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The Crack in the Picture Window
This is an angry, brilliantly funny but deadly serious report about the housing developments that are blighting the landscape and souls of America’s suburbs. The misfortunes of John and Mary Drone, who “bought” a nothing-down, life-time-to-pay box on a slab in Rolling Knolls, are simply extensions of the problems that beset nearly everyone who exists on the fringes of a city. Even if the nearest development seems safely zoned from your front door, you will find the Drones and their neighbors disturbingly like your own.
The new suburban slums, by concentrating young couples of similar background, income bracket, and outlook in rows of inadequate houses, have made a stultifying unnatural community. The frustrated residents, anchored to their tiny yards by their colossal mortgages, seek desperately for some form of self-expression.
They try to amuse themselves with the wonderful gadgets of our civilization, but the easy credit is hard to pay and their debt becomes ever more burdensome. Surrounded by friendly neighbors, but no true friends, they attempt anything from handicrafts to neighborhood sex to relieve their boredom. But the only way out is to move out and that’s economically impossible.
Who is responsible for this situation? The builders, whose most useful tool is the chisel? The banks, who are getting the frosting from this miracle-mix cake? The federal government, who by guaranteeing veterans’ mortgages has put a solid base under the whole shaky construction? The local communities, whose lack of zoning laws has permitted these excrescences? The suckers who have bought the houses?
Keats discusses every aspect of life in a development. His account is supported by solid facts and figures but it is presented in personal terms to show you an existence that combines all of the worst aspects and none of the advantages of suburban living. If you ever wondered what goes on under those regimented roofs, this book will tell you. And if you already know, it will make you want to get up and break something. Fortunately the book also tells you how to put the pieces back together.
An ex-reporter for the Washington Daily News, John Keats has managed to avoid the worst traps of the suburban home owner, but he writes with the authority of one who has himself looked on the hunted face of America’s new suburbs.
The new suburban slums, by concentrating young couples of similar background, income bracket, and outlook in rows of inadequate houses, have made a stultifying unnatural community. The frustrated residents, anchored to their tiny yards by their colossal mortgages, seek desperately for some form of self-expression.
They try to amuse themselves with the wonderful gadgets of our civilization, but the easy credit is hard to pay and their debt becomes ever more burdensome. Surrounded by friendly neighbors, but no true friends, they attempt anything from handicrafts to neighborhood sex to relieve their boredom. But the only way out is to move out and that’s economically impossible.
Who is responsible for this situation? The builders, whose most useful tool is the chisel? The banks, who are getting the frosting from this miracle-mix cake? The federal government, who by guaranteeing veterans’ mortgages has put a solid base under the whole shaky construction? The local communities, whose lack of zoning laws has permitted these excrescences? The suckers who have bought the houses?
Keats discusses every aspect of life in a development. His account is supported by solid facts and figures but it is presented in personal terms to show you an existence that combines all of the worst aspects and none of the advantages of suburban living. If you ever wondered what goes on under those regimented roofs, this book will tell you. And if you already know, it will make you want to get up and break something. Fortunately the book also tells you how to put the pieces back together.
An ex-reporter for the Washington Daily News, John Keats has managed to avoid the worst traps of the suburban home owner, but he writes with the authority of one who has himself looked on the hunted face of America’s new suburbs.
- GenresNonfiction
198 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1956
8 people are currently reading
126 people want to read
About the author
John C. Keats
11 books6 followersOften confused with English poet John Keats, John C. Keats was a newspaperman and social critic whose often biting commentary skewered American trends of the 1950s and 1960. The "second" Keats claimed to be a descendant of the poet, and one of his author photos showed him standing before the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, Italy.
After serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the Pacific Theater during WWII, Keats worked as a reporter for the Washington Daily News and later went on to become a freelance writer. His articles appeared in over 44 publications in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain and West Germany. In America, he contributed to Field & Stream, True, Outdoor Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, Playboy, The National Geographic, Look and Vanity Fair.
He was the author of 13 books, some New York Times Best Sellers, with translated copies appearing in nine languages. Although perhaps best known for satirical social criticism leveled against post-war housing, automobiles and schools (The Crack in the Picture Window, Houghton, 1956; The Insolent Chariots, Lippincott, 1958; Schools Without Scholars, Houghton, 1958; The Sheepskin Psychosis, Lippincott, 1965;) he also wrote biographies (Howard Hughes; The Biography of a Texas Billionaire, Random House, 1966; and You Might As Well Live; The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker, Simon & Schuster 1970) as well as history (They Fought Alone, Lippincott, 1963; and Eminent Domain, Charterhouse,1973 )and two semi-autobiographical works (The New Romans, Lippincott, 1967; and Of Time and an Island, Charterhouse, 1974.) His love of travel and of the old wooden boats that passed his riverfront home prompted two additional works (See Europe Next Time You Go There, Little, Brown, 1968 and The Skiff and The River, Herrick Collection, 1988).
During his career Keats received the Washington Guild Front Page Award for best human interest story, June 2, 1949, in the Washington Daily News; The Literary Achievement Award from the Georgia Writers Association for non fiction in 1958 for his book, Schools Without Scholars; The Sydney Hillman Foundation Award for the 1962 television documentary, "Conformity" appearing on WCAU-TV in Philadelphia; a Colonial Dames of America Citation in 1977 for his book, "Whatever Happened to Mom's Apple Pie?" (Houghton, 1976) and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1961 to pursue his writing and research work for "They Fought Alone."
From 1974 until retiring in 1990, Keats taught magazine writing at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, in upper New York State. Proud of his ability at having earned a living as a writer, during lectures Keats was fond of echoing the famous lexicographer Samuel Johnson's dictum that "Only a blockhead writes for anything but money." He urged his students to aspire to obtain assignments from high profile, reputable publications and "not those that are commonly used to wrap fish."
Upon retirement, Mr. Keats resided part time in Italy; Savannah, Georgia; Washington, D.C., and Kingston, Ontario. He always maintained his summer home on the St. Lawrence River between Alexandria Bay, New York and Rockport, Ontario.
After serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the Pacific Theater during WWII, Keats worked as a reporter for the Washington Daily News and later went on to become a freelance writer. His articles appeared in over 44 publications in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain and West Germany. In America, he contributed to Field & Stream, True, Outdoor Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, Playboy, The National Geographic, Look and Vanity Fair.
He was the author of 13 books, some New York Times Best Sellers, with translated copies appearing in nine languages. Although perhaps best known for satirical social criticism leveled against post-war housing, automobiles and schools (The Crack in the Picture Window, Houghton, 1956; The Insolent Chariots, Lippincott, 1958; Schools Without Scholars, Houghton, 1958; The Sheepskin Psychosis, Lippincott, 1965;) he also wrote biographies (Howard Hughes; The Biography of a Texas Billionaire, Random House, 1966; and You Might As Well Live; The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker, Simon & Schuster 1970) as well as history (They Fought Alone, Lippincott, 1963; and Eminent Domain, Charterhouse,1973 )and two semi-autobiographical works (The New Romans, Lippincott, 1967; and Of Time and an Island, Charterhouse, 1974.) His love of travel and of the old wooden boats that passed his riverfront home prompted two additional works (See Europe Next Time You Go There, Little, Brown, 1968 and The Skiff and The River, Herrick Collection, 1988).
During his career Keats received the Washington Guild Front Page Award for best human interest story, June 2, 1949, in the Washington Daily News; The Literary Achievement Award from the Georgia Writers Association for non fiction in 1958 for his book, Schools Without Scholars; The Sydney Hillman Foundation Award for the 1962 television documentary, "Conformity" appearing on WCAU-TV in Philadelphia; a Colonial Dames of America Citation in 1977 for his book, "Whatever Happened to Mom's Apple Pie?" (Houghton, 1976) and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1961 to pursue his writing and research work for "They Fought Alone."
From 1974 until retiring in 1990, Keats taught magazine writing at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, in upper New York State. Proud of his ability at having earned a living as a writer, during lectures Keats was fond of echoing the famous lexicographer Samuel Johnson's dictum that "Only a blockhead writes for anything but money." He urged his students to aspire to obtain assignments from high profile, reputable publications and "not those that are commonly used to wrap fish."
Upon retirement, Mr. Keats resided part time in Italy; Savannah, Georgia; Washington, D.C., and Kingston, Ontario. He always maintained his summer home on the St. Lawrence River between Alexandria Bay, New York and Rockport, Ontario.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 8, 2014
The major theme of this book is how housing developments, by drawing people with similar backgrounds and tastes, create monotonous situations that are not truly communities. As each person attempts to find something that differentiates his or her self from the neighbors, that something is consumed by the neighbors, rendering it no longer unique. At some point, gadgets bought on time begin to be used as a way to alleviate the monotony, leading to a vicious cycle.
Through all this, the inhabitants must endure the pitiful houses sold to them by swindling builders. Keats discusses how these houses are a money-making racket for disreputable builders that will erect the worst box for the highest price. This book is a must-read for anyone who is looking into buying a "home" in a subdivision. Although old, much of it is still relevant.
Through all this, the inhabitants must endure the pitiful houses sold to them by swindling builders. Keats discusses how these houses are a money-making racket for disreputable builders that will erect the worst box for the highest price. This book is a must-read for anyone who is looking into buying a "home" in a subdivision. Although old, much of it is still relevant.
August 12, 2010
We are living in the suburban future predicted in this book, and we have lived to see perpetuated the shoddy construction, environmental devastation, mortgage fraud, runaway debt, inner-city decay and congestion detailed in its infancy by this book. Keats' sardonic wit is fun to read, and he peppers the text with supportive quotes from sociologists, government studies and news articles to add credence to his fictional example. Come on publishers - what more do you need besides a housing crisis to reprint a classic account of how the mess started?
December 1, 2016
I found a copy--the lone copy--of this book at the University of Utah's Marriott Library. It looked like it had been rebound at least once. Many of the pages were dog-eared or had pencil markings in them. The book smelled musty and its pages showed signs of yellowing. These features are definitely not something one experiences with electronic books, and I felt a unique stewardship of care for this object d'art.
I was excited to open it, and its contents did not let me down.
The Crack in the Picture Window was a pop-sociological exploration of the then-newly booming suburban communities which sprawled from America's cities in the 1950s and 1960s. John Keats, a contemporary journalist for the now defunct Washington Daily News, tells the story of a fictional post World War 2 family experiencing American life in the age of the so-called suburban boom. Veterans of the war were returning home en masse, and needed places to live and to start families. It was a sociological crisis, and the United States government attempted to respond by building housing projects. John and Mary Drone begin their post-war life in the Jubal Early Homes development, one of the many, barely adequate, government housing projects for returning veterans. On the very first page of the first chapter of the book, Keates vividly describes these homes.
"The Jubal Early Homes, government rented to veterans only, was a dilapidated set of jerry-rigged barracks situated in a near-swamp on the outskirts of Alexandria, Virginia, and here, in the mud and in the smell of sour milk and dirty diapers lived John and Mary Drone with their two infant children. Through their fiberboard walls they could easily hear the racket of near-by National Airport and the constant roar of traffic on Route One. These sounds came through as a sort of background to the lighter, more immediate tones of their neighbors' radios, cursing, love-making, and crying babies."
There were few options available for these returning veterans, who came home to low-wage jobs in a country that was ill-equipped to handle an influx of twenty-somethings.
Post War
When looking back on this era with twenty-first century attitudes, we often consider this the period of the the "post war economic boom," when families could afford to live in quaint homes of their own, and own a vehicle with which the breadwinner could commute to his job in the city. The housewife would, of course, mind the house, the children, and participate in "home front" activities like cooking, cleaning, shopping, and socializing. Even she might have a separate car with which to shuffle around the children or run other errands. Indeed, the American automobile was the ultimate symbol of freedom. Car commercials abounded, and still resonate today--almost everyone knows the Dinah Shore jingle "see the USA in your Chevrolet" (1949). The automobile made the suburbs possible, and suburban homes themselves began to be designed with the automobile in mind, such as the "ranch style" homes that included attached garages or car ports and paved driveways.
America was on the move, and the only way to go was up. These were the years of Eisenhower and the space race, the birth of the electronic computer, and the construction of the interstate highway system. American attitudes were positive and hopes were high. The forward progress of the United States economy could, seemingly, never be stopped; but economies are cyclical and for all the benefits of capitalism, it comes with a certain amount of greed.
Keats shows the darker side of this suburban boom, where opportunistic business people capitalized on poor veterans who needed more space for their young families. These swindling home builders “figured how many houses [they] could possibly cram onto a piece of land,” land which had once been beautiful countryside now bulldozed into muddy wasteland. One particularly deceptive builder shaved off a few feet of each house so that he could fit 94 homes on a tract of land zoned for 90. The descriptions of the crammed-in houses themselves are of boxes, sitting on basic cement slabs, lined up on muddy unpaved roads, often missing essential rooms like basements and dining rooms, and overall poorly built structures. In most of these homes, a large window in the living room was marketed by the builder as the "picture window." The picture it framed, according to Keats, was “of the box across the treeless street.” It is as if the occupant of the home--usually a housewife--is looking into a mirror of bleakness and sameness; of confinement and of sorrow.
The suburban life was perhaps hardest on these women, who in their dutiful 1950s gender roles stayed home with the children, cooked and cleaned in their small houses, gossiped with other women who were in every way the same as they were, and dressed-up to welcome their husbands home. On rainy days, laundry would be hung to dry (and drip) in lines strung across the living room and the kitchen, and on nicer days the outside air afforded her to hang the laundry to dry on a clothes tree, and perhaps even go for a neighborhood walk. But each walk was a dreary reminder of the situation in which suburbanites lived. No brilliant sunny day could mask the tedium of suburban life.
"Each identical house, with its identical picture window, with its identical dwarf cedars, the identical gullies, in the eroding lawns, always the same, the same, the same, row on row, would not inspire Mary's [Drone] personal skylark to pour forth its full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
And there was no way out."
Consumerism
The popularity of the television offered a sense of respite from the depressing development life. But television still served a greedy agenda. With the entertainment of television shows came advertisements for gadgets: from automatic dryers, to vacuum cleaners, to automatic dish washers, gadgets were built for the suburban dweller who could no more afford to purchase them than they could purchase the box in which they lived. The rise of credit--the ability to buy something "on time" by making payments--allowed families to purchase all of these things, and forever have a "crushing sense of financial anxiety." And they needed to purchase these gadgets, because all of their neighbors purchased these gadgets. The American way was beginning to take hold, and "keeping up with the Joneses" was its mantra. The man of the house now commuted to the city in an automobile he did not own, to earn enough money to make payments on gadgets he did not own, to come home to a house he did not own. And every other development resident did the same thing.
While perhaps daytime television commercials were targeted toward women, the do-it-yourself industry targeted men and promised that anyone could repair or improve their little, poorly-built box. Keates describes do-it-yourself repairs ironically: one homeowner's shingles blew off his house, so he went to the hardware store, which was owned by the builder, to purchase expensive tools and replacement shingles to repair the roof of the home that the same builder originally built. Poorly built wooden doors and floors that warped with water damage necessitated constant maintenance, and the development builder was only too happy to supply the residents with tools and expensive replacement parts (but not necessarily know-how). In an already debt-encumbered lifestyle, hiring a professional was reserved only for the wealthiest of homeowners.
Split Levels
Wealthier families could afford a slightly larger home, and families like the Drones sought to move up into one of the new "split level" mansions after they (quickly) find out that a two bedroom box on a cement slab would not be sufficient space for their growing family.
Mary became pregnant, and she Mary wanted out of that box!
After the first wave of suburban boom towns, the next wave of slightly larger homes hit the consumer market. These homes, advertising "split-level living" as the "home of the future" cost nearly double what the ramblers of yesteryear cost, but offered very little extra space. Through clever marketing, these new style homes were sold as the home of the future, and consumers could purchase one for "nothing down" by trading in their old home. Of course, their old box was not worth what they paid for it, and the homeowners were charged for repairs and remodeling that, they were told, were needed to put the house in "sellable" condition. In addition, if the new buyer defaulted on their payments, the original owner, under the VA guarantee, was liable.
Split level homes remained highly popular until the late 1980s; in fact, many of the homes in the neighborhood in which I grew up were of this style (our home was a rambler with a full basement). Split level homes can be nice, with full basements and spacious rooms on the main and upper levels, but early split level homes seemed like just another way to swindle veterans out of their money. Keats describes the early split levels as offering little more than the boxes on cement slabs of older developments. And the advertisements for these homes of the future were dubious at best.
"SPLIT LEVELS--Four Bedrooms--Maid's Room--Dining Room--TWO Living Rooms--Servant's Entrance--Floor to Ceiling Walls--$16,970--NOTHING DOWN--JUST AHEAD"
But the potential home buyer soon found out to what levels advertising connivery could ascend. The homes did have dining room, just not a dining room--meaning sure, there was room to dine in a small alcove off of the kitchen. Yes, there was a fourth bedroom, a second living room, and a maid's room, just not at the same time. John and Mary drone, having been development dwellers for years now, were not amused. John Drone told the salesperson:
"A split level looks to me. . .like you just dug half of a basement half deep enough and finished it off and stuck the bedrooms over the basement room."
The half basement could be used as any number of rooms: a bedroom, a maid's room, a second living room, a study, or anything the home buyer wished. (We are reminded of reading about "cilk" in our history classes.) In truth, the thousand square foot split level home of the future was not much different from the 700 or 800 square foot boxes of the present.
The Crack in the Picture Window is a haunting commentary on our time as well. A lot has changed in the United States since the 1950s, but a lot remains the same. Housing developments never went away; they became the way the majority of Americans live. No doubt because of regulation, housing developments have greatly improved, but are by no means perfect. The development in which I live, for example, has schools, churches, parks, swimming pools, lawn care, well-kept roads, and organized community events. But the rows of boxes on the treeless streets look hauntingly similar to the developments in Keats' book. There are trees on my street, but they are very young, and will take 20+ years to grow into a mature tree. I have yet to run into the social problems described in the book, but that doesn't mean they don't exist across subdivisions across modern America.
Likewise, home builders and mortgage brokers are still using every method they can think of to swindle home buyers out of their money. The subprime fiasco that nearly collapsed the world economy in 2008 is a perfect example that some things never really change.
I was excited to open it, and its contents did not let me down.
The Crack in the Picture Window was a pop-sociological exploration of the then-newly booming suburban communities which sprawled from America's cities in the 1950s and 1960s. John Keats, a contemporary journalist for the now defunct Washington Daily News, tells the story of a fictional post World War 2 family experiencing American life in the age of the so-called suburban boom. Veterans of the war were returning home en masse, and needed places to live and to start families. It was a sociological crisis, and the United States government attempted to respond by building housing projects. John and Mary Drone begin their post-war life in the Jubal Early Homes development, one of the many, barely adequate, government housing projects for returning veterans. On the very first page of the first chapter of the book, Keates vividly describes these homes.
"The Jubal Early Homes, government rented to veterans only, was a dilapidated set of jerry-rigged barracks situated in a near-swamp on the outskirts of Alexandria, Virginia, and here, in the mud and in the smell of sour milk and dirty diapers lived John and Mary Drone with their two infant children. Through their fiberboard walls they could easily hear the racket of near-by National Airport and the constant roar of traffic on Route One. These sounds came through as a sort of background to the lighter, more immediate tones of their neighbors' radios, cursing, love-making, and crying babies."
There were few options available for these returning veterans, who came home to low-wage jobs in a country that was ill-equipped to handle an influx of twenty-somethings.
Post War
When looking back on this era with twenty-first century attitudes, we often consider this the period of the the "post war economic boom," when families could afford to live in quaint homes of their own, and own a vehicle with which the breadwinner could commute to his job in the city. The housewife would, of course, mind the house, the children, and participate in "home front" activities like cooking, cleaning, shopping, and socializing. Even she might have a separate car with which to shuffle around the children or run other errands. Indeed, the American automobile was the ultimate symbol of freedom. Car commercials abounded, and still resonate today--almost everyone knows the Dinah Shore jingle "see the USA in your Chevrolet" (1949). The automobile made the suburbs possible, and suburban homes themselves began to be designed with the automobile in mind, such as the "ranch style" homes that included attached garages or car ports and paved driveways.
America was on the move, and the only way to go was up. These were the years of Eisenhower and the space race, the birth of the electronic computer, and the construction of the interstate highway system. American attitudes were positive and hopes were high. The forward progress of the United States economy could, seemingly, never be stopped; but economies are cyclical and for all the benefits of capitalism, it comes with a certain amount of greed.
Keats shows the darker side of this suburban boom, where opportunistic business people capitalized on poor veterans who needed more space for their young families. These swindling home builders “figured how many houses [they] could possibly cram onto a piece of land,” land which had once been beautiful countryside now bulldozed into muddy wasteland. One particularly deceptive builder shaved off a few feet of each house so that he could fit 94 homes on a tract of land zoned for 90. The descriptions of the crammed-in houses themselves are of boxes, sitting on basic cement slabs, lined up on muddy unpaved roads, often missing essential rooms like basements and dining rooms, and overall poorly built structures. In most of these homes, a large window in the living room was marketed by the builder as the "picture window." The picture it framed, according to Keats, was “of the box across the treeless street.” It is as if the occupant of the home--usually a housewife--is looking into a mirror of bleakness and sameness; of confinement and of sorrow.
The suburban life was perhaps hardest on these women, who in their dutiful 1950s gender roles stayed home with the children, cooked and cleaned in their small houses, gossiped with other women who were in every way the same as they were, and dressed-up to welcome their husbands home. On rainy days, laundry would be hung to dry (and drip) in lines strung across the living room and the kitchen, and on nicer days the outside air afforded her to hang the laundry to dry on a clothes tree, and perhaps even go for a neighborhood walk. But each walk was a dreary reminder of the situation in which suburbanites lived. No brilliant sunny day could mask the tedium of suburban life.
"Each identical house, with its identical picture window, with its identical dwarf cedars, the identical gullies, in the eroding lawns, always the same, the same, the same, row on row, would not inspire Mary's [Drone] personal skylark to pour forth its full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
And there was no way out."
Consumerism
The popularity of the television offered a sense of respite from the depressing development life. But television still served a greedy agenda. With the entertainment of television shows came advertisements for gadgets: from automatic dryers, to vacuum cleaners, to automatic dish washers, gadgets were built for the suburban dweller who could no more afford to purchase them than they could purchase the box in which they lived. The rise of credit--the ability to buy something "on time" by making payments--allowed families to purchase all of these things, and forever have a "crushing sense of financial anxiety." And they needed to purchase these gadgets, because all of their neighbors purchased these gadgets. The American way was beginning to take hold, and "keeping up with the Joneses" was its mantra. The man of the house now commuted to the city in an automobile he did not own, to earn enough money to make payments on gadgets he did not own, to come home to a house he did not own. And every other development resident did the same thing.
While perhaps daytime television commercials were targeted toward women, the do-it-yourself industry targeted men and promised that anyone could repair or improve their little, poorly-built box. Keates describes do-it-yourself repairs ironically: one homeowner's shingles blew off his house, so he went to the hardware store, which was owned by the builder, to purchase expensive tools and replacement shingles to repair the roof of the home that the same builder originally built. Poorly built wooden doors and floors that warped with water damage necessitated constant maintenance, and the development builder was only too happy to supply the residents with tools and expensive replacement parts (but not necessarily know-how). In an already debt-encumbered lifestyle, hiring a professional was reserved only for the wealthiest of homeowners.
Split Levels
Wealthier families could afford a slightly larger home, and families like the Drones sought to move up into one of the new "split level" mansions after they (quickly) find out that a two bedroom box on a cement slab would not be sufficient space for their growing family.
Mary became pregnant, and she Mary wanted out of that box!
After the first wave of suburban boom towns, the next wave of slightly larger homes hit the consumer market. These homes, advertising "split-level living" as the "home of the future" cost nearly double what the ramblers of yesteryear cost, but offered very little extra space. Through clever marketing, these new style homes were sold as the home of the future, and consumers could purchase one for "nothing down" by trading in their old home. Of course, their old box was not worth what they paid for it, and the homeowners were charged for repairs and remodeling that, they were told, were needed to put the house in "sellable" condition. In addition, if the new buyer defaulted on their payments, the original owner, under the VA guarantee, was liable.
Split level homes remained highly popular until the late 1980s; in fact, many of the homes in the neighborhood in which I grew up were of this style (our home was a rambler with a full basement). Split level homes can be nice, with full basements and spacious rooms on the main and upper levels, but early split level homes seemed like just another way to swindle veterans out of their money. Keats describes the early split levels as offering little more than the boxes on cement slabs of older developments. And the advertisements for these homes of the future were dubious at best.
"SPLIT LEVELS--Four Bedrooms--Maid's Room--Dining Room--TWO Living Rooms--Servant's Entrance--Floor to Ceiling Walls--$16,970--NOTHING DOWN--JUST AHEAD"
But the potential home buyer soon found out to what levels advertising connivery could ascend. The homes did have dining room, just not a dining room--meaning sure, there was room to dine in a small alcove off of the kitchen. Yes, there was a fourth bedroom, a second living room, and a maid's room, just not at the same time. John and Mary drone, having been development dwellers for years now, were not amused. John Drone told the salesperson:
"A split level looks to me. . .like you just dug half of a basement half deep enough and finished it off and stuck the bedrooms over the basement room."
The half basement could be used as any number of rooms: a bedroom, a maid's room, a second living room, a study, or anything the home buyer wished. (We are reminded of reading about "cilk" in our history classes.) In truth, the thousand square foot split level home of the future was not much different from the 700 or 800 square foot boxes of the present.
The Crack in the Picture Window is a haunting commentary on our time as well. A lot has changed in the United States since the 1950s, but a lot remains the same. Housing developments never went away; they became the way the majority of Americans live. No doubt because of regulation, housing developments have greatly improved, but are by no means perfect. The development in which I live, for example, has schools, churches, parks, swimming pools, lawn care, well-kept roads, and organized community events. But the rows of boxes on the treeless streets look hauntingly similar to the developments in Keats' book. There are trees on my street, but they are very young, and will take 20+ years to grow into a mature tree. I have yet to run into the social problems described in the book, but that doesn't mean they don't exist across subdivisions across modern America.
Likewise, home builders and mortgage brokers are still using every method they can think of to swindle home buyers out of their money. The subprime fiasco that nearly collapsed the world economy in 2008 is a perfect example that some things never really change.
April 23, 2024
Keats was writing in the tradition of Vance Packard and other sociologists who commented on the silly things we do as a society. Keats was questioning the sanity of living in a home in the suburbs. Of course, these days there are a lot of people who would kill for such a home. I still enjoyed the novel look he took of life in a bedroom community.
May 14, 2012
This book is so relevant to what is happening today, despite the fact that it is over 50 years old. I am absolutely shocked that it is not back in print. If you are interested in the ongoing housing crisis during our seemingly endless the Great Recession, find a copy of this book!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews