Narrow lives in Kirkwood?

“The critics of suburbs say that you and I live narrow lives.

I agree. My life is narrow.

From one perspective or another, all our lives are narrow.  Only when lives are placed side by side do they seem larger.”  

D.J. Waldie. Holy Land.

These 1950’s style tract homes are located on Wisteria Street in Kirkwood.  Although the homes are very small with similar layouts, owners or renters have taken the time and care to personalize their homes.  Do these residents think that just because their homes are narrow, then their lives are narrow?

Although not developed for the same reasons as Lakewood, Atlanta’s Kirkwood neighborhood features some of the same kinds of 1950’s post war tract housing  described by Waldie in his memoir. Kirkwood was one of Atlanta’s first streetcar suburbs, with streetcars providing service to and from Atlanta three times per day until the early 1950’s.

Beginning in the 1950’s, Kirkwood experienced white flight, and the racial composition of the neighborhood went from being almost entirely white to entirely black.  This posed serious problems for Kirkwood’s new black residents who wanted their children to attend the white, segregated Kirkwood school.  As a result, the school was integrated in 1965.  Beginning in the 1980’s, Kirkwood began to experience an influx of white, middle class residents who began to renovate the neighborhood’s housing stock, which ranges from Victorian mansions, to craftsmen bungalows, to 1950’s tract housing.  In 2007, the Kirkwood Neighbors organization voted to establish the neighborhood as a historic district.  

"Beginning in the 1850's in America, city planners and architects sought to domesticate the condition of working people by setting their houses in a landscape.  

The houses of working people would have a lawn and a garden, to soften the view. 

The houses would be small, because extended families would no longer live in them.

The small houses would be affordable, so that even a machinist could buy one.

Living in them would, however, require orderly lives."

-D.J. Waldie