| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Becky M. Nicolaides. My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965. (Historical Studies of Urban America.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2002. Pp. xviii, 412. Cloth $65.00, paper $24.00.

Becky M. Nicolaides's magnificent book is unlikely to restore luster to the tarnished reputation of American suburbs. Nicolaides links many problems of the American metropolis to the suburban fringe, but, unlike many previous critics, she has assembled ample unflattering data to buttress her criticism. Most notably, she demonstrates that white working-class suburban values, cultivated over nearly half a century of community building, played as important a role in the urban crisis as the more common explanations of destructive federal policy and elite suburban exclusivity. 1

The book, set primarily in South Gate, California, begins in the 1920s with a thick portrait of life in this white, working-class suburb of Los Angeles. Industrial growth, labor issues, social characteristics, consumption patterns, and religious life all receive extensive treatment. Nicolaides, like Richard Harris, believes that scholars have paid too little attention to owner building by the working class in suburbs before World War II, and she devotes considerable ingenuity to reconstructing these informal efforts. Unlike Harris, however, Nicolaides only demonstrates the existence of owner-built housing in South Gate and does not succeed in creating a comprehensive analysis of Los Angeles suburban owner-builder patterns of the type Harris created for Toronto. . . .

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