Who on this bitch is from THE SUBURBS¿

Did you grow up in a suburb?

not entirely (see above) but spent some years in one.

What was/is it like?

kinda weird, not entirely unenjoyable. One good thing about it is there were a ton of kids on my block, and there was quite a lot to do in terms of hanging out, playing stupid games, cultural exchanges, etc. For instance, my best friends on the block were two African-American kids a few doors down that I played with all the time. We discovered a lot of common interests, such as playing with Legos, epic games of kill-the-man-with-the-ball, but they also introduced me to things such as Devo and their annual skateboard derby (where we'd have obstacle races in the street). Additionally, my brother and I had a lot of free range to explore all the weird stuff around the neighborhood (the big area around the elementary school complete with small little hill that we were all convinced was an Indian burial ground, backyard forts, drainage ditches, the weird creek/forest at the bottom of this one hilly street/cul de sac, etc.).

On the other hand, there was sort of a desparate, criminal teenage element around (which my stepbrother, who was having a lot of trouble with drugs back then, belonged to) which made things kinda weird around the hood. Very 1980s Hessian: lots of pot (I didn't know anything about drugs at this early age), wispy moustaches, mullets, arguments on whether something "rocked" or not (the band The Police were most notably "faggots" according to this element).

What city did it cling to?

This is in a small suburb called Devondale, just outside of Louisville, in eastern Jefferson County, Kentucky. Louisville and Jefferson County merged governments a couple years ago, btw.

Do you ever go back?

My parents live in Louisville proper now, but their office is near there, so I'd guess, yeah. I haven't been on the actual block in a long time, though.

What characterizes your suburb?

split-level houses, driveways, trees. Apparently the area was once a hemp-growing plantation (I think the original plantation house was still there when I was growing up).

What memories do you have of your suburb?

Generally good ones overall, although a few not-so-pleasant memories (that I associate more with family stuff than the suburb itself) exist. Like seeing my stepbrother in handcuffs, for instance.

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What characterizes your suburb?
Very tall trees, strip malls, a surprisingly wide variety of nationalities and ethnicities co-existing mostly peacefully, really ridiculously daft school districting, and a fuck load of people who don't understand how 4-way stops work.

YES. Even though most of my parents' friends were/are Jewish, I went to school with a lot of kids whose families were recent immigrants from China, Pakistan, India, and yet somehow I never kept in touch with any of them.

(Steve-I grew up in Edgware/Stanmore)

Growing up here kinda sucked. I got my lucky break at the beginning of my junior year of high school when I had a minor mental breakdown and transferred to the "alternative" school in Providence. Things rapidly improved at that point. Going from typical awful public school environment (being called fag every day, skipping lunch to go on the interweb in the library, occasional visits to the school psychiatrist due to someone thinking i was going to pull crazy Columbine-style action, getting gum thrown at me on the school bus ride home, etc.) to hippy school (45 minute lunch breaks where we could leave campus, 80 kids in the entire school, addressing teaches by their first names, getting high almost every day) was really really awesome.

So I'm back in Warwick at the moment, though for those keeping track the apartment hunt is going well and I will probably be moving back to New York around the fifteenth of August. It blows here. The only fast food open late is Wendys and Taco Bell, and they're only open until 2. There is a twenty four hour supermarket though, and a Dennys. I am still surprised by the number of kids I see walking around all thug'd out in long t-shirts & baseball caps & gold chains & baggy shorts with FUBU logos.

Little league baseball seemed really important when I was six. Too bad I sucked at it and never got a hit the entire time I played.

not really, no. Where I live now is much more diverse than Louisville in the 1980s or even now, although yeah it's not like I have a friend from every single ethnic group in NYC. But generally the only non-white and/or non-Christian kids I ever met growing up were probably African-Americans, Indians/South Asians and Jews, until I got to college, which even though it was small, was more diverse.

I used to go back in college when my parents still lived there, but they've since moved to another suburb (Willow Springs), which is also southwest (both suburbs are along Rte. 55, which crosses Illinois en route to St. Louis) but closer to Chicago. So I haven't been there in three years or so.

Bolingbrook is an interesting town. Although there'd been a settlement there since the 19th century, it wasn't established until 1965 and still felt like a fairly small suburb (30,000) when my family first moved there when I was six. But throughout the 1990s, a ton of development started happening on the western end of town, closer to Naperville, and according to the 2000 Census, it's now 56,000 strong. Just a few weeks ago, Bolingbrook was awarded the second IKEA in the Chicago area (the other's in Schaumburg).

I get the sense that much of that western development is more similar to Naperville -- huge houses in prefab subdivisions, more affluence -- than to the Bolingbrook I grew up in. Because even though I felt closer to Naperville and Downers Grove than I did to the Will County towns to the south, there was always a sense that Bolingbrook was inferior to them. Certainly, we were poorer. I was plenty resentful in high school when I'd read about new swim facilities at Naperville North, when we'd never even had a swimming pool, and meanwhile the district was slashing funds for extracurricular activities and for language classes. (I think toward the end of high school, we were required to PAY a $30 fee to play sports, be in the school play, etc.)

At the same time, I always liked that Bolingbrook was pretty multicultural in contrast to the DuPage suburbs. Bolingbrook High was about 20-25% African-American, 5-10% Latino, and 5-10% Asian-American. (For whatever reason, there was a particularly large Filipino community.)

But of course the major complaint growing up was that there was never anything to DO there, hence the nickname "Boringbrook" (haha). I don't know, though. I get the sense that everyone who grows up in a suburb registers that complaint, and I'm not sure what people are looking for, especially when you're underage. I mostly spent my time hanging out at friends' houses and occasionally going to a movie or a family-style chain restaurant like Chili's, and I was reasonably happy.

Anyway, I'll let Oops (who, AFAIK, still lives there) fill in anything I've missed.

The population is now listed at 65, 000, but the town will soon run out of farms to convert to subdivisions so the population explosion should begin to peter out soon. I live in the older, eastern part of town (though there are some older homes on the west side, too) and it's makeup is becoming less and less Caucasian every year. Mexicans are coming here in droves, which suits me fine because there is now a great non-chain little Mexican take-out place and I can get quality tortillas at the local supermercado. Many of these minorities (is that still a PC term?) come from the city or rougher suburbs closer to the city and are attracted by B-brook's low crime rate, good schools, and, in the older subdivisions, reasonable housing prices.

Unlike suburbs built along a railroad stop, Bolingbrook has no downtown. There isn't much to do if you take "much to do" to mean bars/clubs/places to see a band, musuems and other cultural stuff, etc. If however you'd rather play some baseball, I have about 15 fields I can show you. The main weekend pastime, esp for people over 30, seems to be going to Best Buy or Barnes and Nobles.

I think it's a pretty good place to grow up (and, conversely, to raise a family), but if you like, you know, meeting people and whatnot it's typical suburban wasteland. It is really diverse (even moreso now than when I was growing up) and it's blue-collar enough to keep people more or less grounded in some type of reality than sheltered la-la land.

Memories: ding-dong ditching (just last week I heard some kid mention this to his (really) little sister and then they noticed I was eavesdropping and he was all "icksnay!" but she kept saying loudly "WHAT'S DING DONG DITCHING???". It made me smile).....playing touch football in the street....trying to get to first base with the cute girl across the street (does watching pornos with someone count as first base?)....waving at the Ice Cream Man and the UPS Man who both kept their jobs my whole life....running through sprinklers in the summer....BLOCK PARTIES!!!!....all the little kids, including me, spying on my babysitter as she was making out with her boyfriend

How could I forget? BOLINGBROOK: T-BALL CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

140,000 people, 30 miles west of chicago.
its boring and expensive. i may as well go to chicago to bars because the prices are the same.

we got all the regular suburbian stuff... huge multiplex, mini golf, bowling. the downtown section is crawling with stupid teenagers trying to impress each other with their short skirts or whatever.

i suppose that i live in a poorer section of naperville. its good and decent. people have a general stereotype for napervillians... rich, beautiful, and shallow. i admit that there are plenty of those people, but of course there are plenty of nice and down to earth people here.

i go to chicago as much as possible. there is just so much more to do and not many art films get out to naperville.

Perhaps Cafe Trieste's demise did have something to do with it, though I seem to remember it closing well before the alternakids departed. I never liked being there cause I hate coffee and didn't smoke, so I'd just sit there munching on a muffin or something, without purpose.

Actually, growing up where I grew up in OC wasn't as bad as being down by the beach cities like Newport or Huntington. Still, it was your typical suburban area with your typical suburban attitudes. LA was only 20 or so miles away, so not too bad.

It's one big suburb out here anyway.

As some of you might know, Melbourne is situated on Port Phillip Bay. Brighton is just down the inner-east coast, about a 25 minute drive to the city. It's one of the more upper/middle-class suburbs, but will always fall short of the hoity-toity areas like Toorak/South Yarra or Camberwell.

There were essentially two shopping strips, Church St and Bay St, both of which were continuously occupied by gossipy housewives and bored teenagers. Whenever I wanted to score weed I'd have to travel to other suburbs by train or bike, which was always an adventure. There wasn't much crime or anything. I think we had our house burgled once or twice in the 20 years my family lived there.

Some of my fondest childhood memories involve my friends and I riding around on BMX bikes after school and getting up to all kinds of mischief. For a couple of years I spent pretty much every day hanging out with the kids next door. My best friend of several years lived a few blocks away, and we would go to eachother's houses and play video games all the time.

As I grew older, I started to realise just how much the place really sucked. I don't think my parents were particularly happy living there towards the end. The locals tended to be a bit narrow and sheltered, whereas my folks are very open and worldly people.

We moved to St Kilda when I was 15. I lived with my family for a few years, but now live with a friend in the suburb of Brunswick, which is full of migrant families - much more colourful and interesting than the homogeneous population of Brighton.

LOGAN'S ROADHOUSE

Then we moved back to Mississippi (where both of my parents are from) in 1975. AIIEEE! Hated it! I'm still conflicted -- I don't feel like I belong to either CA or MS.

Sounds like the newer, western metro areas in the US, specifically Phoenix.

The usual applied - loads of bogan (or as we called them, booner or westie) kids, a very high migrant population (mostly Serbo Croatian, Macendoian, Greek and Italian), lower middle class, quiet streets full of 3 bedroom brick veneer homes. Everyone played street footy, hung out at each others homes to play in the backyard (slip n slide and the trampoline were the popular ones in our backyard).

Queanbeyan had a funny reputation as this sort of wannabe hanger-on place to Canberra (which was a little richer, more sophisticated, had better shops etc). By the time I was about 16 I just went "into town" all the time and hung out with the other goths at the bus interchange, scowling and trying to look cool.

Like Andrew said about Melbourne applies even more so in Canberra and other smaller Aus cities - there is simply no "city" that people live in. Even the innermost suburbs still have actual houses with backyards. Theres little in the way of rowhomes/walkups/council flats in Canberra at all.

Everyone moves away eventually. I dont know anyone still left - they all went to Sydney or Melbourne (or overseas).

I've lived on rural dirt-roads, in suburbs and big cities. I still love both the cities and the country. The in-between I have much less use for.

What was/is it like?
It's nice enough. Houses mainly date from the 1920s/30s or the 1980s with a few really old cottages and a new Barratt home development that they put up after I'd left. It really is the dividing line between town and country. You can be out in fields with ten minutes walk maximum. It's rather conservative (small c, my Guardian-reading mother would never forgive me otherwise), everyone has their pleasant house and nice enough car and they probably work in the public sector or have their own small business. The bus to Wolverhampton takes half an hour, but you could easily shop, drink, eat out, see a doctor and educate your children through to A-level in good state schools without ever leaving Codsall. And then you would go slowly mad and end up with a sniper riffle on top of the County Council building.

What city did it cling to?
Wolverhampton, or Birmingham if you wanted anything decent (spoken as my teenage self).

Do you ever go back?
Occassionally, to see my mum and her boyfriend. I would never live there, ever again. I spent years hankering to live in a city and I'm not going to give it up yet.

What memories do you have of your suburb?
The boredom. The waiting and waiting for my life to start.
Cider and Hooch in various fields. Standing at bus stops for ever and ever. School. Parties in houses with shiny wooden furniture and stick on floral borders. Goldfish ponds. Trees. Two degrees of separation from everyone in the pub.

I say it because that was how it felt to me -- the perceptions of someone who lived there from age 6-11. I was in Stanton, but two blocks away, my school was in Garden Grove. If you think in terms of Anaheim, woo, yay.

It was seriously THE most evil, thrilling, rebellious thing a 6 year could be do in my suburb. By the time I was 11 or so, we had moved onto to taking those wire thingees people put around rose bushes and whatnot, placing them in the middle of the road, and watching---from a safe vantage point---the sparks fly. One time the victim was my dad. Whoopsie. We called a night of such activities "Havoc Nights", which also included such things as going on to the public golf course at night (just because you weren't supposed to), aiming a universal remote through people's windows and changing the channels, and other more heinous things which I have forgotten about.

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very very cool.

We had the same thing in growing up in my suburb of NYC. We called it "Chonking". I am not sure of the origin of the word. But the activity consisted of running around town, dumping bagged grass clippings on area lawns, pulling out pacasandra, and generally being destructive. Oh to be a confused teenager in the burbs with nothing but time.