Research Notes: Toward a History of the Suburban Driveway

Driveways are everywhere. Like traffic signs and signals, pavement markings, telephone poles, and street lamps, they belong to a category of highly legislated and highly engineered elements found especially in the suburban domestic landscape. Like these other elements of American infrastructure, driveways are ubiquitous almost to the point of invisibility. However, they do have an aesthetic presence and identity. They also have a history.

In the context of single-family homes, driveways have gone from being the picturesque private paths described by Andrew Jackson Downing in the 1840s to the nondescript parking pads being built in suburbia today, with many steps taken between these two extremes.¹ No matter the form they take, driveways simultaneously perform utilitarian and representational functions. They help establish where one can go, what one does, and how one feels. However, because driveways are designed and deployed primarily for practical reasons, their experiential and rhetorical aspects are often overlooked. What does paying closer attention to these almost invisible elements of the suburban landscape reveal?

These notes focus on the formal aspects of the suburban driveway and outline the different shapes, sizes, uses, and interpretations driveways have taken on over time. The goal is not to show how one type of driveway is better than another or to argue that the aesthetic aspects of driveways preclude the functional ones. Rather, these notes draw attention to the physical qualities of the driveway as a means of beginning to understand its changing cultural significance within the vernacular cultural landscape from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This essay focuses on the driveway's presence in a number of well-known polemical texts, design proposals, and built projects over a 150-year time frame. While the current study documents the general changes made to the suburban driveway, it is hoped that future investigations will be able to build on some of its points by examining how local legislators, builders, and owners have adapted the driveway to meet the cultural needs of specific times and places.

The Driveway Defined

A driveway is defined as a space that allows for vehicular access between a public road and a piece of private property.² It has two zones: 1) the curb-cut at the street and 2) the roadway and/or parking area on the individual lot (Figure 1). While roadway designers, traffic engineers, and owners of commercial properties have focused on the first zone, users of single-family suburban houses are more familiar with and concerned with the second.³ In all instances, the driveway's location at the intersection of the public and private realms makes it a highly regulated entity. Whether through municipal codes starting in the early twentieth century, deed restrictions at mid-century, or in more recently developed design guidelines, there are strict rules about where driveways can be located, how often they can occur, how close to the corner they are allowed to be, how wide and long they must be, what the radius of their openings should be, and who is responsible for their maintenance and construction.⁴ Such restrictions are there to protect the public's health, safety, and welfare. They can also be used to manage the visual identity of a place.⁵

Figure 1.

Typical driveway condition, Ithaca, New York, 2016. The curb-cut at the street and sidewalk is of concrete, while the parking area behind it is of macadam. Copyright Google Earth Pro, September 2016.

In residential developments where design guidelines and deed restrictions are used to dictate the design of driveways, what can be put on the driveway and what can take place on it is even more tightly regulated.⁶ While such limits may seem at odds with the dominant cultural narrative of the suburbs as places of personal choice, they are consistent with suburbia's history as a highly managed and designed environment.⁷ In other words, the driveway is one of many suburban spaces subject to collective control.

Among those who have sought to exert influence on this seemingly nondesigned space are architects and...