Shelter From The Storm

One of the projects Wright developed while waiting out the Depression and the absence of commissions was Broadacre City. After 1929, he thought the modern city needed to be decentralized, diluting its physical impact, and hopefully lessening its social inequities. Broadacre was a work of social philosophy as much as architecture: if you could change the way families lived, perhaps you could change the way they were.

Wright wasn’t the only person working on such utopian schemes at the dawn of the Depression. In 1929, two architects, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, developed a residential model called Radburn in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. They called it a “Town for the Motor Age,” and their design separated pedestrian and vehicular traffic, using U-shaped bays that limited traffic to people who lived there, and even they would only traverse part of each bay. The houses fronted onto a huge common park. Like Broadacre, it was a social experiment.

The model was recreated in various places, among them Davis, California, and Osaka, Japan; in England at Coventry, Bracknell, and Stevenage; and in Winnipeg at Wildwood Park, where I grew up. There was a vast contiguous park connecting most of the houses, and Wildwood was situated in a generous cul-de-sac formed by a loop in the Red River. Bordered by a golf course, it was protected from the outside world, a green and isolated Oz.

When I was ten, we bought a post–World War I vintage house at Wildwood’s edge. My father redesigned it completely, and my brother and I were paid fifty cents an hour to unleash our destructive adolescent energies on the walls with hammers, knocking out the lath and plaster. A photograph taken in front of his creation shows the family in hopeful ’60s fashions, sitting in a pile of leaves with our handsome, sweetly useless dog. The house was unique, and it reinforced the idea that we were unique, coming out of an era of conformity when individuality was slowly becoming prized in the colourful riptide of the ’60s. My father has a hip, short-lived beard, and I am sitting in tight-lipped adolescence, sullen and plotting rebellion. My sister is still a perfect five-year-old, and between us is David, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, pudding-faced boy who, even then, had a musical talent that my mother retailed with some pride. She was taking the picture, and demanded proof of our happiness.

My brother was a guileless child, open to the world, while I was paralytically shy. I used him as a buffer to ask directions, deal with adults, anything that required interaction. He was a foil and a convenient target. One day when my mother was sewing, she asked where her pins had disappeared to.

“David swallowed them,” I said, immediately and fictively.

“You swallowed them?” she said to David, who was standing next to her. He looked at me and nodded, a four-year-old along for the ride.

“Oh my God.” She loaded us into the front seat of our unsafe Chevrolet Corvair (soon to be condemned by Ralph Nader in a screed titled Unsafe at Any Speed) and raced to the hospital. She had grabbed a loaf of bread on the way out and kept feeding slices to David, hoping this would cushion the trauma of the pins. He chewed each piece of white, nutrition-free ’60s bread, then put the damp ball of dough in her purse as we careened toward the hospital for no real purpose.

David and I shared a room for almost ten years, which ensured a mild ongoing antagonism based on our three-year age difference, our contrasting habits and personalities, on months-long arguments over who actually owned the magnetic puck hockey game, and whether the Dave Clark Five would be bigger than the Beatles (I argued for the DC Five). Once, while staying at my grandmother’s house and having just watched a prison movie, my cousin and I knotted sheets into a rope, tied them to a bed leg, and lowered David out the second-floor window. He descended erratically and dangerously into the frame of the living-room picture window, in view of my grandmother, who was serving tea to a group of Presbyterians. The sheet rope wasn’t long enough (just like in the movies), and he crashed into her prized flower bed. David recovered from this mishap as he did many others, and he continued to play the piano in the study with infuriating talent, sailing through his Toronto Conservatory lessons like Mozart as I struggled with each note.

I can see all this in the photograph. Most family photographs from any given era have certain similarities, posed and framed in the same way, the subjects wearing similar clothes, sporting the same haircuts, filmed with the same technology, and sending the same message: we are happy. With our own family photos, we see the context, we see what lurks outside the frame, the talents, limitations, antagonisms, and kinship that bind us and drive us apart. We know the grown-up version of the grinning child, that he was venal or gentle, that he loved his family or worked in the insurance game, that his liver gave out or his heart blew up. We go through family photo albums with a running narrative, and with what Roland Barthes described as “that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.”