In the mid-1950s, the idea that the cutting edge of pop would come to be dominated by relatively young people writing songs for and about people even younger was a revolutionary notion, one that in the next decade would come to be taken for granted.
How much did the music help encourage youth culture or the youth culture encourage the music? This was a period with a growing number of children and teenagers and a different sense of what youths could do and contribute to society.
It would be interesting to compare that time period to today regarding music. Some of those original influential youths from the 1950s and 1960s music scene are still alive. They continue to make new music as well as play their old hits. They are no longer young; but do they continue to carry on a youthful spark or the youth culture of that time? Or do they not matter much as younger people continue to make, remake, and innovate music.
It is hard to imagine otherwise but imagine the purveyors of rock music in the 1950s and 1960s were not young – not Elvis, Chuck Berry, the Beatles, etc. – but rather musicians in their 30s and 40s. What might be different – the sound? The lyrics? The scene? Would rock music be different today based on those changes back then?
There was local time, determined by the position of the sun at high noon at a centrally located spot in town, usually City Hall. There was also railroad time, which put Columbus, Ohio, six minutes faster than Cincinnati and 19 minutes faster than Chicago. Scattered across the country were 100 different local time zones, and the railroads had some 53 zones of their own.
To do away with the inevitable confusion, the railroads took the matter into their own hands, holding a General Time Convention in the fall of 1883 at the Grand Pacific Hotel at LaSalle Street and Jackson Boulevard. (Today, a plaque at the location — which is just north of the Chicago Board of Trade Building — notes its significance).
Its purpose: to develop a better and more uniform system of railroad scheduling. The Standard Time System — based on the mean solar time at the central meridian of each time zone — was formally inaugurated on Nov. 18, 1883, a day that came to be known as the “Day of Two Noons.”
But it was an astonishingly rapid and successful shift, syncing up almost the entire country in the space of a week, with all roads leading back to Chicago.
Three interrelated features of Chicago stand out to me as contributing to being the place where time zones were agreed upon:
A railroad center with numerous major railways running in and through the city and region.
Business leaders, specifically railroad leaders, pushing for standard time zones in order to help their commercial activity. Chicago was a center for commerce and industry.
The ease of getting in and out of Chicago – lots of railroads, central location in the United States – helped facilitate a meeting there.
These features of Chicago still hold today. The city continues to be a railroad center with lots of traffic throughout the region. It is still a business center, a leading global city. And it still serves as a transportation hub. Just as the railroad executives found it a good place to gather, see the number of important meetings that take place near O’Hare Airport, in the city, and throughout the region.
Might such a meeting in 1883 taken place elsewhere? Perhaps. If something as consequential as time zones were to be decided in 2025, which American city might we expect to host the discussion: the political center of Washington, D.C.? The leading global city of New York? The tech capital in San Francisco?
Commercial businesses such as retail stores, restaurants, and entertainment venues depend on a strong local population to generate steady sales and foot traffic. The more households that surround a shopping center, the greater the built-in customer base to support those businesses and the more attractive the redevelopment is for a developer. For Charlestowne Mall, the surrounding area has relatively low population density compared to other successful shopping corridors in the region. With fewer nearby residents, there is less day-to-day demand to sustain large-scale retail, making it harder to attract and retain major tenants. The graphic below provides the basic demographic and market data within a five-mile radius of the Charlestowne Mall site. Developers and businesses rely on this data to evaluate the market feasibility of proposed commercial uses and to understand the strength of the local customer base.
From this analysis (which continues for about 10 more malls in addition to the chart above), several features of Charlestowne stand out: the nearby population is relatively small and the mall has no interstate access. It does have a higher median household income than some malls, including the two others on the list that were demolished (but had more residents nearby with one having interstate access and another not).
So is the real story about this property about mall overdevelopment? As the number of shopping malls expanded in the growing suburbs of the end of the twentieth century, how many were doomed from the beginning? Or perhaps developers and communities were too optimistic about how many people malls might draw or projected more nearby residents than ended up living nearby. Did anyone foresee the rise of online shopping or the shifts in consumption habits?
The trend in recent years is to try to save malls with new features that will continue to pull people to the property. But the malls that are already closed – such as Charlestowne – can struggle to replace them with something local residents and leaders want. This property still has fewer people nearby and no interstate. Even if the mall building is closed, it is hard to lose the dream of the mall and all that went with it including local revenue and a local gathering spot.
“We need a White House that is not for the tech billionaires, but for forgotten Americans,” he said.
“In that spirit, we should ask Americans — in rural communities, urban centers and hollowed-out factory towns — for their ideas of what to do with the space,” Khanna said.
This is an interesting comment as it contrasts that who have a lot versus those who are forgotten. Rather than note what these forgotten Americans do or do not have, they are instead linked to geographic areas. Three in particular: rural areas, the centers of big cities, and factory towns.
The primary residential and business space left out of this list is the suburbs. These areas are often assumed to be wealthy, full of people who have made it in American life. They have at least some major control of their own destiny. They may not be tech billionaires but they are not forgotten.
There are communities in the suburbs not doing well. There are suburbs that are more rural than urban, suburbs that experience similar issues facing urban centers, and suburbs that have lost important jobs ad have limited business activity. These struggling suburbs can sometimes be near wealthy suburbs.
And it could be interesting to see how such designations line up with survey responses from Americans regarding whether they feel forgotten and where they live.
A real estate agent might know a lot about neighborhoods or communities. Looking at the local marketing realtors do, I see that they claim to know about different suburbs. In particular, they have knowledge about the local housing market through what has sold and what has not. They can also talk about other aspects of the community, such as schools and nearby amenities.
If I go to websites like Zillow or Realtors.com, they offer neighborhood information with each property listing. This includes a map, walkability scores, ratings of local schools, other nearby listings and recent sales, and more.
But what does it take to know about a neighborhood? Who can accurately describe what it is like to live there or how the character of a place plays out? Does anyone offer insights from local residents? Do real estate agents live in the communities they sell in or have secondhand information from local residents and organizations?
This reminds me of two posts I put together years ago on how to learn about a suburb. There are lots of sources of information about communities and some of it is available online. But some of it is not. Talking to people or walking through a community or reading local histories can provide some insights that are harder to intuit online.
Who else might be a “neighborhood savant”? A local journalist, where they are still available. A local political official or a longstanding member of a community institution. A local historian. Residents who take an interest in and actively participate in their neighborhood.
“Libertyville will be featured quite a bit,” he said. All the business names were kept as is and some of the shopkeepers appear in the film, he added.
The village was to have been one of the locations for another of his holiday films, Charles said. That was delayed but filming for “Christmas at the Zoo” has been approved by the village and is planned for December.
“Libertyville has been on our radar for some time,” he said. “Having had a great experience shooting ‘Exes’ there, we’re happy to be coming back.”…
Local actors will be used in the film and Libertyville will be listed as an official filming location on the IMDb website.
With all these real shots of Libertyville, it appears the film does not say it takes place in Libertyville. From one Facebook post and a brief shot in the movie trailer, it appears the community in the film is named “Mill Creek.” According to Wikipedia, there are at least a few communities in the United States named “Mill Creek.”
I have wondered about whether filming in real locations matters for those watching a film or TV show. Couldn’t they just have found some establishing shots or used a studio to film? This is commonly done so how much does it matter that this was set in a real place that the film’s creators were familiar with? Perhaps the residents of Libertyville can watch and discuss and then compare what people who watch from elsewhere think.
I remember a time when a 40-year mortgage — and a 50-year adjustable rate mortgage — built some buzz back around 2006 and 2007 for people who were struggling to buy a home. It didn’t work out well if you had to sell when home prices collapsed.
The 40-year mortgage has a history going back to the early 1980s, according to an earlier report in the Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, when 18% fixed-interest rates were squeezing consumers out of buying homes. It never proved to be the most popular product…
Rocket Mortgage notes online that the Detroit-based giant offers a 40-year mortgage with the first 10 years being interest-only payments. These mortgages can be available for loan amounts between $125,000 to $2 million.
I wonder how many people apply for and receive 40 year mortgages.
Reading the reactions to the idea of a 50 year mortgage, I was struck by how much of the conversation was dominated by financial details. How much equity would a homeowner have after 20 years? When would the interest parts of the payment taper off compared to paying down principal? How would interest rates be different for a 50 year loan? I should not be surprised given how much homeownership is now seen in the United States as a financial investment. It is a tool to build wealth, perhaps the biggest tool most people will have.
But homes are about more than that. Americans have ideas about the virtues of owning a home compared to being a renter. A homeowner might feel differently and act differently regarding their property if they have a mortgage. Numerous neighborhoods and communities are structured around homeownership (such as many suburbs). Having a stable and affordable residence can help contribute to numerous positive outcomes.
Are we at a stage when public discussions about housing then are exclusively or are primarily about the finances of owning a home – which are certainly important – and not any influential factors that might encourage or discourage people from owning homes in the United States?
But to get around metropolitan areas in the United States almost requires using highways. Driving is required in most places and people might be able to avoid faster roads for specific destinations or shorter trips. However, completing a lot of trips – whether suburb to suburb or in and out of major population centers – will involve highway travel.
There are already numerous efforts to make highway driving safer. Vehicle features. Signs. Public service announcements. Traffic enforcement. Are there other methods to try or is this more of a question of public will – are people willing to change driving habits and our public infrastructure in order to reduce the number of deaths?
Chicago grew in a way that many American cities have grown: they annexed land and communities just outside their borders. Famously, New York City annexed Brooklyn in 1898 when the separate community across the East River was one of the most populous communities in the United States. But Chicago also had its share of large annexations that helped it add neighborhoods and expand to the borders it has today. The Encyclopedia of Chicago summarizes this process:
The Encyclopedia of Chicago (The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 22
For Chicago, the period of extensive annexations extended from 1851 to 1920. The largest annexation occurred in 1889, when four of five incorporated townships surrounding Chicago (as well as a part of the fifth) were annexed to the city. Most annexations to Chicago during these years came because Chicago offered superior services, from better water connections in the nineteenth century to better high schools in the early twentieth. Later, prior incorporations and suburban resistance to the power and urban complexity of Chicago halted the process.
As these suburban areas became part of the city, they received city services and became part of the larger city’s fabric. They added residents and structures. But they also have hints of suburban life. Row upon row of single-family homes. Strip malls and big box stores. Residents might drive more.
Such neighborhoods can be found in many American cities. Big cities are not just the dense downtowns with skyscrapers, major corporate offices, and certain cultural institutions. They include numerous residential, commercial, and industrial neighborhoods on their edges where the borders of municipal boundaries can blur.
The show’s audience of Millennials, coming of age in an era defined by consumption, learned to take their cues from celebrities. These role models accumulated traditional markers of wealth while also having fun subverting them: In their respective episodes of Cribs, the That ’70s Show actor Wilmer Valderrama highlighted red Solo cups and paper plates on display in a china cabinet, and Missy Elliott gestured to her decorative, seminude Greek statues, remarking, “Naked a-s-s all around the house.” The show featured nouveau riche celebrities who proudly referred to themselves as outsiders; the rapper Juelz Santana was still a “hood dude,” and the record producer Master P claimed that he’d come “from the ghetto.”
These scenes were designed for the average young viewer to enjoy, yet their appeal was offset by their unattainability. Even the celebrities themselves hadn’t always attained Cribs’ vision of the so-called good life. On occasion, the show constructed complete fantasies: Bow Wow and 50 Cent supplemented their car collections with luxury rental vehicles, and the singer JoJo presented her uncle’s lake house as her own. On camera, T-Pain and Missy Elliott admitted to staging their homes—with a frosted cake and a colony of goldfish, respectively—several hours before filming. These contrivances became so well known that, in 2009, the All-American Rejects guitarist Nick Wheeler spent much of his appearance mocking them. “I went down to Enterprise and picked up what they had,” he said, standing beside his Mitsubishi and Mazda sedans, before flaunting his notably sparse kitchen. “I didn’t just do this for Cribs,” he said, evoking an earlier episode in which Kim Kardashian insisted that the cookies on display in her kitchen were homemade, despite their striking resemblance to a popular prepackaged variety…
The secret of Cribs, though, was that even amid its less relatable moments, the show found a way for viewers to feel included in the fantasy: It taught the audience what to consume as well as why they should, by demonstrating how a person’s property—both its literal value and its aesthetic qualities—could define them. Viewers could seek to understand a celebrity’s personality by studying their domestic environment. “The subject of house furnishing is more important than is often realized,” said the Cribs companion book, explicitly articulating this connection:
Everyone is free to change his surroundings. Hence the furniture and the decorations of a house, and the condition of the house and grounds, are properly considered as index to the character of its occupants.
It sounds like one lesson is that the ways someone inhabits a space says a lot about them. Sure, some people have more resources to work with but decorating a home is about self-expression. The homeowner gets to narrate their choices and what they are trying to say about themselves. (Now I am wondering how often this happens when someone provides a house tour to someone visiting; is the focus on the residence or what the house says about the people living there?)
At the same time, I wonder if the size of the dwellings depicted and the amount of things within those spacious spaces affects viewers. I first read sociologist Juliet Schor’s book The Overspent Americanin graduate school. She argues that watching television shows helped shape what Americans expected from homes. If you watch a typical drama or sitcom, you tend to see people living in large residences with nice furnishings. With Americans watching a lot of television in the postwar era, they could consider the characters on television as a reference group. Rather than just looking at family or neighbors for what is normal or possible regarding housing and consumption, they could now turn to TV depictions of regular life. For example, how did those young adults on Friends afford those apartments and lifestyles? Did regular viewers of Cribs then envision larger homes for themselves?
I have not read any studies that look specifically at that question: did watching specific television shows directly affect choices about where to live? Broader data can look at the possible relationship between how many hours of TV people watched and their consumer choices. Did watching Cribs or HGTV or any number of shows that prominently feature well-appointed spaces change real behavior, and if so, how?
Legally Sociable 