WHERE IS ‘ANDY HARDY’?

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

     ANY TOWN, USA – Ironically, as Americans fatten up through fast food and lifestyle, it is also slimming down to overly thin in its public look, in its parks and on its once-shaded streets, those oak- and maple-lined boulevards that looked like “Andy Hardy’s” Hollywood set. Mickey Rooney’s village of Carvel was purely fictional, but that does not forfeit the fact it was “community.”

     Once, many U.S. villages, towns and city neighborhoods looked this way, and some, fortunately, still do or at least have semblance. Yet post-World War II suburban development, in itself a valuable builder of the middle class, unfortunately helped push aside the picture of tree-lined streets leading to downtown neighborhood shopping. Developments offer landscaped lawns and kept shrubbery but lines of well-placed trees along sidewalks and downtowns are not usually in the mix. Walkable neighborhoods linked to one another and to villages are seldom in such relative anonymity.

Suburbia was built quickly to serve dire housing need, but in the push, downtowns and cities were abandoned, and little effort was made to link developments to villages, or to establish new communities within rows and rows of homes. Instead, duplicative strip shopping and malls took up space and added to traffic congestion since you don’t walk to them.

     That’s a loss, for while Andy Hardy was a fictional character and his father the judge, girlfriend Polly Benedict and friend Betsy Booth, played by Judy Garland, were make-believe, these people did exist in true communities, with economically working downtowns and tree-lined streets leading to and from them. Yes, this was a white mix and relatively prosperous at that, but Hollywood aside, truth is that sustainable downtowns of old were just that in diverse and specific neighborhoods.

     Suburbia took the population to development homes, and many downtowns then deteriorated. Even the oaks and maples so well laid out on the boulevards were neglected, first by a stressed tax base that deferred maintenance, then by disease.

     Elsewhere in both Gotham and suburbia, parks today are without funding, as are shade tree commissions. In a nation that sees its upper-class wealth grow exponentially by the Gordon Gekko factor that does not include a trickle-down quotient, there are so very few old-style Rockefeller, Carnegie and other corporate trusts that built and saved our green space. They were parents to our downtowns, to our parks, and now there are many orphans.

     Pity. Foolish. Short-sighted. Each suburbia has its DNA in a tree-lined, small American Main Street, and when, metaphorically, those areas are neglected, or the parks of both suburbia and gotham are abandoned, we become less tied to community. America needs community today.

     The “Andy Hardy” set is long closed. Can we be next?

  The writer is a retired newspaperman. This essay is adapted from an earlier version.

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