Introduction
After World War II, American corporations followed the middle class into the suburbs, transforming them dramatically: today, the majority of Americans both work and live in suburbia. Corporations fled from the city's high rents, high crime, nuclear vulnerability, and minority population, taking advantage of the long-distance car commuting made possible by the government's huge postwar highway-building project to escape to greener pastures. Starting fresh in the suburbs enabled corporations to reshape their image and their structure. In moving to the suburbs, corporations re-enacted their employees' dreams of homeownership and reinforced their leaders' traditional attitudes toward the role of women in society. They set their buildings in acres of landscaped greenery and emulated aristocratic traditions to fit in with suburban standards, to attract and stimulate educated employees, and to combat public suspicion of their immense power. In their Edenic surroundings, corporations constructed buildings shaped especially to their needs, permitting them to better apply hierarchical management and systematic scientific discovery to the running of their businesses. In establishing a campus on the Platinum Mile in Westchester, the iconic agglomeration of suburban offices in upstate New York, Fordham University takes on their complex legacy; Fordham's choice for its newest campus suggests that, though corporations' suburban offices have faltered lately, America's future lies in its vast suburbs.