Category Archives: Sociology

The American suburbs shaped religion more than American religion shaped the suburbs

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I have been studying and writing about religion in the American suburbs for about ten years now. After recently publishing a book on evangelicals embracing suburbia – Sanctifying Suburbia – and more recently also looking at a variety of religious traditions over time in the Chicago suburbs, I had this thought:

This is a broad statement. But if I were to put the two social forces side by side – suburbanization in the United States and religion (and all that entails) in the United States – I would come down on suburbs affecting religion more than the opposite. Here is a couple of ways to think about:

  1. As religious groups have moved to the suburbs, whether Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, or others, they often have to adapt to suburban settings.
  2. How much do religious congregations, organizations, and adherents in suburbia shape community life or social life at the structural level (beyond individuals, small groups, some social networks, more micro level)? Another way to put it: if these religious groups were not present, how different would suburban life be?
  3. The reasons Americans love suburbs and the way of life involved therein can override religious values and concerns such as loving their neighbor, serving the good of the whole community, and pursuing religious and spiritual goals.

I am going to keep thinking about this claim and may write more about it. Even as religion has served to provide meaning and structure for many humans and societies across time and space, suburbia is a powerful place and ideology.

US a nation of aspiring readers

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New survey results suggest Americans want to read:

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According to the poll, 82% of respondents think reading is a useful way to learn about the world, 76% say reading is relaxing and a whopping 98% of respondents with children in their household want their children to “develop a love of reading.”

Reading is “certainly aspirational,” said Mallory Newall, vice president of Public Polling at Ipsos. “We certainly want to be a reading nation.” And yet 51% of people read a book in the past month, according to the poll. In comparison, about 80% of people watched streaming services, used social media or watched a short-form video.

Interestingly, respondents who classify themselves as readers are also more likely than non-readers to consume other forms of media. So it’s not necessarily a direct competition between, say, reading and scrolling on your phone. When asked about the “reasons you don’t read more,” “other life activities” was the most common answer, which could mean anything from doing chores to sleeping to hanging out with friends…

But for many Americans it’s not going to take precedence. When asked what they’d do with one extra hour of leisure time, the top of the list is spending time with family. Below that is a tied race between watching TV, reading and exercising.

This can happen in many areas of life: we might have a high regard for something but day to day life does not reflect these ideals. Think New Year’s resolutions: stated goals but maybe short on follow through.

So if someone wanted to promote more reading among adults in the United States, where would they start? One could appeal to people’s aspirations – but they already think highly of reading and do not necessarily read a lot. Is it about making it easier to read (more affordable, more accessible, more compelling texts, etc.)? Or helping people meet their other interests – spending time with family, as noted above – so they can then read? Or making reading cool?

Small N and big percentage change, Paul McCartney and Wings edition

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I saw this headline earlier this week: “Paul McCartney’s Wings Album Soars More Than 5,000% In Sales.” For an artist who has sold millions of albums over 60 years of making music, this sounded important. But here are the details of the story:

According to Luminate, Venus and Mars sold 2,500 copies in the U.S. in the most recent tracking week. That’s a strong number for a reissue of an album that’s been around for decades — and especially notable given how little it moved just a week prior. In the previous frame, the set couldn’t even manage 100 copies. That means that from one span to the next, the Wings title enjoyed a sales spike of 5,435%.

The Venus and Mars surge can be attributed to a recent reissue that targets McCartney’s most devoted supporters. The full-length was re-released on vinyl in a half-speed remastered form, which may not sound like a major change, but it was enough to grab the attention of collectors and audiophiles alike. While the music remains largely the same, the format offers improved sound quality and a what must be a unique listening experience.

What happened is that this album was reissued on vinyl. This pushed sales of the record up. But it went from under 100 copies sold to 2,500 copies sold. This is a big percentage increase but not a big figure. 2,500 records moved in one week is less than a drop in the bucket in numbers of popular music sold after World War Two.

The headline is technically correct. Sales jumped over 5,000%! Sales spiked for Paul McCartney! Is it a meaningful change? No. Barely any records were sold in either week. Maybe plenty of people will click on this story because of the shocking statistic in the headline – I did – but there is not much news here.

This is what happens when you have a small number of cases overall. A small shift in numbers either way, up or down, can lead to a really big percentage change.

How flat Chicago is

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In some American cities, you can see mountains. Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver. What you see (and experience) in Chicago is flat land. How flat? Here is one way to approach it:

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According to “A History of Beverly Hills, Chicago,” a 1926 University of Chicago thesis by Cora DeGrass Heinemann, that Far South Side neighborhood, which now goes by Beverly, “is the highest land in Cook County.” That’s because the Blue Island Ridge, a glacial moraine, winds through it.

In the Dan Ryan Woods, a forest preserve that adjoins Beverly to the north, a historical marker for Lookout Point says the spot was “used as a signal station on [the] main highway of Indian travel.” Lookout Point offers a fine view of downtown Chicago, but at 660 feet above sea level, it’s not quite the highest spot in the city. That’s a little farther south, at 91st Street between Claremont and Western, where the land rises to 670 feet.

By contrast, the city’s lowest point, the lakefront, is at 577 feet. The lesson here: With less than 100 feet between its highest and lowest elevations, Chicago is one flat city.

This is some variation in elevation, almost 100 feet. I wonder if there are additional factors that help hide changes in elevation:

  1. An urban landscape. Lots of buildings and activity might distract from elevation changes.
  2. Chicago is not just any urban landscape; there are plenty of tall buildings. A ten-story building is roughly 100 feet tall and there are plenty of these across Chicago. Such buildings could help a 100-foot difference seem small in comparison.
  3. Gradual elevation changes. This could be from the natural landscape and/or the smoothing effects of development over decades.
  4. The location of the highest point is away from the center of the city. How many people pass by this location regularly compared to other parts of the city with less variation in elevation?

So Chicago is relatively flat – and other factors could contribute to the sense of flatness.

Chicago and the beginning of the soap opera

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The American soap opera started in Chicago:

Soap operas have long been trivialized as low-brow women’s entertainment. Even the term “soap” is pejorative when describing television. But there’s a deeper story to tell about the genre that changed storytelling on the small screen. Irna Phillips doesn’t get enough credit for her creation. She’s the Chicago woman who birthed the daytime serial for radio in the 1930s and ushered it onto television in the 1950s. Phillips established staples in the genre like the cliff-hanger; she was a prolific writer who knew the daytime audience wanted to see their own problems in stories. As she summed it up in 1947: “[T]heir own conflicts, their own heartache, their hopes and their own dreams. Everything isn’t happiness, is it? No.” Beyond the melodrama and romantic escapism, soaps took bold risks, embracing social consciousness with groundbreaking women-centered storylines.

According to this timeline, here is the early history:

1930: Painted Dreams, the first ever daytime serial, airs five days a week on Chicago radio station WGN. It’s written by an innovative woman named Irna Phillips, who plays the lead character: a sweet-hearted mother who talks out issues with characters in long expository scenes.

1930s: Soap maker Procter & Gamble (P&G) begins sponsoring daytime serials, birthing the name “soap opera.”

1932: When WGN refuses to take Painted Dreams national, Irna Phillips moves to competitor WMAQ radio and creates Today’s Children. This show goes national.

1937: Irna Phillips creates The Guiding Light, which is set in a fictional Chicago neighborhood. It follows Rev. John Ruthledge, who provides help to those around him. It is among the longest-running broadcast shows in history, airing on radio for 15 years and on television for 57.

1938: Chicago is firmly the mecca for the daytime serial. Fifty are on the radio, and most originate in Chicago.

How does a city recognize this cultural contribution? Chicago is known for a number of important cultural products but I was not aware of this deep connection to the soap opera. What could put this in the public eye; a historical marker or museum of the soap opera or public art or school curriculum?

And how much is this limited recognition connected to the ways soap operas intersect with gender, race, and social class? Thinking about Chicago, soap operas might not be considered by many to be high-brow cultural works compared to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra or the Art Institute or architectural movements. But Chicago also has a long history of mass entertainment.

Efforts toward a pedestrian mall in Wheaton in the 1970s

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As cities across the United States added pedestrian malls in the 1960s and 1970s, the suburb of Wheaton, Illinois considered developing its own. The efforts began in the late 1960s in the Wheaton Beautification Commission and a semi-mall was created by 1971. Today, Wheaton residents are familiar with summer dining replacing car traffic on Hale Street.

https://www.dailyherald.com/20240502/business/hale-street-tents-are-back-and-so-is-outdoor-summer-dining-in-wheaton/

In 1969, Harland Bartholemew and Associates issued The Wheaton Comprehensive Plan for the community which the city adopted in December of that year. Prior to the plan, a survey of residents commissioned by the firm noted the downtown shopping options as both an asset and a potential issue. On one hand, some residents noted: “Shopping facilities need improvement. While there are some fine shopping centers, the facilities in the central area leave much to be desired.” On the other hand, other residents said, “There is a fair level of shopping facilities and parking.”

Among the recommendations in the 1969 report was the closing of downtown Hale Street to pedestrian traffic. Here is the vision the planners provided:

Hale Street should be improved as an attractive pedestrian shopping mall and all vehicular movements – other than emergency or service vehicles – should be eliminated….Areas along each side would receive different treatment. Some would be areas planted with low shrubs, ground cover or flowers, with the latter being changed with the seasons. These would be surrounded by low walls which could be used as seats for resting purposes. Other walks or platform areas would also be slightly raised to assist in defining the service drive. One or more of these could contain benches and simply play apparatus for small children.

The city pursued this in the following years and the City Council on September 20, 1971, adopted this resolution:

Resolution R-48-71. Whereas, the Wheaton Beautification Commission in 1967 proposed the improvement of the central business area by creating a mall-type environment on Hale Street, between Front and Wesley Streets, and Whereas, this proposal was echoed in the Wheaton Comprehensive Plan, adopted in 1969, as one of the several suggested improvements to downtown Wheaton by the business community, and Whereas, with the encouragement and leadership of the Greater Wheaton Chamber of Commerce and the financial backing of the Hale Street property owners and merchants, this proposal can soon become a reality by constructing a semi-mall with trees, planters, benches, attractive brick paving, and curvilinear street alignment and other improvements to this area; Now, therefore, be it resolved by the City Council of the City of Wheaton, Illinois, that wholehearted support be and hereby is given to this project, and that the planning, engineering, parking layout revision and certain sewer changes be the City’s contribution in making the Hale Street semi-mall a reality; Be it further resolved that the proper departments of the City be authorized to proceed with the work upon establishment of an escrow account containing funds sufficient to finance the project…Motion carried unanimously…”

A description from the 1971 annual report sums up the changes made:

They did, however, join in the creation of a major accomplishment of 1971: the Hale Street semi-mall. Proposed by the City’s planning department and endorsed by the Beautification Commission nearly four years ago, the plan was revived with the help of the Greater Wheaton Chamber of Commerce, nurtured with the funds of Hale Street property owners and businessmen, and finally implemented by the City. The mall was officially opened on November 29th, and will provide future shoppers and visitors with an attractive invitation to stroll down Hale Street, browse a bit, and hopefully find what they need in the many quality shops on both sides of the gently-curved street. After shopping the customer can rest a while on one of the attractive planter benches surrounded by an area of paving brick. The Hale Street semi-mall, the first such project in the metropolitan area…

In 1975, a Chamber of Commerce publication said, “The completion of the Hale Street Mini-Mall inaugurated a greater impetus for change and growth in the seventies.”

In 1982, the downtown was struggling. In a local newspaper article discussing concerns, the suburb’s city planner said, “a pedestrian mall such as the one suggested in the early 1960’s, would be “disastrous” to merchants not in the mall.”

COVID-19 led to the complete removal of vehicular traffic on Hale Street in 2020. This continued each summer through 2024 as restaurants and residents enjoyed the extra dining space.

In sum, it appears Wheaton followed the broader patterns regarding pedestrian malls: it saw it as a possible solution to shopping activity moving out of downtowns and to strip malls and shopping malls, it put together a semi-mall with a curved street and limited traffic, and that mall faded away over time. With the onset of COVID-19 in 2020 and revived interest in more places in outdoor dining, a pedestrian mall has returned during warmer months.

When the pedestrian mall swept across American cities

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Part of the story of the American shopping mall included in Meet Me at the Fountain is the rise and fall of the pedestrian mall in cities:

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From 1959 through the early 1980s, more than two hundred American cities closed blocks of their downtowns to car traffic. B 2000, fewer than twenty-four of those original malls remained. (89-90)

As people and shopping moved to the suburbs, larger cities responded by trying to create something like an outdoor mall on busy urban shopping streets. But the experiment did not work:

By 2000, fewer than twenty-four of these original malls remained. The design intervention that was supposed to bring people back from the suburban mall had, instead, exacerbated the very problem it was trying to solve, turning downtown into car-centric, retail-first monocultures rather than pedestrian-first, mixed-use places. (90)

Many cities thought this was the answer but it turned out not to be; few of the pedestrian malls survived even a few decades.

Two thoughts hearing this account:

  1. Cities did not know what to do regarding the millions of Americans who moved out of big cities and to the suburbs after World War Two. Were they moving out of cities in part because of shopping opportunities? This was not the biggest issue but cities hoped they could at least attract more visitors with pedestrian malls.
  2. The copycat nature of retail development across places is interesting to consider. As malls proliferated, often borrowing architecture and techniques regardless of location, many communities also jumped on the pedestrian mall bandwagon. And then when they did not bring about the desired changes, they disappeared en masse as well. It makes sense that cities and developers would look to each other to see what works but it also seems like it can lead to fads and trying to shoehorn generic solutions to what can be complex local settings.

Bradbury, CA, an example of an exclusive wealthy suburban community

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A newspaper reports that it is hard to access the California suburb of Bradbury:

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There’s no shopping to speak of and there are barely any sidewalks to stroll on. Bradbury is almost entirely comprised of gated sub communities and homeowners associations, SFGate reported.

If you don’t already have a friend that lives there, it’s not wise to go up to someone’s house looking to make some. That’s because the town has an ordinance banning people from walking up to front doors and knocking without permission.

And since its founding in 1957, a time when the suburbs were expanding in Southern California, Bradbury and the residents who live there have said they don’t even want cars passing by to stop for even the briefest moment, urging them to keep driving.

The town is so locked down that most of the public roads that abut its borders are dead ends or run straight into tall, guarded gates with signs that read ‘Royal Oaks’ and ‘Bradbury Estates.’

The landscaping also does quite a bit to send the message that outsiders aren’t welcome, with most homes being shrouded by towering hedgerows and bushy trees.

Why? This is an small exclusive suburb. These are scattered across the American landscape where wealthy homeowners have their own community. According to the US Census, the community has 921 residents, the median household income is over $158,000, the population skews older, more than 90% of homes are owned, and over 80% of homes are worth over $1 million. The community’s website starts with text saying “Preserving Rural Tranquility” and features numerous images of the landscape and horses.

One thing wealth can do is enable people to live exactly where they want. This often involves living near other wealthy people. And this can mean putting distance or barriers between those with money and others. It sounds like this community has a variety of methods to discourage visitors who might threaten that rural tranquility, including gated subdivision, large landscaping features, no soliciting, and no sidewalks.

The National Public Housing Museum now has a building and tours of recreated residences

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Chicago has a long history of public housing and now a museum devoted to public housing in the United States has a building and unique exhibits:

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The Hatches’ time machine comes courtesy of the National Public Housing Museum, the only museum of its kind in the country. The museum opened its first brick-and-mortar space last week after years of being “a museum in the streets,” in the words of board chair Sunny Fischer.  Between now and the museum’s incorporation in 2007, Fischer — a former executive of the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation and a child of a Bronx public housing project herself — says the museum hosted education programs, walking tours and pop-up exhibitions “wherever they would let us,” including an early installation at the Merchandise Mart.

The museum’s new space offers a permanent home for its roving presentations — now free of charge to visitors — which trace the history of public housing from its origins in the New Deal to the present day. But unlike the typical museum, the National Public Housing Museum offers a deeper, more personal engagement through $25 tours of its recreated apartment spaces. The Hatch family apartment is one of two recreated units in the new museum, with the other, representing the Jewish Turovitz family, who were among the Addams Homes’ earliest tenants in the 1930s. A third unit has been transformed into a presentation on redlining, with visuals by local shadow-puppet theater Manual Cinema and a script by Princeton University scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.

The National Public Housing Museum was profoundly inspired by New York City’s Tenement Museum, a cluster of well-preserved and partially recreated tenement apartments on the city’s Lower East Side. That museum, which National Public Housing Museum Executive Director Lisa Yun Lee considers a “sister” institution, also incorporates oral histories from tenement residents and their descendants.

But the interactivity of the Chicago experience is largely without precedent. Tour-goers are invited to sample Jackson’s peanut brittle recipe, held in a cookie tin in the Hatch family kitchen. And visitors who tour the Turovitz unit next week will notice an empty space above the sink: the family’s gefilte fish bowl, on display there most of the year, will have been pulled off the shelf for their present-day Passover celebrations. Elsewhere, visitors can spin vinyl records and learn more about the public housing pasts of famous musicians in a “rec room” curated by DJ Spinderella, of Salt-N-Pepa fame, or listen to archival interviews in a studio named for late Chicago historian Dr. Timuel Black Jr.

Two thoughts in response:

  1. Chicago makes a lot of sense for a long-term museum regarding public housing. Because of the city’s size, its central location in the United States, and the particular history of public housing in Chicago with threads of location, race, local government, and public perception, this could be an important institution for the city and country for years to come.
  2. As someone who likes museums, I remember as a kid a different era where more material in museums involved reading text, outdated displays, and limited interaction. Those days seem to be gone and museum attendees have more ways to connect with exhibits, artifacts, and history. It would interesting to see how visitors respond to the interactive elements described above and what this might lead to regarding collective memory of public housing.

American toolkits for marriage and relationships amid social change

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How are changes in American education by gender affecting how American adults approach relationships?

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According to her calculations, in 2020, American husbands and wives shared the same broad level of education in 44.5 percent of heterosexual marriages, down from more than 47 percent in the early 2000s. Of the educationally mixed marriages, the majority—62 percent—were hypogamous, up from 39 percent in 1980. Crunching the numbers slightly differently, Benjamin Goldman, an economics professor at Cornell University, found that among Americans born in 1930, 2.3 percent ended up in a marriage where the woman had a four-year degree and the man did not. Among the cohort of those born in 1980, that figure was 9.6 percent. (This trend is hardly unique to the United States; hypogamy is becoming more common all over the globe.)

It’s a fragile time for gender relations in the United States. Young women and men appear to be diverging politically. Fewer people are dating, marrying, or having kids. Some commentators argue that there aren’t enough suitable bachelors to meet the standards of accomplished modern women. Meanwhile, a growing “manosphere” claims that women’s advancement is to blame for all manner of struggles experienced by lonely, unmoored men. Yet for all the worry that a chasm is opening between men and women, the rise in the number of hypogamous couples suggests that some men and women are doing what men and women have always done: coupling up regardless of differences and figuring out a way to get along. “It’s clear,” Goldman told me, “that understanding the dynamics of these couples is key to understanding the future of marriage.”

This reminds me of two sociology books I’ve used in classes that use the concept of cultural toolkits to help explain how people in the United States address love and relationships. One describes how Americans draw upon ideas of romantic love and covenantal love at different points of marriage. The second considers how evangelicals seek pragmatic solutions to everyday family life amid their commitments to Christian perspectives and a changing society around them.

The description of the article above sounds similar: social, political, and economic conditions are changing. Ideas about relationships are changing. More women are getting college degrees. Yet a good number of Americans still desire to be part of relationships and marriages. “Making it work” might require applying different tools in their toolkits about relationships and life or developing new toolkits.

In other words, marriage continues in the United States with some changes and how Americans approach it and the toolkits they have regarding it changes.