Abstract
The postwar comedy Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (H. C. Potter, 1948) starts with a monologue espousing the virtues of New York City :
In any discussion of contemporary America, and how its people live, we must inevitably start with Manhattan, New York City, USA. Manhatta n! Glisten i ng modern gia nt of concrete and steel, reaching to the heavens and cradling in its arms seven millions. Seven millions— happy beneficiaries of the advantages and comforts this great metropolis has to offer: its fine wide boulevards facilitate the New Yorker’s carefree, orderly existence; a transportation system second to none in passenger comfort; quaint little sidewalk cafes make for leisurely, gracious living; for its nature lovers, the peace and privacy of a day in the sun. The city offers delightful changes of climate.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Catherine Jurca, “Hollywood, the Dream House Factory,” Cinema Journal 37, no. 4 (Summer 1998): 29
Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000 (New York: Vintage, 2003), 150
Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (San Diego, New York, London: Harvest Books, 1961), 483.
For discussion of railroad and streetcar suburbs, see Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1989)
Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)
Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 317.
Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1981), 240–242
Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 87–88.
Baxandall and Ewen, Picture Windows, chap. 8; Dolores Hayden, “Building the American Way: Public Subsidy, Private Space,” in The Politics of Public Space, ed. Setha Low and Neil Smith (New York: Routledge, 2006), 35–48.
Dolores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work and Family Life (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002), 55.
David Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture, 2nd ed. (Malden: Blackwell, 1997), 44.
Gerard Jones, Honey, I’m Home! Sitcoms: Selling the American Dream (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 100.
Hal Himmelstein, Television Myth and the American Mind (New York: Praeger, 1984), 87.
David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Random House, 1993), 514.
For a detailed account of single versus multi-camera modes of production see Jeremy G. Butler, Television: Critical Methods and Applications, 3rd ed. (Mahwah and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007), 195–225
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Routledge, 1985), 304–308.
Mitchell Schwarzer, Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 273
For details of the MGM New England Street, including extensive pictures, see Steven Bingen, Stephen X. Sylvester, and Michael Troyan, MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot (Solana Beach: Santa Monica Press, 2011), 154–159.
Michael Kassell discusses the textual evidence of Cleaver’s level of income, as well as the attitude to that, in “Mass Culture History and Memory,” 144–149; for the privileged position of the middle class in film and television of the era see Nina C. Leibman, Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film and Television (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 240–247.
Copyright information
© 2015 Stephen Rowley
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rowley, S. (2015). Sitcom Suburbs. In: Movie Towns and Sitcom Suburbs. Screening Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137493286_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137493286_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-50161-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-49328-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)