Too Many Mornings

When my family first moved from downtown Denver to the suburbs nearly 12 years ago, I was excited because it was quiet, the new house required less maintenance, and my kids could ride their bikes up and down the street out front without worrying about traffic.

But I soon discovered I’m a city boy at heart, and started missing everything about the old place—the hustle and bustle of our remarkably diverse neighborhood, the ice cream shop with the Parisian café chairs, the creaky wooden floors of the crowded hardware store, and even our slightly dilapidated house, a three-story, 5,000-square-foot classic Denver Square that was built in 1899 but still had sturdy character despite undergoing many sloppy renovations during its long life.

Nothing in the suburbs interests me as much as it did in the city, not the people, the parks, or the businesses. But it’s city architecture that I miss the most.

City architects seem to work harder to make every home and neighborhood unique. Everything from roof lines and brick colors to porch and window styles is widely varied, often in the same block, and certainly from block to block. Although there are similarities between homes, each one tends to have several distinct and prominent features that separate it from its neighbors. It’s true even for apartment buildings. Within a few blocks of my old house, for example, there was a famous historic area named Poets Row, a long string of six very large apartment buildings, each with a singular design, each named for a different writer.

Most suburban homes, on the other hand, look about the same—bland, dun-colored variations of the wonderfully affordable ranch-style architecture first built in 1932 by architect Cliff May in San Diego, Calif., and popularized in the 1940s by Levitt and Sons, who used it in their famous planned community called Levittown, in Pennsylvania.  Former company president William Levitt, who died in 1994, is widely credited as the father of modern American suburbia.

There are interesting architectural sights to see in the suburbs, of course, but I’ve struggled to find ways to capture them in photographs.

For me, suburban homes and buildings tend to be more interesting at night. That’s when the tiresome sameness of the architecture is cloaked in darkness, lights create interesting shadows and shapes, and the distances between points of light naturally draw your attention to the openness and space that tends to pull people out of the crowded city to the suburbs in the first place. Colors often seem to be more vivid at night in the suburbs, too, although I’m not sure why.

I think these photographs I took illustrate what I mean. They’re abstract, and I believe the abstraction combats the stifling similarity that plagues suburban life at the same it captures what’s best about living here.

Bottles in a Garden Window/MikeWJ

House on a Hill/MikeWJ

Ranch-Style Home at Night/MikeWJ

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