Between the wars, the lives of four neighboring English families intersect in this “highly recommended” saga by a New York Times–bestselling author (Sunday Express). In the spring of 1919, his wife’s death brings Sergeant Jim Carver home from the front. He returns to be a single parent to his seven children in a place he has never lived: Number Twenty, Manor Park Avenue, in a South London suburb. The Carvers’ neighbor Eunice Fraser, at Number Twenty-Two, has also known tragedy. Her soldier husband was killed, leaving her and her eight-year-old son, Esme, to fend for themselves. At Number Four, Edith Clegg takes in lodgers and looks after her sister, Becky, whose mind has been shattered by a past trauma. No one knows much about the Friths, at Number Seventeen, who moved to the Avenue before the war. The first book in the two-part historical series the Avenue, which also includes The Avenue Goes to War, The Dreaming Suburb takes readers into the everyday lives of these English families between World War I and World War II, as their hopes, dreams, and struggles are played out against a radically changing world.
A sweeping epic of two families—one Dutch, one English—from the time when New Amsterdam was a raw and rowdy settlement, to the triumph of the Revolution, when New York became a new nation’s city of dreams. In 1661, Lucas Turner, a barber surgeon, and his sister, Sally, an apothecary, stagger off a small wooden ship after eleven weeks at sea. Bound to each other by blood and necessity, they aim to make a fresh start in the rough and rowdy Dutch settlement of Nieuw Amsterdam; but soon lust, betrayal, and murder will make them mortal enemies. In their struggle to survive in the New World, Lucas and Sally make choices that will burden their descendants with a legacy of secrets and retribution, and create a heritage that sets cousin against cousin, physician against surgeon, and, ultimately, patriot against Tory. In what will be the greatest city in the New World, the fortunes of these two families are inextricably entwined by blood and fire in an unforgettable American saga of pride and ambition, love and hate, and the becoming of the dream that is New York City.
Tracing two centuries of rise, fall, and rebirth in the heart of downtown Detroit. Downtown Detroit is in the midst of an astonishing rebirth. Its sidewalks have become a dreamland for an aspiring creative class, filled with shoppers, office workers, and restaurant-goers. Cranes dot the skyline, replacing the wrecking balls seen there only a few years ago. But venture a few blocks in any direction and this liveliness gives way to urban blight, a nightmare cityscape of crumbling concrete, barbed wire, and debris. In Dream City, urban designer Conrad Kickert examines the paradoxes of Detroit's landscape of extremes, arguing that the current reinvention of downtown is the expression of two centuries of Detroiters' conflicting hopes and dreams. Kickert demonstrates the materialization of these dreams with a series of detailed original morphological maps that trace downtown's rise, fall, and rebirth. Kickert writes that downtown Detroit has always been different from other neighborhoods; it grew faster than other parts of the city, and it declined differently, forced to reinvent itself again and again. Downtown has been in constant battle with its own offspring—the automobile and the suburbs the automobile enabled—and modernized itself though parking attrition and land consolidation. Dream City is populated by a varied cast of downtown power players, from a 1920s parking lot baron to the pizza tycoon family and mortgage billionaire who control downtown's fate today. Even the most renowned planners and designers have consistently yielded to those with power, land, and finances to shape downtown. Kickert thus finds rhyme and rhythm in downtown's contemporary cacophony. Kickert argues that Detroit's case is extreme but not unique; many other American cities have seen a similar decline—and many others may see a similar revitalization.
With a new afterword covering the two decades since its first publication, two of Washington, D.C.’s most respected journalists expose one of America’s most tragic ironies: how the nation’s capital, often a gleaming symbol of peace and hope, is the setting for vicious contradictions and devastating conflicts over race, class, and power. Jaffe and Sherwood have chillingly chronicled the descent of the District of Columbia—congressional hearings, gangland murders, the establishment of home rule and the inside story of Marion Barry’s enigmatic dynasty and disgrace. Now their afterword narrates the District’s transformation in the last twenty years. New residents have helped bring developments, restaurants, and businesses to reviving neighborhoods. The authors cover the rise and fall of Mayors Adrian Fenty and Vince Gray, how new corruption charges are taking down politicians and businessmen, and how a fading Barry is still a player. The “city behind the monuments” remains flawed and polarized, but its revival is turning it into a distinct world capital—almost a dream city. Harry Jaffe has been a national editor at The Washingtonian magazine since 1990. He has received a number of awards for investigative journalism and feature writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. He has taught journalism at Georgetown University and American University. His work has appeared in Esquire, Regardie's, Outside, Philadelphia Magazine, National Geographic Traveler, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, and other newspapers. Jaffe was born and raised in Philadelphia and began his journalism career with the Rutland (Vermont) Herald. He is the co-author of Dream City: Race, Power and the Decline of Washington, D.C. He lives in Clarke County, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughters. Tom Sherwood is a reporter for NBC4 in Washington, specializing in politics and the District of Columbia government. Tom also is a commentator for WAMU 88.5 public radio and a columnist for the Current Newspapers. Tom has twice been honored as one of the Top 50 Journalists in Washington by Washingtonian magazine. He began his journalism career at The Atlanta Constitution and covered local and national politics for The Washington Post from 1979 to 1989. He is the co-author of Dream City: Race, Power and the Decline of Washington, D.C. A native of Atlanta, he currently resides in Washington, D.C. and has one son, Peyton.
A study of London suburban-set writing, exploring the links between place and fiction. This book charts a picture of evolving themes and concerns around the legibility and meaning of habitat and home for the individual, and the serious challenges that suburbia sets for literature.
This book is the first comprehensive economic, social and political study of the London suburb of Croydon from 1900 up to the present day. One of the largest London boroughs, Croydon, has always been a mixed residential suburb (mainly private but with some municipal housing), which has strongly influenced the nature of its political representation. It was never just an affluent middle-class suburb or ‘bourgeoise utopia,’ as suggested by traditional definitions of suburbia and in popular imagination. In economic terms it was also an industrial suburb after 1918. It was then transformed into a vibrant post-industrial service economy following rapid deindustrialisation and remarkable commercial and office redevelopment after 1960. In this respect Croydon is also an ex-industrial suburb, similar to many other outer London areas and other peripheral metropolitan areas. Croydon’s civic identity as a previously independent town on the outskirts of London remains unresolved to this day, even as its political representatives seek to redefine the borough as a more independent ‘Edge City.’ Author Michael Tichelar examines this suburb by looking at the suburban development of London, the changing politics of Croydon and policy issues during the twentieth century. Labour in the Suburbs will be of interest to the general reader as well as students of modern British history with special interests in electoral sociology, political representation and suburbanisation. It provides a template against which to measure the process of suburbanisation in the UK and internationally.
During the last few decades suburbia has grown enormously and become a phenomenon attracting the attention of scholars as well as practitioners by whom it is seen as an increasingly significant and complex area of modern life. The essays in this volume consider a range of representations of suburban life from the late nineteenth century to the present day, including fiction, film, and popular music, drawn from America and Australia as well as Britain. They explore and challenge traditional views of suburbia so that, rather than a location of conformity and stereotypicality, it can be viewed as a site of social conflict, division, and ambiguity as well as a source of significant creativity across a range of cultural texts. The volume takes a thematic approach, considering the rise of suburbia, imagined and real suburbias, alternative suburbias: all of the essays have a strong historical dimension and the overall approach is characterized by interdisciplinarity.
