A Little Piece of Heaven in Lakewood

On most Saturday mornings, Donald Waldie is out weeding his frontyard, which he will say desperately needs it, but don’t be deceived. The azaleas are a little burned out, but the lawn is green and well-manicured.

Waldie lives in Lakewood, and his home is one of the hundreds of homes that make up the nearly anonymous patchwork of suburbs in southeast Los Angeles County. Little distinguishes Lakewood--unless you recall the brief notoriety of the Spur Posse, the group of teenagers who a few years back made it a cruel sport to have sex with as many girls as possible.

Today Lakewood’s tree-lined streets and well-maintained homes are quiet and almost defy attention, unless of course you’re interested in the almost mystically simple qualities of everyday life in a classic American suburb. Waldie is, and has lovingly rendered his perceptions in “Holy Land” (Norton), a memoir of growing up--and still living--in one of the largest postwar housing developments in the country.

Beginning in 1950 and continuing for almost three years, Lakewood was a flurry of building. As many as 100 homes were started each day, more than 500 a week, and by the end--33 months later--17,500 had been raised.

When considering this astonishing boom, Waldie breaks ranks with critics who disparage sprawl. He paints instead a picture of a community of simple and practical values that worked 50 years ago and still works today. A recent survey of homeowners in Los Angeles County backs him up. The average Lakewood resident lives here 15.6 years--the longest length of stay of any municipality in the county.

As the public information officer for Lakewood, Waldie, 47, makes his living explaining the city to its residents and the press. That he defends the place might not be surprising, but unlike the boosters who sold homes here in the 1950s on the benefits of a regional shopping center (the Lakewood Center Mall was one of the first and largest in the country) and a garbage disposal in every kitchen, he focuses on the spiritual benefits of life here.

“These are not perfect places, and the people who live in them are not perfect,” admits Waldie, a soft-spoken man who picks his words carefully. “But my book is about the possibility of leading a redeemed life in this kind of suburban place--a life that has some value to others and a life in which one gets saved.”

Welcome to the first church of the suburb. Let “Holy Land” be your bible.

Comprising more than 300 mini-chapters, ranging from a single sentence to a page and written much like an extended prose poem, “Holy Land” is the story of Waldie’s faith and his notion that a kind of salvation takes place within the context of a suburb like Lakewood. Responsibility and obligation, he will tell you, are the linchpins of this faith, holding neighbors and communities together to make this a real holy land.

If you look carefully behind a scrim of materialism--these homes and these yards--you will see that the simple upkeep of a frontyard is symbolic of a complicated social contract between neighbors.

Waldie--whom Buzz magazine described in its list of 100 notables as having “a passion and eloquence worthy of Joan Didion”--composed the chapters of “Holy Land” during the half-hour it takes him to walk to or from work. Poor eyesight keeps him from driving. He lives alone, almost like a monk, in the house his parents bought in 1946. He attends Catholic church.

The homes in his neighborhood would probably sell in the high $150,000s; most have three bedrooms, one bath and a detached two-car garage. Windows look into neighbors’ windows. Cars, trucks and campers are parked in driveways and in the street. Some lawns are scruffy; some are immaculate. It is, in Waldie’s words, a place for the “not-quite middle class.”

These straight-arrow streets and single-family homes are as much a part of the American landscape as shopping malls and 7-Elevens and from here to Levittown, Long Island, have been easy targets. Writer Ron Rosenbaum described his 1956 screenplay for “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” as “about the horror of being in the ‘burbs.” In his influential 1964 book “God’s Own Junkyard” (Holt, Rinehart & Winston), architect Peter Blake wrote: “The kind of stratified, anesthetized and standardized society being bred in America’s present-day Suburbia is not one to look forward to with pleasure.”

Nowadays critics are no less unkind. Robert Bellah, principal author of “Habits of the Heart: Individualism & Commitment in American Life” (University of California Press), a 1985 diagnosis of what ails American communities, today sees suburbs as “a catastrophe for this country.” First, their population density is low, leading to a wasteful use of land; second, they cater to the automobile, which is expensive and polluting; and third, they represent a closed door to what’s happening in urban centers.

“People [in Lakewood] may be able to look out for themselves,” Bellah says. “But what about the rest of society?”

Waldie is not surprised by the anger and the harsh language the suburban experience can evoke.

“These are furious, vituperative attacks on the kind of suburban space that Lakewood best exemplified,” he says. “Willful ignorance about these places is one of the reasons I wrote ‘Holy Land.’ ”

*

Take a Saturday walk through Jose del Valle Park in Lakewood and you will see what the critics probably didn’t take into account: People really seem to enjoy living here.

Children scramble for the playground equipment. Baseball diamonds are packed with players; parents cheer children from the bleachers. Waldie pauses to watch a foul ball fly into a quiet street. He wrote “Holy Land” with the presumption that the ordinary lives of ordinary people have a unique value.

In 1949, Louis Boyar, Mark Taper and Ben Weingart purchased 3,500 acres of farmland to create this landscape. Boyar, who had built homes in Long Beach in the 1930s, was responsible for the plan. He used a simple formula--straight streets at right angles and 5,000-square-foot lots--parameters that were surprisingly prescient. Urban planners today, in an attempt to built more friendly communities, are returning to straight-line grids, which seem to be more conducive to neighborliness than curved streets and cul-de-sacs.

But Boyar did more than plot 17,500 homes and a scattering of social amenities, Waldie says. He built a community out of his heart, creating a network for possible social interactions that reinforce common values. Values that make Jose del Valle Park so popular. Values that seem at times forgotten--or at least under-reported--in the country.

Of course, the motives of the developers were not entirely altruistic. By the time they dissolved their corporation, they had made almost $12 million--money that ironically was made from a community that kept Jews, like themselves, as well as blacks and Mexicans from living here.

Filled with sad truths and terrible ironies, “Holy Land” chronicles the distance between 1950 and now. Here was a suburb, after all, whose major selling point was a shopping center that could double as a fallout shelter; but rather than ridicule these facts, Waldie writes with a poignant mix of knowing and compassion.

“The critics of suburbs say that you and I live narrow lives,” one mini-chapter reads. “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.”

*

Waldie will admit, however, that not all lives fit into this side-by-side pattern. “Holy Land” does look at a few disconnected people who live outside the tacit social contracts that connect neighbors. There’s the man who filled his yard with dead machinery and used building supplies. There’s the woman who believed that the dead from the nearby aircraft plant were secretly buried beneath her house.

Conspicuously absent from the book, however, is mention of the Spur Posse, the 1993 story that yanked Lakewood out of its peaceful anonymity. To a nation worried about its apparent loss of morals, the case of these high school athletes who gave each other “points” for sexual conquests was deplorable, especially coming from such an all-American community like Lakewood.

As Waldie sees it, “The Spur Posse was less about the decline of the suburbs and more a lesson in how charismatic individuals can create evil.

“If you looked at Lakewood in 1993 and projected a straight-line evolution from that point, I can see how you might have imagined a collapse of the social infrastructure, but that has not happened. There is some resiliency here.”

Not only does he leave out references to the Spur Posse, but he also glosses over the time he was nearly robbed at gunpoint walking home from work. Snakes may live in the grass here, but you won’t find them in Waldie’s yard.

Perhaps denial keeps the residents here safe--as it did in the 1950s with regard to the bomb and racism, so too for the 1990s with gangs and neighborhood violence.

When writing about the ever-present Southern California danger of earthquakes--apparently the homes here are built so lightly, they pose relatively little danger to the owners and “might even shelter us”--Waldie concludes that “the burden of our habits do the same.”

“I believe that accepting obligations because you’re obliged to is probably the saving strength against all that would further erode our social institutions,” he explains. And as he turns to weed a yard that barely needs it, Waldie joins the dance that connects residents to the community--past and present.

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Lakewood by the Numbers

At first glance, Lakewood seems to be a community built by the numbers. Perhaps it was. Just consider the statistics its developers racked up between 1950 and 1953:

* 105 acres of concrete sidewalks and 133 miles of paved streets were laid.

* 5,000 street lights were erected.

* 264 acres were set aside for a shopping center featuring 10,580 parking spaces.

* 37 playgrounds, 18 churches and 20 elementary schools were planned.

* 30,000 people showed up the first day of sales; 611 homes were sold the first week.

* 15 feet extended between one home’s kitchen window and another’s bedroom window.

* Seven floor plans with 21 exteriors and 39 color schemes were offered.

* 4.2 people lived in each home and more than 75 children lived in an average block.

From “Holy Land” (Norton, 1996) by D.J. Waldie