Beau Weston is a sociology professor at Centre College. [full disclosure: I took several course from Beau during my time at Centre between 1994-1998 while I was getting my BA in cultural anthropology and philosophy.]
Apparently he is visiting his sister in my own town of Mt. Lebanon, PA. and couldn’t resist the chance to do a little social theorizing while he is here. His claim is that Lebo is a “crunchy suburb” as specified by David Brooks in On Paradise Drive. I initially questioned his claims and have done a little digging to clarify my instincts. Below is an excerpt from the post, “The Coffee House Test of a Crunchy Suburb” on his blog followed by my thoughts and commentary.
David Brooks introduces the useful concept of the “crunchy suburb” in On Paradise Road. This is an inner suburb of a big city. It has more of the people he called “bobos” (bourgeois bohemians) in an earlier book. Among suburbs, it is likely to have more professionals, better schools, and more sophisticated consumer goods.
We are in Mt. Lebanon, a Pittsburgh suburb where my sister is hosting Christmas this year. It meets these criteria. Mt. Lebanon has, I think, been more corporate and Republican in the past, but is shifting in the professional and Democratic direction that many good-schools inner suburbs are.
Danville, KY, is too much of a small town to have such nuances among the various sections of town. The coffee houses are in the middle of town and serve everyone from all the neighborhoods and “suburbs.” We needed to come to a larger city to see a crunchy suburb in action.
We are sitting in a coffee house in Mt. Lebanon. It filled up just after school drop-off. Mrs. G. suggested that this is a measure of a crunchy suburb. The first necessity of a weekday morning is to get the kids to school. The second necessity is espresso.
In comparison to Danville, KY, Mt. Lebanon may be further down the scale towards a crunchy suburb, but I think it still has a quite a long way to go be anywhere near a true crunchy suburb as laid out by David Brooks in his book On Paradise Drive.
According to David Brooks in an article he wrote for the NYTimes, he summarizes a crunchy suburb as:
You don’t have to travel very far in America to see radically different sorts of people, most of whom know very little about the communities and subcultures just down the highway. For example, if you are driving across the northern band of the country — especially in Vermont, Massachusetts, Wisconsin or Oregon — you are likely to stumble across a crunchy suburb. These are places with meat-free food co-ops, pottery galleries, sandal shops (because people with progressive politics have a strange penchant for toe exhibitionism). Not many people in these places know much about the for-profit sector of the economy, but they do build wonderful all-wood playgrounds for their kids, who tend to have names like Milo and Mandela. You know you’re in a crunchy suburb because you see the anti-lawns, which declare just how fervently crunchy suburbanites reject the soul-destroying standards of conventional success. Anti-lawns look like regular lawns with eating disorders. Some are bare patches of dirt, others are scraggly spreads of ragged, weedlike vegetation, the horticultural version of a grunge rocker’s face.
Definition of crunchy suburb:
A typically inner ring suburb characterized as progressive, anti-commercial, or countercultural, particularly found in cities located in the northern rim of the United States through Vermont, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Oregon, and Washington.
Satirized by David Brooks as a “progressive suburb dominated by urban exiles who con- sider themselves city folks at heart but moved out to suburbia because they needed more space,” a crunchy suburb is populated by countercultural urbanites with kids as well as businesses that cater to these families, such as food co-ops. Brooks sees crunchy suburbanites as open-minded, inclusive, and in possession of the last truly anti-commercial lifestyle.
While I do see some of these characteristics in myself and in the circle of friends that we have in Lebo, I think its a too much to say that the whole of Mt Lebanon could be classified as a crunchy suburb. It may be trending that way, but I think it is still more closely associated with other cultural zones described later in the book.
He goes on on to describe other other rings of suburbia further from city center that I would equate more closely to my experience in Mt. Lebanon.
Then a few miles away, you might find yourself in an entirely different cultural zone, in an upscale suburban town center packed with restaurants — one of those communities that perform the neat trick of being clearly suburban while still making it nearly impossible to park. The people here tend to be lawyers, doctors and professors, and they drive around in Volvos, Audis and Saabs because it is socially acceptable to buy a luxury car as long as it comes from a country hostile to U.S. foreign policy.
Here you can find your Trader Joe’s grocery stores, where all the cashiers look as if they are on loan from Amnesty International and all the snack food is especially designed for kids who come home from school screaming, ”Mom, I want a snack that will prevent colorectal cancer!” Here you’ve got newly renovated Arts and Crafts seven-bedroom homes whose owners have developed views on beveled granite; no dinner party in this clique has gone all the way to dessert without a conversational phase on the merits and demerits of Corian countertops. Bathroom tile is their cocaine: instead of white powder, they blow their life savings on handcrafted Italian wall covering from Waterworks.
Here are a few pages from the book describing “crunchy suburbs” via Google Book Search:
Read if for yourself and make your own decision.
Related:
Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes
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