The yard and suburbia go together like Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lennon and McCartney, the Cubs and the June swoon. But now the yard is shrinking and that says a lot about America — not all of it good.
Have you noticed?
Drive down a street in any affluent suburb and you’ll be surprised at how little green you see. Sprawling driveways, vast back decks and megahouses with attached garages are eating up lawn faster than an army of termites attacking a two-by-four. In the process they are gradually destroying the open, park-like environment that the great railroad suburbs — places like west suburban Riverside — raised to the level of art.
Suburbia isn’t the only place where the yard is under attack, however.
In booming city neighborhoods where families once sat in lawn chairs and visited with their neighbors across the back yard fence, there is practically no lawn left. Gargantuan new houses in Chicago are swallowing up almost every inch of their lots while the back yards of old three-flats are being crammed with triple-decker porches, parking spaces and makeshift storage buildings.
All that’s missing is a tombstone — set in a concrete patio — proclaiming “R.I.P.: The Yard.”
What does the disappearing yard mean?
There are the obvious answers. We don’t have the time or the inclination to primp and prune the lawn anymore. So we’ve simply decided to devote less space to it.
Or there’s the Economics 101 explanation: Land prices are soaring in desirable neighborhoods and buyers want more interior space today than they did in the Ozzie and Harriet era. So developers are feeding the market what it wants — Goliath homes that tower over the little Davids next door while leaving hardly any room for trees and other vegetation. To their detractors, these giants are known as “McMansions.”
But houses are not simply widgets, to be analyzed through supply-and-demand charts. A house is an expression of self. It’s almost human. Think of a child’s drawing of a house — the pitched roof like a forehead, the windows like eyes, the door like a nose or mouth. Houses — and the yards around them — say a lot about our values and our relationship to our communities. They are cultural symbols, Rosetta stones that help decipher who we are and how we live.
And today, historians of the suburban landscape agree, we’re living it up — to the detriment of the yard.
Awash in stock market riches and corporate bonuses, Americans aren’t shy about showing off. Take the suburban driveway, once a relatively simple affair — placed on the far side of the property, the better to leave the lawn wide open, and leading to a detached garage in the back of the lot.
Now some driveways gouge a horseshoe-shaped swath through the grass, a configuration that means the driver never has to back up. Others make an L-shaped slice through the yard, going to and from a garage that is appended to the front of the house.
The new driveways may be asphalt, concrete or fancy brick, but whatever form they take, they provide a way to display wealth and, in the process, obliterate the lawn — now more car-scape than landscape.
As suburban historian Robert Fishman of Rutgers University cracks: “It’s not a real trophy house unless you have $200,000 of cars parked in front of it.”
A harsh moralistic judgment? Perhaps. But the suburban yard has always had moral connotations in the United States.
With people packing overcrowded cities in the 19th Century, wealthy Americans retreated to the suburbs where they sought haven from epidemics, corruption and the kind of helter-skelter development that jammed two houses on a single Chicago lot.
In the suburbs, as Columbia University historian Kenneth Jackson has pointed out, the ideal house came to be viewed as resting amid a picturesque garden or carefully cut lawn. It was a badge of status, respectability — and more.
Symbolically, at least, the lawn was a verdant moat, meant to keep the temptations and dangers of the city at bay.
But in such classic railroad suburbs as Riverside, laid out by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted in 1869, the lawn represented an asset for the community as well as for the individual homeowner. Each yard was part of a greater whole — with ornamental lawns in front of every house and arching elm trees along the street shaping a space like the nave of a cathedral.
As Fishman writes in his 1987 book “Bourgeois Utopias”: “The lawns, in conjunction with the roadside trees, create the illusion of a park. Their greenery transforms an urban street into a country lane. The lawn is the owner’s principal contribution to the suburban landscape — the piece of the `park’ he keeps up himself.
“Not surprisingly, lawn maintenance is considered a civic duty at least as important as any other form of morality. The lawn thus maintains that balance of the public and the private, which is the essence of the mature suburban style.”
But venture to west suburban Hinsdale, the Chicago-area capital of the nationwide “tear-down” housing phenomenon and you see that this balance is starting to go out of whack.
Since 1986, developers have demolished about 750 houses in Hinsdale — more than 15 percent of the suburb’s single-family housing stock — and even more demolitions are planned.
As Chateauesque mini-mansions rise alongside modest Victorian frame houses and postwar ranches, front yards are shrinking and the cherished park-like atmosphere is taking a hit.
Critics complain that there’s less space for children to play and that neighbors can practically gaze into each others’ living rooms.
“If people all want to live eyeball to eyeball, they should live in Oak Park,” says Mary Sterling, author of the guidebook “Hinsdale’s Historic Homes.” “These people are taking away their own privacy.”
A comparable trend is affecting booming Chicago neighborhoods, such as Lakeview, that were originally built as suburban townships and were incorporated into Chicago late in the 19th Century.
There, developers already have raised look-alike three-flats where porches and three-car-wide parking pads transform back yards into lifeless eyesores of planks and asphalt.
Now that such buildings have been banned in certain areas, the developers are tearing down modestly scaled old frame houses and building huge new single-family homes with back yards little bigger than a 33-cent stamp. Some of these dwellings are nearly 70 feet long, 25 feet longer than a typical home in these neighborhoods used to be.
Not only do they erase the greenery on their own lots, but the homes also shut light out of adjacent back yards and gardens — all this, ironically, in the city where Mayor Richard M. Daley is well-known for efforts to plant trees and flowers.
It’s getting so crowded out there in the city that the back deck, heretofore attached to the rear of a single-family house, often is banished to the top of the garage. To reach it, the homeowner might cross a steel bridge leading from the back of the home.
In a sense, things have come full circle from the early 19th Century, when if front and side yards in American cities were tiny, rear yards were almost as small — and overrun by rodents.
“Because regular garbage collection was rare before the Civil War, most families threw refuse out the doors to scavenging dogs and pigs,” writes Columbia’s Jackson in “Crabgrass Frontier,” his classic 1985 suburban history.
“Except for regular visits to the privy or outhouse, most people avoided the back yard entirely; a social occasion there would have been unthinkable.”
That was precisely what suburbanites wanted to get away from. So they voluntarily submitted to regulations, like those mandating a 30-foot front setback, that created a serene communal landscape.
Now, it seems, it’s every house for itself.
Why?
There is, first, the new space race, the one that is pushing the envelope of the house outward as never before.
According to developers, architects and building officials familiar with the trend, more and more children have their own rooms instead of sharing them. Master suites are as big as two or three old-fashioned bedrooms, with his-and-her walk-in closets, dressing rooms and bathrooms of imperial splendor.
Garages now often house three or four cars instead of one or two; home offices are rising in popularity. And then there is the new phenomenon of the “getaway room,” which allows parents to shut the door and get a moment’s peace when the teenagers take over the family room.
But for all that internal changes are making houses bigger and yards smaller, external ones matter too.
In a world of expressways, cars and malls that enable people to shop and socialize over a sprawling region rather than in a concentrated neighborhood, the sense of community is invariably diminished — and with it, the sense of civic duty that calls for maintaining a large and attractive front yard.
The personal computers in all those home offices only magnify this trend, focusing the homeowner’s attention inward on the World Wide Web rather than outward to the neighborhood.
It’s as if we’re all isolated dots in space, not joined like the interlocking roots in a good, thick piece of sod.
To their credit, suburbs such as Hinsdale have enacted laws designed to preserve the lawn — restrictions on the amount of asphalt or other impervious surfaces in the front yard, measures that allow more square footage in the home if the garage is detached.
But no one should expect the arguments over the disappearing yard to, well, disappear — not unless cities and suburbs do a better job of striking a balance between the rights of the individual property owner and the needs of the community.
And that won’t happen until homeowners realize that greenery on their streets is just as valuable as green in their wallets.
Without it, they’re likely to wind up in a “natural” setting, all right.
A jungle — the kind that’s made of concrete.
