Corporations Flee the City, Find the Suburbs
by James Passarelli
Though most associate urban sprawl with residential and family shifts, a concurrent trend proved even more influential: the mass movement of American corporations to the suburbs. This uprooting of corporate headquarters, offices, stores, and factories followed the less dramatic housing shift that saw large groups of middle class American families escaping the stifling city in the first half of the twentieth century. Despite a different ideological color, American corporations and families shared many reasons for seeking refuge in the spread-out green spaces beyond city limits.[1] The laundry list of urban plagues became, and remained, a truism. A 1971 Time article (two and a half decades after the war) entitled “Why Companies Are Fleeing the City” gave an exhaustive list of “all the familiar ills of the city”: “the housing shortage, spastic transit facilities, increasing air pollution, drug addiction, burglaries and muggings, low-caliber public schools, public-be-damned municipal employees.”[2] It was no longer practical for the country’s leading executives to cling to their old downtown headquarters and urban factories, and many executives considered a change of scenery to be imperative.
Corporations Get Out of Downtown
The most obvious reason for the move from the city was overcrowding. Relatively small floors in downtown skyscrapers could no longer accommodate thriving businesses and their ever-growing staffs in the midst of the post-war economic boom. As early as 1945, Architectural Record commented on businesses’ need to “look ahead” and “establish new quarters.”[3] The lack of space had correlative repercussions, not least of which were “blight, congestion, ugliness and general drabness” as “[d]owntown lost its self-contentment and stirred to improve its self image.”[4]
Suburbs, meanwhile, offered “spacious surroundings, landscaping, ample on-site parking, lower rent, free-flowing traffic movement, [and] buildings designed for tenant needs.”[5] Suburban plots offered cheaper land and seemingly limitless space to accommodate future growth, and the ability to build outward instead of upward. It also offered companies the ability to refashion themselves in the public eye, or to completely hide themselves from critics’ gaze. Suburban pastures offered both a blank slate for public relations and a more serene location for creative business enterprise.[6]
Growth in Gotham
The establishment of new corporate centers was a nationwide trend, but it was especially apparent in New York City. Beginning in the early 1950s, a slew of Fortune 500 companies moved to Westchester County, just north of the city, following the lead of General Foods, which relocated to White Plains in 1953. Besides the evasion of downtown office reorganization headaches and the social stains of the city, Westchester offered big businesses more predictable tax codes, a homogenous and well-trained workforce, and close proximity to many executives’ homes.[7] Far from peripheral, this radial corporate spread had an enormous impact on federal, state, and city planning. This rapid growth, according to a 1972 report, made “offices the hinge on which any plan for the New York Region might swing, that neither forecasts of a probable shape of the future Region nor proposals for change could be made without an understanding of the potential scale and locational requirements of the office industry.”[8]
Consumerism and Suburbanization
With the exodus of corporate headquarters came commercial decentralization, the emblem of which was the increasingly ubiquitous shopping mall. The appearance of these massive new commercial centers in the 1950s and early 1960s facilitated the growth of “edge nodes,” increasing suburban independence from the city.[9] These outlying suburban communities thrived on tax write-offs for cheap, ephemeral construction, and a new, distinctly American, form of consumerism drew people further away from downtown shopping districts.[10]
Largely studied as disparate phenomena, the relocation of both headquarters and retail centers shared symbolic and practical elements. Unlike headquarters, suburban malls and ever-increasing economies of scale made obsolete the traditional trip to downtown shopping centers in pursuit of luxury items.[11] Yet suburban retail centers and corporate offices both helped to rob the city of its place as the symbol of American commerce. As consumers and corporations alike gained most of the amenities previously unique to the city, urban spaces seemed increasingly irrelevant.[12]
Makin’ Polyvinyl Chloride in the Factory
Another important decentralizing trend had a longer history. Around the turn of the century, factories and factory headquarters had increasingly come to be associated with pollution and the working classes, and company executives constantly sought out new and innovative methods of polishing their image. One way was the construction of a new factory headquarters, exemplified by the Deere & Company’s lavish new building outside Molina, Illinois in 1955, designed by the preeminent architect Eero Saarinen.[13] In the following years, suburban factories gave their inner-city counterparts even more competition as industrial executives sought to boast their manufacturing centers along newly developed highways.[14] Industrial parks began to spring up in the late 1940s, providing low-rent warehouses with little long-term commitment to smaller, less established producers.[15]
New Roots
Despite population loss and clear trends toward corporate suburbanization, some executives desperately clung to their downtown offices and city centers, even into the late 1960s.[16] The overly optimistic conductors of a 1972 research study of office locations by the tri-state Regional Plan Association even made the vague observation that “despite heavy odds in favor of dispersal, the central business districts of the nation’s largest twenty-one metropolitan areas have been…holding their own in the past decade; while population decentralized, offices did not.”[17] Still, despite increasing city growth, more and more corporations saw fit to move at least a large percentage of their personnel away from densely populated areas. Near indistinguishable clusters of self-sufficient corporate communities obscured the traditional geographic norm of dense, thriving city centers surrounded by sparse suburbs. The city, as a symbol of modernism and commerce, was replaced by what urban scholar Robert Beauregard in 1993 called “a non-place realm of rootless individuals and non-spatial communities.”[18] Many of America’s most influential companies, however, saw an opportunity in the move to form new roots, both literally and figuratively, in the virgin pastures outside the decaying city, where only weeds were thought to flourish.
Notes:
[1] Louise Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism, Cambridge, 2011, 21-27.
[2] “Why Companies Are Fleeing the City,” Time, April 26, 1971.
[3] L. Andrew Reinhard and Henry Hofmeister, “Modern Offices: New Trends in Office Design,” Architectural Record, v. 93, no. 3 (March, 1945), 99.
[4] J. Ross McKeever, Business Parks, Office Parks, Plazas, & Centers: A Study of Development Practices and Procedures, Washington, D.C., 1970, 11. McKeever echoes the Time article cited above, continuing his list of disadvantages of the city: “traffic congestion, inadequate and high-priced parking, high rents, obsolescent space, general confusion, clutter and noise.”
[5] Ibid. 12.
[6] Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism, 136-142.
[7] Roger Panetta, “Westchester, the American Suburb: A New Narrative” in Westchester: The American Suburb, ed. Roger Panetta, New York, 2006, 67. PepsiCo and IBM later established headquarters in Westchester in the 1960s/ For an in-depth discussion of these moves, see Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism.
[8] Boris Pushkarev, The Office Industry: Patterns of Growth and Location, Cambridge, 1972, vii.
[9] Dolores Hayden, What is Suburbia? Naming the Layers in the Landscape, 1820-20007” in Westchester: The American Suburb, 77-101.
[10] Hayden, unpublished paper in The Suburb Reader, ed. Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese, New York, 2006, 278-279.
[11] For post-war American consumerism and suburbia, see William Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II, New York, 2011, 117-122.
[12] Muller, Outer City, 45.
[13] Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism, 21. For Saarinen’s role in the bolstering of corporate image see Nancy A. Miller, “Eero Saarinen on the Frontier of the Future: Building Corporate Image in the American Suburban Landscape, 1939-1961,” PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1999.
[14] Peter O. Muller, The Outer City: The Geographical Consequences of the Urbanization of the Suburbs, Washington, D.C.,
[15] Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism, 151-3.
[16] J. Ross McKeever, Business Parks, Office Parks, Plazas, & Centers: A Study of Development Practices and Procedures, 9.
[17] Boris Pushkarev The Office Industry: Patterns of Growth and Location, Cambridge, 1972, vii.
[18] Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline, Cambridge, 1993, 12.
Though most associate urban sprawl with residential and family shifts, a concurrent trend proved even more influential: the mass movement of American corporations to the suburbs. This uprooting of corporate headquarters, offices, stores, and factories followed the less dramatic housing shift that saw large groups of middle class American families escaping the stifling city in the first half of the twentieth century. Despite a different ideological color, American corporations and families shared many reasons for seeking refuge in the spread-out green spaces beyond city limits.[1] The laundry list of urban plagues became, and remained, a truism. A 1971 Time article (two and a half decades after the war) entitled “Why Companies Are Fleeing the City” gave an exhaustive list of “all the familiar ills of the city”: “the housing shortage, spastic transit facilities, increasing air pollution, drug addiction, burglaries and muggings, low-caliber public schools, public-be-damned municipal employees.”[2] It was no longer practical for the country’s leading executives to cling to their old downtown headquarters and urban factories, and many executives considered a change of scenery to be imperative.
Corporations Get Out of Downtown
The most obvious reason for the move from the city was overcrowding. Relatively small floors in downtown skyscrapers could no longer accommodate thriving businesses and their ever-growing staffs in the midst of the post-war economic boom. As early as 1945, Architectural Record commented on businesses’ need to “look ahead” and “establish new quarters.”[3] The lack of space had correlative repercussions, not least of which were “blight, congestion, ugliness and general drabness” as “[d]owntown lost its self-contentment and stirred to improve its self image.”[4]
Suburbs, meanwhile, offered “spacious surroundings, landscaping, ample on-site parking, lower rent, free-flowing traffic movement, [and] buildings designed for tenant needs.”[5] Suburban plots offered cheaper land and seemingly limitless space to accommodate future growth, and the ability to build outward instead of upward. It also offered companies the ability to refashion themselves in the public eye, or to completely hide themselves from critics’ gaze. Suburban pastures offered both a blank slate for public relations and a more serene location for creative business enterprise.[6]
Growth in Gotham
The establishment of new corporate centers was a nationwide trend, but it was especially apparent in New York City. Beginning in the early 1950s, a slew of Fortune 500 companies moved to Westchester County, just north of the city, following the lead of General Foods, which relocated to White Plains in 1953. Besides the evasion of downtown office reorganization headaches and the social stains of the city, Westchester offered big businesses more predictable tax codes, a homogenous and well-trained workforce, and close proximity to many executives’ homes.[7] Far from peripheral, this radial corporate spread had an enormous impact on federal, state, and city planning. This rapid growth, according to a 1972 report, made “offices the hinge on which any plan for the New York Region might swing, that neither forecasts of a probable shape of the future Region nor proposals for change could be made without an understanding of the potential scale and locational requirements of the office industry.”[8]
Consumerism and Suburbanization
With the exodus of corporate headquarters came commercial decentralization, the emblem of which was the increasingly ubiquitous shopping mall. The appearance of these massive new commercial centers in the 1950s and early 1960s facilitated the growth of “edge nodes,” increasing suburban independence from the city.[9] These outlying suburban communities thrived on tax write-offs for cheap, ephemeral construction, and a new, distinctly American, form of consumerism drew people further away from downtown shopping districts.[10]
Largely studied as disparate phenomena, the relocation of both headquarters and retail centers shared symbolic and practical elements. Unlike headquarters, suburban malls and ever-increasing economies of scale made obsolete the traditional trip to downtown shopping centers in pursuit of luxury items.[11] Yet suburban retail centers and corporate offices both helped to rob the city of its place as the symbol of American commerce. As consumers and corporations alike gained most of the amenities previously unique to the city, urban spaces seemed increasingly irrelevant.[12]
Makin’ Polyvinyl Chloride in the Factory
Another important decentralizing trend had a longer history. Around the turn of the century, factories and factory headquarters had increasingly come to be associated with pollution and the working classes, and company executives constantly sought out new and innovative methods of polishing their image. One way was the construction of a new factory headquarters, exemplified by the Deere & Company’s lavish new building outside Molina, Illinois in 1955, designed by the preeminent architect Eero Saarinen.[13] In the following years, suburban factories gave their inner-city counterparts even more competition as industrial executives sought to boast their manufacturing centers along newly developed highways.[14] Industrial parks began to spring up in the late 1940s, providing low-rent warehouses with little long-term commitment to smaller, less established producers.[15]
New Roots
Despite population loss and clear trends toward corporate suburbanization, some executives desperately clung to their downtown offices and city centers, even into the late 1960s.[16] The overly optimistic conductors of a 1972 research study of office locations by the tri-state Regional Plan Association even made the vague observation that “despite heavy odds in favor of dispersal, the central business districts of the nation’s largest twenty-one metropolitan areas have been…holding their own in the past decade; while population decentralized, offices did not.”[17] Still, despite increasing city growth, more and more corporations saw fit to move at least a large percentage of their personnel away from densely populated areas. Near indistinguishable clusters of self-sufficient corporate communities obscured the traditional geographic norm of dense, thriving city centers surrounded by sparse suburbs. The city, as a symbol of modernism and commerce, was replaced by what urban scholar Robert Beauregard in 1993 called “a non-place realm of rootless individuals and non-spatial communities.”[18] Many of America’s most influential companies, however, saw an opportunity in the move to form new roots, both literally and figuratively, in the virgin pastures outside the decaying city, where only weeds were thought to flourish.
Notes:
[1] Louise Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism, Cambridge, 2011, 21-27.
[2] “Why Companies Are Fleeing the City,” Time, April 26, 1971.
[3] L. Andrew Reinhard and Henry Hofmeister, “Modern Offices: New Trends in Office Design,” Architectural Record, v. 93, no. 3 (March, 1945), 99.
[4] J. Ross McKeever, Business Parks, Office Parks, Plazas, & Centers: A Study of Development Practices and Procedures, Washington, D.C., 1970, 11. McKeever echoes the Time article cited above, continuing his list of disadvantages of the city: “traffic congestion, inadequate and high-priced parking, high rents, obsolescent space, general confusion, clutter and noise.”
[5] Ibid. 12.
[6] Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism, 136-142.
[7] Roger Panetta, “Westchester, the American Suburb: A New Narrative” in Westchester: The American Suburb, ed. Roger Panetta, New York, 2006, 67. PepsiCo and IBM later established headquarters in Westchester in the 1960s/ For an in-depth discussion of these moves, see Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism.
[8] Boris Pushkarev, The Office Industry: Patterns of Growth and Location, Cambridge, 1972, vii.
[9] Dolores Hayden, What is Suburbia? Naming the Layers in the Landscape, 1820-20007” in Westchester: The American Suburb, 77-101.
[10] Hayden, unpublished paper in The Suburb Reader, ed. Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese, New York, 2006, 278-279.
[11] For post-war American consumerism and suburbia, see William Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II, New York, 2011, 117-122.
[12] Muller, Outer City, 45.
[13] Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism, 21. For Saarinen’s role in the bolstering of corporate image see Nancy A. Miller, “Eero Saarinen on the Frontier of the Future: Building Corporate Image in the American Suburban Landscape, 1939-1961,” PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1999.
[14] Peter O. Muller, The Outer City: The Geographical Consequences of the Urbanization of the Suburbs, Washington, D.C.,
[15] Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism, 151-3.
[16] J. Ross McKeever, Business Parks, Office Parks, Plazas, & Centers: A Study of Development Practices and Procedures, 9.
[17] Boris Pushkarev The Office Industry: Patterns of Growth and Location, Cambridge, 1972, vii.
[18] Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline, Cambridge, 1993, 12.