Interview by Robert S. Griffin
I grew up in the 1950s in a little town called Fairview Village in south Jersey. It was a planned community designed by a fellow named Litchfield, and offered a pleasant environment for people who worked in the shipyard in nearby Camden. Fairview Village had what you could call garden community architecture. Brick houses were attached to each other in clusters of four, and sometimes two, so the houses were in rows, but the rows were broken up. The houses all had yards, and there were common areas on every block where they didn’t build houses. Some blocks had no houses at all; there was just grass and trees. Neighbors would walk their dogs, and kids would play football.
People planted
lovely oak trees, so by the time I lived there the trees were mature, maybe sixteen
to eighteen inches in diameter. There was a town square with park benches, and
people would sit and talk and get to know each other, and there were stores and
businesses. It was a socially and economically self-contained unit. Looking
back on it, the neighborhood where I grew up seems idyllic, with its parks and
shaded streets. In fact, one fellow who had lived in England remarked that
Fairview Village was like a little English town…..
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