Suburbia, Part 1: Where I grew up in Daydreaming on the Porch

Suburbia: land of middle class dreams and hopes for the “good life” fulfilled. Good schools. No crime. No gangs. Just a lot of invisible angst. Shady streets, two–car garages, neatly manicured lawns, tasteful homes and decor, swimming pools, sidewalks, hardly anyone knows anyone else. That describes my suburban neighborhood, alright.

I grew up in the Aurora Gardens subdivision in the Algiers section of New Orleans — quintessential “burbs” in the sixties (1961-69, to be exact). Oak trees surrounded us and lined the streets. I mowed lawns. I played basketball and football with kids who lived nearby. My elementary school was one block away. The parochial school was two blocks from us. Junior high five blocks. All walking distance. Convenience store 8 blocks away.

Strip shopping centers were only a mile or so distant, my favorite and the nearest having a grocery store, dime store, barber shop and Royal Castle hamburger restaurant. I often rode my bike up to the dime store where I bought my first abridged, Whitman Publishing Co. edition of “Huckleberry Finn.” (I have a copy of the same edition today).

Overall my subdivision and surrounding suburban tracts comprised a few square miles, a grid of interwoven streets, some winding, some straight and long. There was the lower middle class section around the junor high, and the uppper middle class section in the blocks perpendicular to Woodland Drive. Across Woodland Highway there was an older subdivision which preceded ours by about 10 years. It was known as “Old Aurora.” Somerset and Durham streets were directly in back of our house, a modified Cape Cod with a large bay window in front where my mother had a long row of exquisitely cared-for purple African violets in little containers. To this day I am unable to successfully grow them.

To a 12-year-old boy, the houses on our block seemed huge and dreamy, like mansions. The house across the street was enormous in my estimation when we first moved to Aurora Gardens. Of course, it really wasn’t, as I discovered in later years. A pediatrician, his glamorous socialite wife, and their five children lived there. The oldest son, Buddy, seemed arrogant to me, and we never got along, even though we were the same age.

Our street was, in fact, unique, not your typical suburban block. It stood out, and it had two houses in particular that were of ultra-modern design. I never could quite figure them out. One of them was next door to us and it burned in a bad house fire in 1964 when I was 13. I will never forget that night. It was quickly rebuilt, and the owners became one of my lawn mowing customers.

I grew up on TV sitcoms with nice, unreal, surreal families such as depicted in “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best.” Let’s not forget “The Donna Reed Show.” You want to know what the dreammakers and myth spinners fed us on TV in those years? Those shows, with very excellent actors and characters, were a microcosm of the times. I didn’t say a realistic reflection. How much does popular culture via media like television tell the truth? Were we just being entertained? What was going on in those shows? Sometimes I think a scholar could write a dissertation on any one of them that I just mentioned. It probably has been done. (Remind me to check Dissertation Abstracts).

Where we lived in the flush years of the 1960s in New Orleans, the oil and gas industry in the city, and in Louisiana, was in its heyday. Thousands of mid-level managers and execs flooded into the city and got set up in the suburbs. Ours was notable for these transplants, often from places like California and Texas. It was all very affluent. Back then, I took it all for granted. This was the way people lived, raised families, sought out what their vision of the good life was, and that was that. By the time I was a junior in high school, it all gave me a big dull, achy feeling. A kind of numbness. I couldn’t process it all. I just knew I sure didn’t fit into that scheme of things.

Starting in 1968, a documentary photographer named Bill Owens, working for a newspaper in Livermore, Calif., began taking pictures that would later become the documentary photography book, “Suburbia.” It was published in 1972, right about the time I was finishing up college and getting ready to leave New Orleans for good. I think I actually came across the book in the late 1970s. Unlike the rather bleak outside shells of suburbia in Denver that Robert Adams photographs, Owens gets into the interiors of a certain class of suburbia, call it what you will. It is a vision that has always rather disturbed me. It’s real and unreal. Slightly tawdry and yet strikingly normal and human. Complex. On the surface, it is easy to dismiss his work, but upon deeper examination his vision of the world comes to light.

I keep wondering: Is his work universal or a reflection of the times he was living in?

If you want to delve a bit more deeply into the subject of Bill Owens’ photographs of suburbia, check out this:

https://www.billowens.com/photographs/suburbia