Kevin Starr's Valley

Historian Kevin Starr's latest thick work on California, "Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963," devotes much attention to the San Fernando Valley, which swelled during the time period covered to a population of a million people. It also gained its status then as the archetype of the sprawling SoCal suburb. Writer Joel Kotkin, who lives in the Valley and writes often from a suburban perspective, reviews what Starr has to say — and approves — in a piece posted at his own New Geography and at Truthdig. Sample:

Starr’s book is not merely about the rich, the powerful, and even the culturally influential. He finds his primary muse not in the Bohemian realms of San Francisco or the mansions of Beverly Hills, but in that most democratic of everyman’s places, the San Fernando Valley, the place author Kevin Roderick aptly dubbed “America’s Suburb.”

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This growth was far more than the mindless bedroom sprawl often depicted by aesthetes and urban intellectuals. People in the Valley did not depend largely on the old part of Los Angeles the way, for example, Long Island lived off Manhattan. Most of the Valley’s growth was homegrown—driven by local industry such as aerospace, entertainment, electronics and until the 1960s automobiles.

Even today, the Valley has very much its own economy and sense of separation from Los Angeles. However, more important, the Valley was, first, a middle-class phenomenon. A cosmopolitan of the first order, Starr manages to chronicle California’s artistic and literary elites, but does not see in them the essence of the state’s appeal. Instead, he explores the everyday wonders of the Valley’s families, single-family homes and swimming pools—6,000 permitted in one year, between 1959 and 1960!

Thanks for the shout out. Starr was nice enough to say of my considerably thinner (in every way) effort, "Just a superb book...this is history the way I like it."