Did I grow up in a suburb?

At the risk of seeming affected, I'm going to write about where I grew up and how I didn't realize it was technically a suburb until class yesterday.

I grew up in Highland Park/University Park, a separate town within Dallas that was established in 1909 under similar motivations as Hyde Park, Austin. I was researching its history and discovered that the designers were hired to "design its layout in 1907 'as a refuge from an increasingly diverse city.' Notably, twenty percent of the original land was set aside for parks." When I first read those sentences, I thought it said "dense city", but it doesn't. IT SAYS DIVERSE! The entire town was created as an escape from other races, classes and types of people! Not the pollution, crowdedness and hustle of the city... and it is notable, and slightly confusing to me, that the town was concieved right as the Model T was coming out. Henry Ford's innovation established 1908 as the year the car became popular, but, as it says above, Highland Park was designed in 1907 and the lots were first sold in 1909. Mabye the first landowners in the town owned cars before the masses, but it sounds like the car was not at all the driving factor of the suburb. The town is still extrememly homogenous today, you can imagine.

The fact that 20% of the land was devoted to parks is interesting. Looking back, there are tons of parks in the neighborhood, and all very accessible. Though I lived in 4 different houses in the school district, I really was always within walking distance of one. Caruth Park was a staple hang out after everything else had closed, and the duck pond at Curtis Park, right across from my elementary school, was constantly peppered with families, couples and exersisers. Besides Northpark Mall, the main shopping areas were outdoors, like the image we saw in class yesterday, and though no one commuted on bike, we kids rode our bikes safely through the neighborhoods past dark.

Reasons it never occured to me that Highland Park/University Park was a "suburb":

The roads are straight and tight and don't end in cul-de-sacs

The lots are small (in University Park at least)

There are businesses everywhere and many people work within the town limits

I didn't go downtown because there was nothing to do there, not because it was too far away

The house styles are very diverse

The lots are so expensive

It is over 100 years old and grew over time

I always put Dallas, TX as my address

When I think of suburbs I think of this:

Reasons I see that HP is a suburb:

We drive EVERYWHERE, no matter how close, no exageration

There are very strict and exclusive zoning policies in place

The first development was Highland Park Village Shopping Center, which is exactly the same idea as the ones we talked about in class yesterday

Everyone has a lawn and the streets are lined with trees--they are just so old, they don't seem implanted

It exists only on one side of Highway 75, the opposite side of downtown

Why is it so jarring to me that it was a legitimate suburb? Probably because the balance of houses, businesses and parks seemed to work. It was small enough that we could have ridden bikes everywhere, or stuck a trolley on the road and eliminated the car. But it was a bubble. The exclusivity of the area, the pretension, the self-centeredness were all detrimental to the inhabitants. Honestly, it's for that reason, not the abundance of cars and commuting, that make me dislike the idea of suburbia in the form of these old developments. I wouldn't care to send people into downtown Dallas to live just so they could walk to work and live in high rises, I would send Highland Park residents to live outside the town boundaries, whether it's in a single family home or not. I think that would be a greater leap toward a better future. The rest can come later.