First, undesirable functions, like leather tanning and other smelly industrial works, were exported to just outside the walls. Jackson explains that two tendencies were taking place in medieval and early modern Europe. In fact, Allan Sherman who was kind of the Weird Al Yankovic of the early sixties, wrote a song called “Here’s to the Crabgrass” in 1963. But ‘crabgrass’ was kind of a symbol for suburbia during the Compression years nationwide. As a native Californian, I’m not sure what crabgrass is, or why it’s a bad thing. Jackson does not actually write about crabgrass. He also detours to Paris, which pioneered a very different model. This featured houses, stores, and offices, all the features that a traditional city boasts, but is designed around the automobile. Jackson is more thorough, while Fishman’s publication lightly pursues the history of suburbia from seventeenth and eighteenth century English villas, through the Clapham Sect, on to Los Angeles and finally to the modern boomburb or ‘edge city’. This book notice discusses Crabgrass Frontier in view of what we, or at least I, have learned in the last 35 years. It came out in 1985, two years before my personal favorite, Bourgeois Utopias, by Robert Fishman.
One of the classic books on the history of suburbia is Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier.
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