Alan Ehrenhalt's The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America was written over a decade ago, when I was only eleven years old and living in the very suburb, Elmhurst, Illinois, that he uses as source material for the last third of his book. Ehrenhalt's history advances a counterintuitive and simple thesis: the traditional municipal and familial authority structures of the 1950s allowed America to modernize at an astonishing pace while still remaining in one piece culturally. It was the subsequent transition from an authoritarian sense of community to an individualist one based on free choice that undermined that social cohesion, leading to our current state of communal ennui, as Walker Percy would have described it.

Conservatives might warm to the idea that the 1950s were actually not as bad as Mad Men makes them out to be. And Ehrenhalt is eminently fair to a much-maligned decade, employing far more nuance than one might expect. However, while the first half of The Lost City details the traditionalist structures of urban life, demonstrating how they were able to maintain a sense of community in a hyper-modern city like Chicago, the last few chapters on suburban Elmhurst introduce a creeping sense of tragedy. As a native son of Elmhurst, I was particularly fascinated by his social analysis of the Western suburb which stands-in as Ehrenhalt’s archetype for late 1950s America.

The strange thing is, compared to more recent suburban developments, Elmhurst seems at first glance to be a New Urbanite’s paradise. I remember walking downtown from my grandparents’ house to the train station at York Road, after getting two scoops of ice cream at Baskin Robbins. I’d walk through the poplar- and oak-strewn downtown retail district, always making sure to stop at “It’s Good to be King,” which sold cast-iron toy soldiers and all my favorite board games. Later, when I was a teenager, my family moved to one of the far northern suburbs of Chicago. We lived in a suburban development built in the early 1990s. All the homes conformed to suburban code—pastel colors, perfectly landscaped shrubbery, with plastic playgrounds littered about every few blocks. There was no downtown to walk through. No locally-owned toy store. There was not even a suitable sidewalk connecting our sub-development to much of the rest of the town. We had to drive if we wanted to leave. I remembered Elmhurst with more than a little nostalgia.

That’s why Ehrenhalt’s history took me by surprise. He argues convincingly that the trend toward suburbanism, which turned so ugly in the past couple decades, began on Norman Rockwell streets like those of Elmhurst. Ehrenhalt paints a picture of the town’s (re)birth in the 1950s as a haven of young urbanites fleeing the authoritarian city. The older Elmhurst was composed of primarily of blue-collar German immigrants, who had settled in the southern Yorkfield district in which my mother spent her childhood. Downtown York Road was an old fashioned blue-collar city center, which even housed a blacksmith as late as 1950. But by the end of the decade, Elmhurst had become one of the focal points of suburban development in greater Chicagoland, and by 1957 a new expressway was buying up the last remaining farm land within city limits.

The social climate in Elmhurst changed rapidly as hundreds and then thousands of young upwardly-mobile couples fled Chicago—still very much under the control of Mayor Daley’s political machine. They were like modern day Israelites fleeing Egypt, removing their monetary and creative capital to the new split-level houses in the Brynhaven and Emery Manor subdivisions. The suburbanites maintained a surprisingly tight-knit social group. While their parents, who had probably lived in one of the Cook County wards, had enjoyed an established community in urban (and ethnic) parishes, schools, and authoritarian family life, the suburbanites had to adapt to new surroundings. Writes Ehrenhalt: “Grafting authority onto life in a wholly different physical environment was a tortuous process.” While the liberated children of these 1950s suburban-dwellers remember “a culture in which authority was tough, rigid, even crude at times,” in reality, the authority structure in suburban life felt this way precisely because it was so artificial. The new Elmhurst was a place “where natural authority was eroding, in a new and unfamiliar world in which rules were difficult to enforce, and where adults invoked it hesitantly, less certain than in old days of just what the rules were.” Ehrenhalt argues that the “traditional” nuclear family, as popularly understood, was in fact an invention of mid-century suburbia. “In subdivisions such as Brynhaven and Emery Manor, the suburban family was regarded, like the physical setting, as something very new: an experiment in fulfilling personal needs and solving personal problems that used to be province of the larger community.” Urban communities had fostered a social hierarchy in which families lived an integrated life together on a daily basis. In suburban Elmhurst, each social demographic had its own domain: the young fathers had the Jaycees club (whose “Creed” includes statements of vague religious faith as well as clear belief in the free-market system). The young mothers had numerous social committees and the local PTA. As for the children—they were lost in the over-burdened school district (in the fall of 1957, York High School boasted an enrollment of over three thousand students).

The new Elmhurst also managed to isolate itself from the older working-class Elmhurst. While the Yorkfield residents continued by-and-large to attend the more fundamentalist Yorkfield Presbyterian Church, the suburbanites founded their own more modern Elmhurst Presbyterian Church. Elmhurst Presbyterian was amazingly successful under its first full-time pastor, Clare Tallman, who was recruited by the local congregation on account of his reputation as a good business manager. After moving to Elmhurst, Tallman joined the Rotary Club and Kiwanis, and began a fund-raising campaign for a new church building, which boasted a strikingly modern design with an aluminum spire that “managed to resemble a space needle.” The church’s annual report contained its own Beatitudes: “Blessed are those who use the offering envelops, for their contributions shall be recorded, and shall be deductible from their income tax. Blessed are the systematic givers, for there shall be order in their lives and in their quarterly statements.”