Hey, We Could Be a SUBURB!
Change was in the air; any day now, the influx of early-bird commuters would begin, and towns would start to blossom into suburbs. Well, not really, not in Hicksville or in any other town east of what today would be central Queens. Wannabe suburbs would have to be patient, and wait for the fast rail link across the East River.
Anyone who is interested in the years that led up to Hicksville's morphing into a suburb, and missed what was said here about them last year, can read two earlier Ancient Hixtory articles by using the links below:
Ancient Hixtory talks about the start of Suburban Transformation
- August 2019: Conquering the East River makes it feasible to commute between New York and Hicksville every day
- September 2019: Suburbia means less farmland, more houses, more commuter trains, and more schools
If one could afford it, 1908 was a good time to buy land, either for one's own use, or for resale at a profit to some future developer. Thus, newspapers (for which real estate ads always were a significant source of revenue) were avidly promoting the building of suburban homes. After all, new commuters meant multiple newspaper ads - ones that attracted them to their new community and homes, and ones for the city homes that they were leaving vacant.
Newspapers did more than offer ads for commuter residences. They also ran profiles of places that wished to attract commuters. These profiles were the predecessors of the "puff pieces" which today appear in weekend papers, touting new subdivisions or condo towers. Back then, they would have spoken of villages that were suddenly to become accessible to Manhattan.
A typical profile said the best things it could about a community. It glossed over the ordinary and tried to ignore the bad. Although it seemed factual, it was not necessarily objective; now and then, fiction was presented as fact. Looking back, it's amusing to see that the same newspaper page might simultaneously promote several towns that were competing against each other to attract commuters.
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