Suburbs Exist For the Weekend

Pikes Peak Park (Robert Adams, 1970)

Suburbs are hives of activity on the weekend, but they are typically desolate during the week. Every weekend in Chicago there are many festivals. In suburbia, the suburbs themselves become the pop-up festivals, all to be broken down in time for the workweek. They are towns in a box, neatly repackaged by bedtime on a Sunday night.

There was a time when living happened at all times in one place when the city or town was the most vibrant place. Older cities now develop "zones"--urban versions of the suburban office park, and become as desolate as a suburban subdivision. The Zone awaits Monday morning, the suburb, Friday night and Saturday morning.

On the edge of suburbia, from Twilight in Italy by D.H. Lawrence (1916): "Down the road of the Ticino Valley, I felt again my terror of this new world which is coming into being on top of us. One always feels it in a suburb, on the edge of a town, where the land is being broken under the advance of houses. But this is nothing, in England, to the terror one feels of the new Italian roads, where are these great blind cubes of dwellings rise stark from the destroyed earth, swarming with a sort of verminous life, really verminous, purely destructive."