping. But as the group walked around and Comitta pointed out various features, it became apparent that in many small ways this development was different. To begin with, there were sidewalks shaded by trees growing in planting strips. The lots were smaller, the buildings closer together — and closer to the sidewalk. Cars were parked on the streets, but there weren’t any driveways or garages — these were in the back, accessed from rear lanes. Many of the houses had front porches and picket fences. These features gave the development a compact, villagelike appearance.

  They met a woman driving her car out of a lane. “She’d been living there about eighteen months, and she was rhapsodic,” Comitta remembers. “She said that it reminded her of her mother’s hometown.” The township engineer expressed some skepticism about the narrowness of the streets, but Comitta saw that most of the group were favorably impressed. The visit lasted about two hours. Afterward, they stood around talking. The representative of the Honeycroft developer said he was concerned about the time it would take his client to redesign the plan and go through an entirely new approvals process. Then the chairman of the planning commission said, “We might not be able to do this in Honeycroft, but wouldn’t this kind of thing be better for the Wrigley tract?”

  “That’s how it began,” Comitta told me. “The township was unhappy with Dilsheimer’s proposal, and the visit suggested an alternative at just the right time. The planning commission approved Honeycroft, but they want Dilsheimer to change his project. They’ve really given him a hard time, so I can understand why he wants to pull out. Now the township has asked me to work with Joe Duckworth on the Wrigley tract and see if we can get something that will be better than what we’ve done before.”

  2

  Seaside

  How a little resort community with porches and picket fences became a touchstone for suburban planning.

  The villagelike community that Tom Comitta had shown the Londonderry Township officials is an example of what is often called neotraditional development, a planning movement that began in the nineteen eighties. It was sparked by two events. In 1981 the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City mounted an exhibition called “Suburbs.” A large part of the show was historical and featured many of the early garden suburbs, such as Chestnut Hill and Yorkship Village, which Comitta had shown me. It also included forgotten classics such as Tuxedo Park outside New York City, Forest Hills Gar
dens in Queens, and Palos Verdes Estates in Los Angeles.

  The organizer of the exhibition was a forty-two-year-old architect and Columbia University professor, Robert A. M. Stern. Stern had become interested in the early garden suburbs thanks in part to Chestnut Hill. “I can distinctly remember Bob Venturi touring me past French Village in the late sixties,” he told me. The Cooper-Hewitt exhibition made an important polemical point: suburbs are an integral part of American urbanism. This was a bold claim. At the time, serious architects considered suburbs and suburban houses beneath contempt. Not Stern. “The modest single-family house is the glory of the suburban tradition,” he had written earlier. “It offers its inhabitants a comprehensible image of independence and privacy while also accepting the responsibilities of community.”1

  John Massengale, a University of Pennsylvania graduate student working in Stern’s office, coedited The Anglo-American Suburb, which accompanied the exhibition.2 It was the first time that many of the developments had appeared in print in over fifty years. What was the inspiration for the book? “Traditional town planning was something that was in the air,” Massengale recalls. “There was a general dissatisfaction among young architects with orthodox modernism, especially modernist city planning.” One could argue that the unpopularity of modernist houses, which Joe Duckworth had mentioned to my students, was a matter of taste, but there is no question that the modernist city planning policies of the nineteen sixties had been a disaster. Highway construction and urban renewal destroyed neighborhoods, and public housing, though built with the best intentions, by concentrating the poor in high-rise blocks created more problems than it solved.3

  The architectural reaction to modernism became known as postmodernism. But postmodernism proved too glib and weak-kneed, and unwilling to question the underlying premises of modernism. Tom Wolfe once compared postmodern architecture to Pop Art, calling it “a leg-pull, a mischievous but respectful wink at the orthodoxy of the day.”4 By the nineteen eighties, postmodern architects reached a parting of the ways. Some returned to the fold, so to speak, embracing various modernist revivals: minimalist International Style, early forms of Russian deconstructivism, and sculptural German expressionism. Others, including Stern, sought inspiration in a more distant past. In that sense, the renewed interest in the old garden suburbs should be seen not only as a revival but also as a desire to continue a tradition.

  Massengale calls The Anglo-American Suburb “the opening salvo in the whole garden suburb renaissance of the eighties.” The first fully realized project of that renaissance was not designed by Stern, nor was it even a suburb. Seaside, begun in 1982 and completed over the next two decades, is a holiday resort on the Florida Panhandle, consisting of approximately three hundred houses and roughly the same number of guest cottages, as well as shops, restaurants, and commercial buildings. Most Florida resorts are designed to look like country clubs; Seaside is different. Narrow streets radiate from a central green as in a New England village. The houses are vaguely Victorian, with traditional pitched roofs, porches, and white picket fences. The lots are small and the buildings extremely close together, bordered by heavy undergrowth. Sandy footpaths provide shortcuts behind the gardens. The casual atmosphere and cottagelike houses recall an old-fashioned beach community.

  The first time I saw Seaside was in 1989.5 The place was less than half finished, but it made a powerful impression. I belong to that generation of architects for whom the central issue in architecture is housing. As a student, I dutifully visited the modern housing that was considered exemplary: Le Corbusier’s Marseille apartment block, with its famous shopping street in the sky; Mies van der Rohe’s Lafayette Park in Detroit, which combined low-rise and high-rise buildings on an urban site; and Louis Kahn’s Mill Creek public housing in Philadelphia, then considered a model of its type. Truth to tell, these projects were uniform, standardized, and lifeless. I sensed — even if I didn’t quite admit it — that none was as lively as the old Italian and Greek towns and villages I visited on my student trips. I assumed it was just a question of time. Any residential development built all at once was bound to be uniform and somewhat dull, I told myself. Seeing Seaside was a shock, since here was a brand-new development that was neither uniform nor dull; instead it was varied and animated.

  Seaside was planned by Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, a young husband-and-wife architect team based in Miami. They had both graduated from Yale in 1974. Duany had briefly worked for Stern, and the couple had contributed to The Anglo-American Suburb. Although Duany and Plater-Zyberk were among the cofounders of Arquitectonica, a chic Miami architectural firm, they had since moved away from modernism and become interested in traditional urbanism. They both taught at the University of Miami, where they did town planning projects with students, studying old Florida towns such as Key West. Not coincidentally, they lived in the garden suburb of Coral Gables.

  George E. Merrick, who developed Coral Gables in the twenties, grandly called his project “America’s treed suburb.” Later planned suburban developments were known as “subdivisions,” and their developers as “subdividers.” Over time, subdivision acquired a pejorative connotation and was supplanted by the more wholesome community, as in golf course community and retirement community. But Duany and Plater-Zyberk did not refer to their project as a resort community — which is what it was — they called it a town.

  The small town occupies an iconic position in American popular culture. All countries have small towns, of course, but in the United States the small town embodies a particular ideal of neighborly democracy, self-sufficiency, and independence. In the mid-nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “the town is the unit of the Republic,” but the popular image of the small town really came into its own a hundred years later.6 Artists as disparate as Mark Twain, Thornton Wilder, Frank Capra, and Norman Rockwell stoked the small-town myth. So did Walt Disney, who made a small-town main street the centerpiece of his first theme park. Such images penetrated the public consciousness. When a 1990 Gallup poll asked people where they would prefer to live, despite the fact that four out of five of the respondents resided in a metropolitan area, small towns were strongly favored over suburbs, farms, or cities.7 By calling Seaside a town, planning it like a town, and incorporating small-town features such as picket fences and front porches, Duany and Plater-Zyberk were tapping into a powerful cultural tradition.

  Time, which featured Seaside in its 1990 “Best of the Decade” issue, speculated that “the 1990s might be ripe for the Seaside model…to become the American planning paradigm.” Between 1988 and 1990, Duany and Plater-Zyberk designed two dozen Seaside-like planned communities across the country. Although the recession of 1990 stalled or halted most of these projects, the end of the decade saw several new garden suburbs take shape, some designed by Duany and Plater-Zyberk, and some by others. The largest and best-financed was built by the Walt Disney Company near Orlando, Florida.8 The new town of Celebration included a high school, a primary school, and a health care facility, as well as a full-fledged town center next to a lake. The first phase of what would eventually house ten thousand was inaugurated in 1996. Closing the circle that had begun fifteen years earlier, one of Celebration’s architects and planners was Robert A. M. Stern.

  Despite the publicity, this handful of developments was hardly the new paradigm that Time foretold — it was a drop in the bucket among the tens of thousands of suburban developments built during that period. Yet the impact of the new generation of garden suburbs has been greater than their small number might suggest. This is thanks largely to Duany and Plater-Zyberk, who in addition to being talented planners are zealous and energetic advocates. They have codified the Seaside approach and coined the term traditional neighborhood development, or TND. They created a foundation that distributes information to interested municipalities, and they convinced President Clinton’s Department of Housing and Urban Development to incorporate traditional neighborhood principles into its in
ner-city housing projects. They conduct workshops and courses for the Urban Land Institute, the research and education arm of the real estate industry, which has endorsed traditional neighborhood development as a type of suburban planning. They are also cofounders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, which has become the prime forum for planners and architects interested in the subject. Thanks to the influence of Duany and Plater-Zyberk, new, large neotraditional urban neighborhoods have appeared in Denver, Albuquerque, and Orlando.

  Andrés Duany is harshly critical of conventional suburban planning. “The classic suburb is less a community than an agglomeration of houses, shops, and offices connected to one another by cars,” he says, “not by the fabric of human life.”9 His point is that suburbs have the right ingredients but that they are improperly put together, strung out along collector roads, functionally segregated, housing over here, office buildings over there, shopping elsewhere. “These elements are the makings of a great cuisine, but they have never been properly combined,” he says. “It is as if we were expected to eat, rather than a completed omelet, first the eggs, then the cheese, and then the green peppers.”10

  In a typical lecture he shows a slide of contemporary town houses, stepped back in a sawtooth pattern, with desultory landscaping and parking slots facing the front doors. He contrasts this banal arrangement with a street scene in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. He points out that the basic elements — attached row houses, asphalt, parked cars — are similar. He talks about how, in Alexandria, façades line up to form a wall defining the street, how slight variations between the houses make all the difference, how the sidewalk and the street trees separate the houses from the cars parked on the street. You don’t have to be a town planner to see which one is better. “The market shows that people are willing to pay several times as much to live in Old Town Alexandria as they are to live in a modern townhouse in a typical development, several times as much for termite-ridden beams and parking that on a good day is two blocks away.”11 Duany delivers the punch line with a flourish, like a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of his hat.