Elite Suburbs and their Social Reproduction: Transportation, Education and Association in the Philadelphia Main Line and the Chicago North Shore
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2016
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Bryn Mawr College. Department of Growth and Structure of Cities
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Thesis
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eng
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Dark Archive until 2036-01-01, afterwards Haverford users only.
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Abstract
In the mid-19th century, the spread of commuter rail service converged with growing demand for single-family homes amid open space and bucolic surroundings. By the late 19th century, a national class of elite inner railroad suburbs had emerged outside major cities including Bronxville (New York, NY), Brookline (Boston, MA), Bryn Mawr and the Main Line (Philadelphia, PA) and Winnetka and the North Shore (Chicago, IL). These shared features of distance, cost of land, and architecture and social ties that made them exclusive. Some of these remain among the most elite suburban addresses of the country. However, even those who interact daily with today’s re-creations of these suburbs’ origin mythologies rarely wonder why and how they have held onto such exclusive statuses. In this thesis, I ask both how these suburbs’ residents have recreated their elite statuses for over a century despite national social, economic, and cultural changes and the shifting composition of elites nationally and within these communities. To answer, I analyze social theories, primary documents, and suburban histories as well as sociocultural theories of two cases: the Philadelphia Main Line’s Lower Merion Township and the Chicago North Shore’s New Trier Township. I conclude that early speculative developers, the design of elites’ country estates and early luxury developments, transportation networks, and distinctive social and well-funded educational institutions established this elite status that also became part of a myth of eliteness. Over subsequent decades, civic adaptations to transportation networks and educational and social institutions have perpetuated this status in spite of the rise of the automobile, changes to the American elite, the growth of affluent outer suburbs and exurbs, and the diversifying composition of elite suburbs. While, as Bourdieu (1984) suggests, classifiers have the power of classification, this thesis shows that maintaining this status has been a complex and continuous action involving multiple agents, institutions, and representations.