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Someone posted this song recently on the SF forum, the song 'Little Boxes' made out of ticky tacky - about Daly City in SF and the shoddy material used to build houses in the 50s and 60s.
Quote:
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same
There's a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same
Daly City Ticky tacky:
I'd never heard the song before but it reminded me of a place in the UK where my Aunt lived called Runcorn Newtown. It was a truly awful place and didnt last long. The housing was probably meant to be futuristic at the time, but all the houses looked like they were made out of washing machines.
But now I look back at it with fondness and think actually its a shame that hardly any of it survived.
These have to be the ultimate 'little boxes made out of ticky tacky'.
Can anything in the US come close to beating this for awfulness? (yes folks, people actually lived in these):
My aunt lived here in one of the low houses rather than the apartment buildings (we called them flats). Funny as kids we loved visiting. It was all pedestrianised and you could run about outside all day.
Those photos have me thinking hybrid of front loading washing machine and recycled shipping containers.
Except for the first photo those homes are ugly as sin. The concrete ones are really depressing to look at. I can't imagine going home to that everyday.
I haven't seen anything like that where I live but I've seen subdivisions with 3 models used over and over again. I'd rather have an old house that looks different.
The picture with the orange things doesn't even look like anything at all. I can't even figure out where people would be living.
The other ones with all the portholes and flaps (windows maybe?) and garage doors looks like a boarding kennel for dogs. They're sort of funny - hahaha - but not so funny to think that people had to live in them and that someone designed them and someone approved them and someone actually built them. Interesting.
To me most of those scream European postwar "damn half our housing stock is destroyed we need places for people to live quick!" Probably was never meant to be there long. Sorta like a FEMA trailer. The first pics are cute little moderns I like.
Runcorn..from around 1969-70-71 or s... was by James Stirling, a fairly good modernist architect, during a sort of hi-tech period for him. Back when architecture---particularly UK architecture---- was going through this wierd hi-tech "sci-fi ", phase, playing around with modular concepts, interchangeablity, megastructures, etc. (Milton Keynes new town was from the same era).
The re the first pix in Daily City.... A sizable part of San Francisco (The Sunset District) looks like that, too (...aka "The Avenues"...sort of SFs version of Queens or Chicago's NW Side). You dont hear much about that side of San Fran in the tourist and urbanist literature.
The folk singer who wrote Little Houses was Malvina Reynolds. She was a Communist (seriously), so a good example of the left wing carping at what most people at the time thought was a good thing....a house in the suburbs and a car in the garage (and a decent job and upward mobility). Capitalism was working when she wrote that song, so as a Communist she had to find some angle to be crticial, so chose suburban conformity.
Malvina Reynolds was an older lady when she became known to the wider world for her songs written in the folk style. This would have been back in the mid to late 1960s, during the Folk Music Revival.
Her activism and politics would probably come closer to aligning with those of Pete Seeger than Communism.. Left of center, certainly, but more for individuality and creativity than for the State, Big Government, or Big Business.
"Little Boxes" is one of her best-known songs - a later verse goes something like this: (this is from memory - didn't check the lyrics).
"And the people, in the houses,
They go to the un-i-vers-i-ty,
And they're put in boxes,
Little boxes, just the same,
And they're doctors
And they're lawyers,
And they're business ex-e-cu-tives,
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky,
And they all look just the same."
Malvina Reynolds also composed songs which were featured on Sesame Street, and much of her music was recorded by the Smithsonian Institution. She was also involved with the American Friends (Quakers) Service Committee.
What evidence do you have that Malvina Reynolds was a Communist?
Last edited by CraigCreek; 04-12-2013 at 12:32 PM..
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