Pagoda+Prairie
Elmhurst’s land is mostly flat; whatever hills there are were man made. Though, they do somehow still give sixteen year old drivers something to do. The people living here would like to think the architecture is something to look at, but really it’s just a suburb designed earlier on in the development of suburban sprawl. Thankfully, as it predates the subdivision there is some charm reserved in its character. This charm owes itself to a mix of housing styles; Prairie’s (actually born right here in the midwest by Frank Lloyd Wright), Ranch’s, a few odd Victorian’s, innumerable Cape Cod’s, one single Spanish Eclectic on the corner of St. Charles and Mitchell ave. which was surrounded by a number of Tudor Revivals. There’s even a Pagoda style home on York road that had an indoor pool and very tall Juniper trees in the front yard. The Japanese woman that lived there held very predictable gardening hours, which I really got a kick out of and found to be very “Asian”. I still don’t get why someone with a taste for aesthetics that excluded the Ranch home ended up in a place like this. What sort of trap could be cast to lure one here? There’s a very inherent difference in the structure of a pagoda from that of the midwestern home. Wright designed his Illinois homes to be as flat as could be, to blend completely in with the straight prairies sprawling from horizon to horizon. This pagoda on York Road was reaching for something and if you couldn’t see it it’s because you saw the Juniper’s stretching their gaze upwards instead. That or your eyes never fully left the flat land ahead. All of us in Elmhurst owe Pagoda Woman something for adding some visual character to our town, and Mr. and Mrs. Spanish Eclectic. Unfortunately, according to my mother the owners of both the Spanish Eclectic and the pseudo-Pagoda have moved out in the past few years.
The business of suburban architecture seems to have transformed from my childhood to my slight entry into adulthood. There are a very limited number of builders being used (Wanger, Meeder, McKenna) and they are all building the same big box brick houses. I suppose the appeal to is to be on trend and have the newest looking thing around. Truth be told, it isn’t surprising to me at all that this is the trend occurring here. Never did I think I would be reckoning with the architecture of Elmhurst, IL. after moving away from it. It never interested me more than being that which surrounded me in a space where time was being killed; in this way I took notice of their characters and individualities. I suppose my feelings for certain homes just accrued accidentally, or out of boredom. I drove past some every day, some more than others, some just on cigarette smoking car routes. There were also homes that required drive-by’s out of obsession, love, lust, revenge, and other indulgent reasons. Then of course, your friends had homes they must see for the same reasons, so those were added to the list. Eventually (and especially with my friend Allison) a strict route was established that provided for ample cigarettes to be smoked, the correct number of songs to be listened to, various options of food to be picked up and all of our chosen heart strings to be tugged along the route. At the time, I never considered myself to be a sentimental or even really emotive person. I am still only warming up to the idea that I may actually be sentimental (throughout childhood horse play, my older brother’s insult to me was “you’re prematurely bitter!”). However, it’s occurred to me that perhaps what Allison and I were doing all this time was creating a sort of emotional ride we could take over and over together. The architecture of Elmhurst became not aesthetic, but emotional. We replaced all of the homes with other signifiers (to ease the pain of teenage boredom and the teenage (eternal) longing for more?). You know, a more normal “It’s a Small World After All” to allow us to experience intimacy with one another on all of our sexless nights spent together, but certainly a route of generated and stored emotional memory that was totally FUBU (for us and by us).
Going home in recent years, I’ve noticed a big upsurge in the use of housing developers and these developed communities popping up further away from the cities that are completely built before anyone moves into the hundreds of empty look-a-like homes. Completely defying the natural order of human migration, but rather trying to predict it. Maybe even just depending on it. Thankfully, for my sake Elmhurst was not pre-designed; it was farmland and became a Civil War era graveyard that became framed by major roads that took you to major cities. Essentially the North and South borders (North ave. and Roosevelt rd., respectively) will take you into Chicago. The border to the East. the Eisenhower extension, and West Route 83 take you to multiple highways running in all four directions. This frame was filled with its own smaller, large roads that became suitable for businesses and following suit houses sprang up around them. While I know this is simple, the point is that Elmhurst is centralized and favors accessibility. I’m not trying to argue its beauty, I don’t think it’s beautiful. The locus of Elmhurst’s center would be York Rd. between North ave and St. Charles. I can point to that. I can tell someone to go there and see a movie. With these newer subdivisions, where the goal is to maximize the number of homes and the amount of land per each home, you get a completely and carefully decentralized residential maze. None of the streets are straight, they all curve around each other making space for just one more house. Yet the roads lead to nowhere. They develop into further sameness. There is no space considered downtown, or social. For that you have to leave this pocket and go elsewhere. It’s this idea that depresses me so completely--everything is flat, there is absolutely no sense of verticality. There’s no way a teenage driving route would be satisfying here! You cannot simultaneously search for love and Taco Bell, you are forced to chose between one or the other. These communities are just docking stations for the people who live there.
The issue may be that I do not know how to operate in a decentralized environment (i.e. myself navigating post-collegiate life, lazier and slower than ever because I no longer march around an institutionalized center). Maybe I was meant to live more directly in the era of modernism, or should have joined a fraternity or some other life-long, embracing institution. My fear is that I understand nothing about a horizontal perspective. That I cannot operate on the horizontal plane. Inherently, this fear leads me to believe that our world is becoming more horizontal and more decentralized every moment and I am stuck in the sentiment of the 1950’s. That the days of linear meritocracy have come and gone and young career hopefuls have been let loose into the hunger games where only people like Andrew Zuckerberg survive. So I’ve been hiding underneath some brush trying not to die instead of getting a job. Rather than restructuring my thoughts about how to navigate the world today, I think how I could have if I was my parents. Then I really start to panic...I have learned the life lessons they have passed on, but not my own. I have unequivocally fallen in love with the decades of yore. The very decades that beheld the conventionality and heteronormativity that I mock! I belong in the suburbs.