Boomburbs: The Rise of America's Accidental Cities

Chapter 1: Legoland

A primary LEGO showpiece, Miniland USA is a celebration of American achievements, a canvas to illustrate the diversification of its peoples and cultures, past and present. —Legoland website The main attraction of Legoland, a theme park just outside of Carlsbad, California, is Miniland USA, which features miniatures of quintessentially American places built from 20 million Legos. Miniland has a replica of Washington, complete with federal museums, monuments, the White House, and the Capitol. It even has a miniature Georgetown and a working model of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal. Other places in Miniland include the French Quarter of New Orleans, a New England fishing village, and Manhattan. The miniature of California is a hodgepodge of scenes, from an Orange County surfing town to Chinatown in San Francisco. What’s missing from Miniland, however, is the built landscapes so typical of America—the housing subdivision, the retail strip mall, the office park—in short, suburbia. The irony is that Lego building blocks are perfectly suited to make such places, especially the commercial structures. The basic Lego is a small rectangular block. Think of the ease with which the Miniland model makers could depict big-box retail centers or the lowslung , banded-window suburban office building. Just snap a bunch of 1 Legoland 1 Legos together and, presto, instant “edge city.”1 It is not as if the Lego folks could have missed knowing about suburban malls and office buildings : Southern California is chock full of them. Such buildings even lie just outside the gates of Legoland, along Interstate 5 as it approaches San Diego. But apparently suburban sprawl does not count as an “American achievement.” Modern suburbia’s absence from Miniland USA reflects a national ambivalence about what we have built in the past half century. We made the suburbs, and we increasingly live in the suburbs, but we still often disregard them as real places. Even though one could describe much of modern suburban commercial development as Lego-like, there was little chance that Miniland would include a replica of nearby Costa Mesa, California, which contains the nation’s biggest suburban office complex and one of its largest malls.2 Boomburbs: The Booming Suburbs This book is about the places that rarely inspire theme parks but, interestingly , are home to them, such as Anaheim, California, which is famous for Disneyland. While these booming suburbs may not capture the public imagination, they have consistently been the fastest-growing cities over the past several decades. This growth has not translated into immediate name recognition, except perhaps among demographers, who keep seeing the population growth of these cities exceed that of older cities. The essence of a boomburb is that people know of them but find them unremarkable and unmemorable. As this book shows, all sorts of highpro file industries and activities occur in boomburbs, but few identify with the city. For example, over a dozen major league sports are centered in boomburbs, but only the Anaheim Mighty Ducks (a hockey team) carries the place name. The fact that the one professional baseball team that had a boomburb identity—the Anaheim Angels—has since become the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim points to the problem. The city of Anaheim took the trouble to highlight this switch in its entry for Wikipedia.com, an online encyclopedia: On January 3, 2005, Angels Baseball, LP, the ownership group for the Anaheim Angels, announced that it would change the name of the club to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Team spokesmen pointed out that, from its inception, the Angels had been granted territorial rights by Major League Baseball to the counties of Los Angeles, Ven2 LEGOLAND tura, Riverside, and San Bernardino in addition to Orange County. New owner Arturo Moreno believed the new name would help him market the team to the entire Southern California region rather than just Orange County. The “of Anaheim” was included in the official name to comply with a provision of the team’s lease at Angel Stadium, which requires that “Anaheim be included” in the team’s name. Thus Anaheim, a city with as many residents as Pittsburgh or Cincinnati , is reduced to an addendum on the Angels name—and only then because of a legal technicality. Scratch most boomburb mayors and you may find that they have a Rodney Dangerfield complex: their cities get no respect. Michael L. Montandon , the mayor of North Las Vegas (one...