When and where was the best time and place to live on this little green-and-blue planet?
In the running, I’d say, was California from the 1920s to the 1960s, particularly in communities like Pasadena and Berkeley, before the pressures of growth overlook the larger regions in which an ever-more prosperous middle-class way of life was close to a kind of Eden. Images of its suburban dreamscape set a standard which is still trying to be emulated elsewhere in the world, even if it’s been lost in California.
So what it did it look like? You can get a sense here – Beautiful California in the 1940s-50s – on the Vintage Everyday blog.
On one hand, the pre-Motordom downtowns were still intact, before the Interstates and shopping malls drained away their economic vitality.
West Broadway in San Diego, 1946
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On the other, surburbia reached its apogee in places like Glendale – where the fog in the Los Angeles basin was still mostly the product of nature, not the automobile.
Glendale, California, 1952
