‘What is a City?’ asks Lewis Mumford in his eponymous 1937 essay. According to Mumford, the city is, amongst many things, a place of both ‘personal disintegration’ and ‘reintegration through wider participation in a concrete and visible collective whole’ (2004, 29). In The Culture of Cities , published a year later, Mumford continues on the theme of that which becomes manifestly perceptible in the built environment: ‘In the city, time becomes visible’ (1938, 4). In keeping with other contributions to this collection, my focus is on the city and time and, specifically, on the way in which the built environment is able to make time visible and to cultivate what we remember of the time that has passed through these spaces.
In the discussion that follows, I apply Mumford’s maxim regarding the visibility of time in the city to two different forms of memoir, examining the ways in which they speak to the complexities involved in visualising and retaining a tangible connection to the past. The two authors discussed, D.J. Waldie and Marshall Berman, are intimately associated with particular suburban and urban spaces. Both are also concerned with the possibility of remembering and forgetting personal history within the confines of these specific spaces. In exploring the relationship between time and the city, I consider Waldie’s memories of his childhood in California in Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996), and several articles and essays by the late philosopher and academic Marshall Berman. I particularly emphasise the final section of his part-polemic, part-personal history, All That Is Solid Melts into Air , ‘In the Forest of Symbols: Some Notes on Modernism in New York’ (1982). Waldie’s semi-autobiographical narrative depicts a particular area of suburban Los Angeles County—Lakewood—during the early to late 1950s. Writing about the same decade, Berman seeks to understand how inhabitants of the Bronx, and by implication New York City as a whole, internalise and react to its fluctuating landscape; a landscape in which ‘everything is torn down/Before you have had time to care for it’ as James Merrill writes in his 1962 poem ‘An Urban Convalescence , (1998, 816). All That Is Solid and Holy Land, two formally and geographically disparate texts, invite the reader to consider the role that the space of the modern built environment plays in the construction and imagining of the past.
It should be noted that though this essay implicitly draws on a large body of work concerning the built environment in general, it does not strictly adhere to the traditional boundaries by which ‘the city’ is defined. For Waldie, the space examined is that of the suburb of Lakewood, as opposed to the strictly urban landscape of Berman’s Bronx. In the context of this essay, the suburb is nevertheless an example of the modern built environment. Though Los Angeles itself pushes at the traditional borders of what it means to be a city, leading Edward W. Soja to describe it as ‘too limitless and constantly in motion, never still enough to encompass, too filled with “other spaces” to be informatively described,’ Lakewood is nevertheless not synonymous with Los Angeles proper (Soja 1989, 222). Likewise, the Bronx, though one of the five boroughs that comprise New York City, is not itself technically a city. Both places lie on the margins of what might be classically defined as city spaces. It is this ambivalence and liminality that connects them, and it is for this reason that I have chosen them as conduits through which to discuss the ways in which built spaces in various forms can make memory, and the grief that accompanies it, visible.
I first briefly examine the question of modernity and how this is made manifest in Berman’s urban landscape of choice. I then touch on city planner par excellence Robert Moses’ impact on the Bronx as evoked in Berman’s writing, before looking at the ways in which the ghostly presence of the uncanny is evoked in the still-locatable spaces of Berman’s childhood. The concept of the uncanny, a phenomenon that pertains to a very personal sense of grief, absence and homesickness, then takes me to Waldie. Here I begin by detailing the suburb of Lakewood, which ironically (given that one of the purposes of the suburbs was to provide respite from the city) mirrored that of modern city spaces like New York in that it assumed the form dictated by the grid system. I then analyse the ways in which Waldie’s text itself mirrors in literary form the regimented sense of control that drove modern urban planning during this era, and how this desire for control extends to the need to impose discipline on his own memory. Waldie’s attempts to regulate and temper how and what he remembers of his past is deeply embedded in the form and style of his text.
This essay examines how Waldie and Berman reconcile themselves to the apparent contradictions of the spaces that are intimately connected to their respective personal histories, and how they each conceive of the past in spatial terms, as represented in the post-war built environments in which they grew up. Both Lakewood and the Bronx (as depicted by their respective authors) reflect, in their separate ways, an attempt to extract, control, and suppress the past.
Marshall Berman’s Modern City
Marshall Berman, who grew up in the South Bronx neighbourhood of East Tremont during the 1940s–1950s, found himself immersed in a period of great change in the borough, thanks in many ways to ‘Master Builder’ Robert Moses, who held numerous positions of public office in New York City from 1924 to 1968, but whose influence and reach extended far beyond the traditional remit of his duties.1 In his obituary, the New York Times recorded that by the time he had departed his post as chief of the state park system, ‘the state had 2,567,256 acres. He built 658 playgrounds in New York City, 416 miles of parkways and 13 bridges’ (Goldberger 1981, n.p.). In All That Is Solid, Berman writes that to oppose the work of Moses was to ‘oppose history, progress, modernity itself’ (1982, 294). What does modernity mean to Berman, and why is this important in the context of this chapter? Berman takes his cues about modernity from The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels describe the shock of the new inherent during the period of nineteenth-century modernisation characterised, in their words, by the constant ‘revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation’ (1968, 38). In Imagining the Modern City, James Donald argues that modernist urban planners saw modernity as ‘a state of mind to do with accommodating newness’ (1999, 54). This accommodation of a ‘new social order’ apparently made the ‘absolute repression of all traces of history, memory and desire from the city’ a necessity (84). The move towards greater transparency and order symbolised a rejection of the built environment of the late eighteenth-century city, which Michel Foucault argues was defined by its ‘stone walls, darkness, hideouts and dungeons’ (1980, 154). Anthony Vidler in The Architectural Uncanny agrees that it is not just regulating a sense of history in the urban environment that has been a key aim of modernity, but also escaping it completely. If only houses, for example, were not ‘haunted by the weight of tradition and the imbrications of generations of family drama, if no cranny was left for the storage of the bric-a-brac once deposited in damp cellars and musty attics,’ then people would be liberated from the anchor of memory, which was deemed an ‘unhealthy preoccupation’ (Vidler 1992, 64). He continues that these attitudes stem from ‘the conventional wisdom of modern urbanism’; this wisdom dictated that one must ‘flood dark space with light’ and open it up to ‘vision and occupation’ (168).
Why is all this significant for Berman? The answer lies in the connection to Robert Moses. Vidler writes that modernising figures, of which I argue Moses is an example, wish to ‘forget the old city, its old monuments, its traditional significance’ (179). For Moses, forgetting the old city translated as an attempt at its erasure, one haunted house at a time. In a 1954 address before the National Education Association in Madison Square Garden, Moses said of his plans for the city: ‘We aim to rebuild New York, saving what is still durable, what is salvageable and what is genuinely historical, and substituting progress for obsolescence’ (Moses 1954, n.p.). Berman describes Moses as coming from a long line of public figures with similar concerns about the urban environment, all of whom were ‘moved at once by a will to change—to transform both themselves and their world—and by a terror of disorientation and disintegration, of life falling apart’ (Berman 1982, 13). In order to prevent this annihilation, this ‘falling apart,’ Moses felt it necessary to break open the city’s ‘darkened spaces’ and let in the light of modern planning (Donald 1999, 73).
As such, Robert Moses sought to create order out of chaos, rendering the amorphous irrationality of New York’s urban spaces into what he saw as something of a cleaner logic. In the pursuit of this aim, he oversaw the creation of what is today one of the world’s greatest examples of the modern metropolis. In order to do so, he first had to destroy what had preceded it.
Memory and Grief
The Bronx’s Grand Concourse in its original form, built in 1909, traced a path through the West Bronx to Manhattan, emulating the wide post-Haussmann boulevards of Paris. Berman notes that it was a place frequented by his family: ‘My family used to take walks up and down the Grand Concourse, and on Jerome Avenue near the Yankee Stadium, just to look at the buildings’ (Berman 1999, 78). The construction of one of Moses’ most infamous projects, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which started in 1948, split the Bronx, dispersed thousands of households, and was forced through residential neighbourhoods along the path of the Concourse. After almost two decades, the Expressway emerged gleaming in the rubble of the South Bronx and its grand boulevard. Berman’s family was one of the thousands forced to relocate from a formerly cohesive neighbourhood. By the early 1960s the buildings he had so admired along the Concourse and Jerome Avenue were soon gone. Even, he writes, ‘the rubble was gone. Soon our family, too, would go’ (Berman 1973, n.p.). In The Power Broker, Robert Caro reports that in order to ‘clear the land’ for his various slum clearance, urban renewal and highway construction plans, Robert Moses repeated this across the city, evicting ‘the city’s people, not thousands of them or tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands, from their homes and tore the homes down’ (1974, 7). Moses attempted to ‘forget the old city’ by erasing vast tracts of it (Vidler 1992, 179). But the denial or removal of history, writes Vidler, forges ‘a kind of negative path, a route of obliteration into a past that is […] always a present’ (180). An abandoned home, a reconfigured city block or an old neighbourhood can each become ‘an object of memory’ for an entire population, creating nostalgia for a localised, material past which seems to have disappeared (64). There is a certain eerie familiarity, finds Berman, in his old stomping grounds, which gives him, when he returns to them, a ‘route to the past’ that can take him suddenly to the shock of the present in which his childhood home is surrounded by rubble: ‘the house I grew up in was still there and still lived in, but the whole block across the street had burned and crumbled into ruins’ (Berman 2007, 18). There is a new sense of alienation in these spaces, instead of familiarity.
What were the consequences of Moses’ policies for a borough like the Bronx, which has seen its fabric stretched and torn, its stitches unpicked block by block? In his introduction to New York Calling, Berman reflects on the visceral experience of these strangely unoccupied spaces: ‘In 1979, 1980, 1981, I spent many lonely afternoons wandering through the Bronx’s ruins. I couldn’t believe the enormity of these ruins! They went on and on, for block after block, mile after mile. Some blocks seemed almost intact; but look around the corner, and there was no corner. It was uncanny!’ (Berman 2007, 125–26). As Berman walks through the borough, he is occasionally ‘lulled to sleep’ by the sense of the ordinary and the vaguely familiar as he re-traces his old neighbourhood steps. Should you walk around Southern Boulevard or Longwood, he advises, you will find blocks ‘that feel so much like blocks you left long ago, blocks you thought had vanished forever, that you will wonder if you are seeing ghosts—or if you yourself are a ghost haunting these solid streets with the phantoms of your inner city’ (Berman 1982, 344). But upon turning a corner, ‘the full nightmare of devastation’ is revealed in the form of ‘a block of burnt-out hulks, a street of rubble and glass where no man goes,’ which rudely awakens him (344). The sense of difference this creates—that tangible before and after which can be made both visible and invisible in the urban landscape—is a schism between what was and what is. Here it is this shock of difference in the built environment, this shock of the new, which awakens Berman from his dream of the past.
Sigmund Freud’s 1919 paper ‘The Uncanny’ describes the experience of sensing simultaneously the familiar and unfamiliar, the homely and the unhomely, which represents for Freud a manifestation of the return of the repressed. Such feelings are arguably endemic to life in the modern city. ‘For Freud,’ Vidler explains, ‘“unhomeliness” was more than a simple sense of not belonging; it was the fundamental propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners, suddenly to become defamiliarized, derealized, as if in a dream’ (Vidler 1992, 7). This sense of defamiliarisation creates a feeling of unreality and alienation, and it is the confrontation with an unexpected tabula rasa that awakens Berman from his dream of the past into present-day alienation. The ‘open,’ ‘empty’ spaces Berman describes echo D.J. Waldie’s empty rooms (on which, more below); the very fact of their uncanny emptiness creating the shadow of what had filled them before. The final pages of All That Is Solid find Berman seeking and meeting signs of the past in the street he loved and abandoned: ‘I thought to end up with the Bronx,’ he discloses, ‘with an encounter with some ghosts of my own’ (1982, 345).
In All That Is Solid, he describes with great pathos the scene of destruction as the bulldozers rolled in, reducing his home to ashes: ‘My friends and I would stand on the parapet of the Grand Concourse, where 174th Street had been, and survey the work’s progress […] and marvel to see our ordinary nice neighbourhood transformed into sublime, spectacular ruins’ (1982, 292–293). For Berman, Moses and his crew were not simply blasting through concrete and steel. They were obliterating the physical locus of memory, effectively demolishing the site of Berman’s personal history. When Berman returns to his old neighbourhood, setting out to rediscover what he felt he had lost, he immediately finds, as detailed above, signs of incoherence and disintegration. The streets, for example, are in ‘various stages of demolition or decomposition’ (18). But perhaps more significant is his description of the space around the borough blocks themselves, which are ‘as open and empty as the desert’ (20).
The sense that something has been omitted from the physical text of his history permeates much of Berman’s writing. In his work on the Bronx, he often writes in terms of absence, loss, and bereavement. ‘As I saw one of the loveliest of these buildings being wrecked for the road,’ he tells us, ‘I felt a grief that, I can see now, is endemic to modern life’ (295). Berman’s evocation of the grief induced by a changing city intent upon modernisation is palpable, and its roots are deep. In 1955, he and his family had moved into the northwest Bronx, at his father’s behest, settling at Claremont Park. Six months later his father died. In his 2013 Mumford Lecture, given four months before his own death, Berman states that ‘The whole episode would have been a perfectly ordinary “move to the suburbs,” at a time when millions of people were making that move—except that, six months later, my father died of a heart attack. […] People even had a hard time getting to our new house, to mourn with us; mostly they didn’t come’ (Berman 2014, n.p.). His home became a site of felt absence, the distance to and from it insurmountable. The Bronx became a place where his life ‘was shattered,’ the pieces scattered amidst the ubiquitous rubble of East Tremont. ‘When I talk about ruins,’ he notes in 1984, ‘I’m an interested party’ (1984, 18).
Becoming the Grid
Throughout his work, Berman asks whether it is possible to root oneself in ‘a stable and coherent personal and social past’ in a place like the Bronx, which continuously attempts to erase ‘both the physical and social landscapes of our past, and our emotional links with those lost worlds’ (1982, 35). The destruction of landscape for him equates to the destruction of a locatable and material history. The overwhelming sense that something has been omitted from the physical text of his history permeates much of Berman’s writing, with the death of his father implicitly linked to his fascination with urban ruin and renewal. In a similar way, Waldie makes use of his childhood home to surreptitiously discuss his grief over his father’s death. ‘My father died behind a well-made, wooden bathroom door,’ he tells us, and this material separation is reinforced by the sequestering and demarcation of personal, painful memories within his text (Waldie 1996, 24). For both authors, remembrances of ‘home’ become fixed on a point of loss.
In All That Is Solid, Berman expresses his desire to go home, to go back: ‘I want to go back to where this essay started, to my Bronx, vital and thriving only yesterday, ruins and ashen wildness today’ (1982, 340). But D.J. Waldie is home. He never left. Until his death in 2013, although Berman continued to live in New York City, he did so in a different borough to the one in which he spent his formative years. Waldie on the other hand, remained not only in Los Angeles County but also in the house in which he had grown up. Like Berman, Waldie traces a localised history, in this case the suburb of Lakewood, California, where he grew up during the post-war decades. In 1946, Waldie’s parents bought the house in which Waldie still lives (at the time of writing) and where he wrote the book that narrates both his childhood and the life of his hometown.
Lakewood , a suburban community developed by Louis Boyar, Mark Taper and Ben Weingart from late 1949 to 1953, is part of the history of endless development in California as a whole. Los Angeles itself seemed to possess no natural or locational advantages, and was at first merely an isolated tract of land ‘in the middle of the empty, semi-arid coastal plain’ (Fogelson 1993, xv). The seemingly uninhabitable landscape of Southern California was eventually pummelled into submission by the might of urban development, quantified and claimed via a ‘mental grid over physical space,’ with constructions such as the Los Angeles Aqueduct and the Southern California freeway system superimposed over the wilderness (Wyatt 1986, 158). Mike Davis explains in City of Quartz that the Greater Los Angeles area was ‘first and above all the creature of real-estate capitalism: the culminating speculation, in fact, of the generations of boosters and promoters who had subdivided and sold the West from the Cumberland Gap to the Pacific’ (2006, 24–25). Joan Didion, who writes about Lakewood in her memoir Where I Was From , tells us that just like ‘much of the southern end of this grid, Lakewood was until after World War Two agricultural, several thousand acres of beans and sugar beets just inland from the Signal Hill oil field’ (2004, 102). During the same decade that the location of Berman’s childhood was being brought to an end, Waldie’s was in the process of being constructed, forged amid the fields of lima beans. In All That Is Solid, Berman recounts that for ten years, ‘through the late 1950s and early 1960s, the center of the Bronx was pounded and blasted and smashed’ (1982, 292). Meanwhile, Waldie reminisces that ‘I grew up in these neighborhoods when they were an interweaving of houses and fields that were soon to be filled with more houses’ (1996, 3).
Holy Land is broken up into 316 segments, like plots of subdivided land or rooms within a house. Waldie approaches the personal and intimate carefully throughout the text, incrementally moving from one story to the next by way of adjoining ‘rooms.’ This is akin to the careful progression from cell to cell, block to block, of the grid system. Waldie writes of his concern that he may have internalised the geometric landscape of his childhood, that is, its subdivision of space and sense of rigid containment: ‘That evening he thought he was becoming his habits, or—even more—he thought he was becoming the grid he knew’ (1996, 1). Waldie refers frequently to the grid system according to which the spatial arrangement of Lakewood was established. This grid is ‘a fraction of a larger grid, anchored to one in Los Angeles,’ making Lakewood an extension of a larger map which was first laid out in 1781 (22). He writes that it is possible to drive from the ocean to Los Angeles and remain on the same grid of streets. ‘Every square foot of my city has been tilled or built on and fitted into the grid’ (54). The site of Waldie’s memories, in its system of intersecting grids, right angles, and straight lines, is therefore not only a reflection of his attempts to control and contain memory but is also symptomatic of the urban spatial arrangement of the twentieth-century city. In Borderland, John R. Stilgoe explains that during the mid-nineteenth century, land speculators at the edge of every major American city were throwing ‘an essentially urban fabric over hitherto borderland landscape,’ cultivating the margins so they resembled the urban spaces from which they originally sought to provide sanctuary (1988, 152). The street patterns being built on a ‘rectilinear’ style was a reflection of the fact that urbanity was at the time ‘equated […] with straightness’ (Stilgoe 1988, 152). In Grids , Rosalind Krauss depicts the grid as deeply modern in its function and style: ‘one of the important sources of this power is the way the grid is […] so stridently modern to look at, seeming to have no place of refuge, no room on the face of it, for vestiges of the nineteenth century to hide’ (1979, 54). Here we find another manifestation of modernity’s rejection of nineteenth-century ‘illegibility,’ in favour of more regulated space (Donald 1999, 73).
Waldie himself embeds his own desire for control, in his case control over narrative, memory, and emotional chaos, into his text. At times Waldie seems to be deliberately placing blocks in his memory between the experience of pain and the remembrance of that pain. For example, two sections stand between the disclosures that his mother died in hospital and his father died at home. Section 49, in which his father’s death is first mentioned, is succeeded by two sections which detail the Douglas Aircraft plant in Long Beach, and the materials used in the construction of the neighbourhood houses. When he alternates in his remembrances between stating facts and referring circuitously to pain, he uses the rooms in his house as repositories for memory: some of these rooms provide a buffer between other rooms he does not wish to enter. The bathroom door behind which his father dies becomes a symbol of the way in which Waldie’s segmentation and subdivision of the narrative into textual cells allows him to contain things he cannot always bring himself to discuss explicitly, and on which he can shut the door of memory if necessary.
In section 55, he describes his father’s death as though from a great distance: ‘He sat on the edge of his bed in the middle room and waited for his father to die,’ while in section 56 he tells the same story from the first-person perspective: ‘I waited on the edge of my bed in the middle bedroom’ (Waldie 1996, 28). In the latter section however, he does not mention his father’s death until the last sentence, as though the use of ‘he’ mitigates the pain of remembering, allowing him to tell the story as if it happened to someone else. The use of ‘I’ on the other hand, offers no such protection. Waldie often writes in the third person in order to narrate the lives of others. Many sections of Holy Land neglect to identify the subject of discussion by name, and so when Waldie refers to ‘he’ and ‘she’ (or Mr ‘X’ or Mrs ‘Y’) it remains ambiguous whether he is referring obliquely to himself and his own recollections, telling the stories of the many who allowed him that privilege rather than his own, or articulating his own memories subliminally through the collective. When he does use the first person, it is from the position of the present, referring back to the past, for example, ‘You and I grew up in these neighborhoods’; ‘The house where I still live, and where my father died, predates the building of the rest of this city’; ‘My brother and I, who shared a room for almost twenty years’ (28, 25, 47 (emphasis added)). These are further examples of Waldie’s attempts at quarantining himself, in the form of his textual ‘I,’ from the rest of the sentence devoted to a painful memory.
Berman also imposes distance, but for him this is more literal than textual: what Waldie does in writing, Berman did in life. In a 1984 article for The Village Voice , Berman explains that he and his family had often spoken of their home on 1460 College Avenue (‘we would talk about “our house”’), the apartment building in the Bronx where they had lived for 20 years (Berman 1984, 18). None of them had been back: ‘No one had heard anything about the building since the fires, collapses, and abandonments had begun. Maybe no news was good news, but during the plague years none of us could bear to go back and take a look’ (18). In On the Town , Berman details his trips into Times Square as having begun in the early 1950s, when he would meet his father near his office at 130 West 42nd Street, ‘half a block from the Square,’ and ended for some time in 1955, when his father died (2006, xxiv). Berman writes that from that point he did not return to downtown Manhattan for a long time. Equally painful for him was the prospect of continuing to go back to his old Bronx neighbourhood after a period of time in which he had ‘walked through those ruins obsessively,’ seeking a ‘core of meaning’ inside the skeleton of what used to be (1982, 352). Berman confesses in the ‘Afterword’ to All That Is Solid that as time went by he found it increasingly unbearable to walk in the shadow of the past; he felt that the ruins were overwhelming his sense of what had preceded them. These particular locations—the house on College Avenue, West 42nd Street in Manhattan, and the streets of East Tremont—became, for a while, points of no return.
Throughout Waldie’s Holy Land, the narrative is peppered with references to rooms that develop particular significance. These are rooms both literal and symbolic, separate spaces in which memories he does not wish to dwell on can be placed. Though each of these rooms is its own separate entity, they are in extremely close proximity to one another. Waldie consistently provides information about the measurements of rooms, the square footage taken up by houses, the distance spanned by the city that further encroaches on the land around it. Though he attempts to seal off and surround each section by the narration of a history which is characterised and understood much of the time through data and quantification, attempts to circumnavigate painful memories are often mitigated by a return to a locational site of memory; his efforts to stop it at the door are thwarted: ‘My father died behind a well-made, wooden bathroom door. It is a three-panel door. Each panel is nearly square, twenty-one inches wide by nineteen inches high. From edge to edge, the door is twenty-eight inches wide. […] The doors in my house are abstract and ordinary. The bathroom door is now forty-seven years old. My father was sixty-nine’ (Waldie 1996, 24–25).
Just as the irrational behaviour of his neighbours (such as Mr H with his superfluity of detritus in his front yard and Mrs A who sends countless letters to the council concerning nuclear waste) continually finds a way of evading suppression and expressing itself publically, so too does Waldie’s grief, revealing itself sporadically and proving to be beyond his capacity for control of the narrative. This is comparable to Berman’s experience of being first ‘lulled to sleep’ when walking through the streets of the South Bronx before turning a corner to see suddenly ‘the full nightmare of devastation’ (Berman 1982, 344). ‘At some point in your story grief presents itself,’ Waldie observes, as though apologising that this is beyond his control. ‘Now, for the first time, your room is empty, not merely unoccupied’ (1996, 3).
Grief is here likened to emptiness. A space which is not filled seems to be the most disturbing concept for both Berman and Waldie. Berman notes that unoccupied buildings in the Bronx since the 1950s had become ubiquitous symbols of the psycho-geographical scar of city living at that time: ‘Thus depopulated, economically depleted, emotionally shattered […] the Bronx was ripe for all the dreaded spirals of urban blight’ (Berman 1982, 293). For Waldie, emptiness is smaller in scope and more important from a symbolic standpoint. He describes his house in the present day as ‘largely a void’ (1996, 42). References to emptiness recur through Holy Land, often in conjunction with discussions of flimsy construction work, which provides only negligible separation between rooms, houses, and blocks. Walls, posits Waldie, offer only a ‘thin, cement skin over absence’ (43). The exteriors of the houses themselves are ‘little more than an inch thick’ (43). In such an enclosure, one’s separation from the outside is so minimal as to be almost non-existent; Waldie envisages feet crashing through the attic, the bathroom door knocked down, an earthquake forcing the ‘stucco and chicken-wire houses […] off their foundations’ (137). Space now seems permeable, the memory housed within it ultimately uncontainable. Indeed, the segmented spaces of the domestic interiors likewise threaten to spill over into the neighbouring rooms. Access to a different room is only one clumsy footfall away. The attic stuffed with the relics of Christmases past is so structurally unsound that one ‘bad step will put your foot through a bedroom ceiling’ (42). When it is discovered that Mr H, who has since been forced to absent himself from his house, has dug a 300-square-feet fallout shelter beneath his garage floor, a city inspector informs the new owner that should a car actually be driven onto this floor, it would immediately collapse. Space is porous, and memory within it ultimately uncontainable. The irrationality of Waldie’s neighbours, and the pain of his own memory, cannot always be kept sequestered in separate rooms.
Death and chaos, it turns out, are only on the other side of a Douglas fir door. Waldie’s grief is outlined subtly in his description of the house in the wake of this bereavement: ‘My brother brought me back from the hospital. I spent that night in the empty house, as I continue to spend each night at home’ (31). Here we return to the sense of uncanny emptiness to which he continually refers. This is one space that cannot be filled.
To return to Mumford’s dictum that ‘time becomes visible’ in the city, I argue that time is indeed made manifest in Waldie’s Lakewood and Berman’s Bronx (Mumford 1938, 4). For both authors, the past is very much rooted in the landscape of their respective childhoods, but exactly how, and indeed whether, to locate and access personal memory within these material spaces, is a more difficult proposition. Berman goes searching for the past, but his return home leads him to a phantasmagoric landscape of hauntings, ghosts, and nightmares that he struggles to reconcile against his own memory. For him, it is the passing of time that has become painfully visible, rather than its capacity for preservation. Waldie, in his attempts to manage his own past by building walls around memory, finds that he cannot entirely prevent time from becoming visible in ways he may not be comfortable with. Despite the propensity of the modern city, and its residential periphery, to pave over the past, individual memory can survive, secreting itself in specific locations and bursting forth at unexpected moments.
But what of Mumford’s question with which this chapter opens: ‘What is a City?’ (2004, 29). As reflected in the work of Waldie and Berman respectively, Lakewood and the Bronx consider the same capacity of post-war suburban and urban environments to internalise the concerns and urges of the modern, as the cities with which they are associated. Equally the authors themselves have internalised what it is to be a city, in the ways in which they have chosen to articulate the modern built environment. Berman writes that, after World War II, Robert Moses turned his hand from his early work on the parkways and beaches of Long Island to the complexities of urban reconstruction, consequently bringing to life brutally imposing structures which were ‘sealed off from the surrounding city by great moats of stark empty space’ (1982, 308). But were such constructions really signs of Moses’ ‘contempt for all natural and human life’ (308) as Berman puts it, or were they merely a symptom of the sequestering and demarcation of space which is perhaps inevitable in the gridded city? Even in the seemingly benign suburban landscape of Lakewood, houses were likewise ‘sealed off’ from one another, the rooms within in turn buffered by other rooms, turning endlessly away from one another at right angles—adjacent but self-contained. Arguably, Waldie himself is attempting to achieve symbolically and textually what Robert Moses made literal in New York City—using the segregation of space to quarantine the ‘irrational’ or unspeakable aspects of the urban landscape (Donald 1999, 73). Stylistically, Waldie constructs his text like a modernist who fears ‘darkened spaces,’ things falling apart, and the potential disintegration of his structurally unsound house, preferring the straight lines and safety of the grid, despite his acute awareness of its failure to completely ‘eradicate the domain of myth, suspicion, tyranny and, above all, the irrational’ (73).
In Berman’s case, he lays the blame for the end of his childhood at the feet of Moses, but is unflinchingly honest about his own choices about his separation as an adult from the site of his youth. ‘For children of the Bronx like myself,’ he notes, ‘this road bears a load of special irony: as we race through our childhood world, rushing to get out, relieved to see the end in sight, we are not merely spectators but active participants in the process of destruction that tears our hearts’ (Berman 1982, 291). He confesses that regardless of the path bulldozed through the Bronx by Moses, he would have ultimately, embodying the very spirit of Moses’ modernity, left his childhood home of his own accord. ‘What if […] we had managed to keep the dread road from being built? How many of us would still be in the Bronx today, caring for it and fighting for it as our own? Some of us, no doubt, but I suspect not many, and in any case—it hurts to say it—not me’ (326). For this is the paradox of modern urban life. We are equally as desperate to grow up and leave ourselves behind as we are to preserve that which we abandon. Or as Berman puts it: ‘We fight back the tears and step on the gas’ (291). What can Waldie do but wall himself off from the past? What can Berman do but move forward, and try not to look back?