From the air, the homes fan out like intricate beadwork. For decades, America’s suburbs have been a popular setting for television shows, from I Love Lucy to Desperate Housewives, chronicling entertaining trivialities against the backdrop of meticulously shorn lawns, the drifting smoke of barbecues, the infrastructure of cars and roads: a pleasantly domestic—but fraught—version of the American dream. The idyllic ideal of modern suburbia in the United States was born in 1947 with the creation of Levittown, a large housing development in Long Island, New York. Businessman Abraham Levitt and…
