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[ 255 ] I’m an eastern and midwestern urbanite, born and educated in Jersey City, New Brunswick, and Chicago, and now a long-time resident of Pittsburgh. I am habituated to eastern industrial cities! Twice in my lifetime, however, I tried to acclimate myself to living in western urban environments—specifically, Tucson, Arizona, and Long Beach, California—but each time I scurried back east to more familiar urban places.1 Obviously, in reversing my trek, I went contrary to the vast westward migration in the second half of the twentieth century of those easterners and midwesterners seeking sun, space, and access to natural environments and playgrounds.2 In contrast, Hal Rothman, who was two generations or more younger than me, embraced the western experience that his position at Las Vegas offered him and spent much of his scholarly life exploring and writing about it. He had grown up and lived in a consumer-oriented suburban environment that was moving away from the earlier, more industrialized American city that I had experienced in my lifetime. He believed that in the West one could see the impact of human action on the environment more clearly than in “humid climes.” He perceived that Las Vegas particularly embodied the new urban synthesis of service and leisure, and held the key to the future, as cities moved into a postindustrial world.3 A whole new generation of historians including Patricia Limerick, Richard White, and John Findlay began to conceptualize an alternative vision of the West. In his book, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940, for instance,John Findlay notes that westerners tried“to set their cities and their region apart from the East.” The cities of the West were perceived of as ”virgin,” compared to the tired and jaded cities of the East, and this perspective, whether correct or not, had the effect of convincing potential migrants and residents that they could find Escape to the West/ Return to the East The Lure of the City Familiar J o e l a . T a r r [ 256 ] c i T i e s a n d n aT u r e a better life in that region. Other historians, sociologists, and novelists who have written about migration to western cities agree on the lure of the “Golden West,” however misguided it was to think of the West as a single environment.4 I have no doubt that I shared the perception that Findlay notes when I embarked in 1952 for Tucson to attend the University of Arizona at the tender age of eighteen. The Jersey City where I grew up personified all that western urban migrants sought to escape from in the eastern city: crowded housing and slums, factories, dirty streets, and air laden with smoke and fumes. Turf battles between ethnic and racial groups were frequent, and one had to be careful not to walk down the wrong street or utter the wrong answer to a challenging question. Although the city’s political boss Frank “I am the law” Hague was finally out of the mayor’s office after thirty years, he left a tradition of corruption and machine politics that plagued the city for decades. I remember boarding the train in Jersey City to take the long trip to Tucson, accompanied by my best friend from high school who was also attending the university . His family had previously migrated to Los Angeles to join relatives who had moved there in 1931 to open a Kosher-style delicatessen, counting on the patronage of other migrants who missed the ethnic foods of the eastern cities.5 The trip to Tucson seemed endless, as the train sped through the midwestern plains and the desert landscapes of the Southwest. I remember staring out the window at the distant horizon, marveling at the large jackrabbits that raced alongside the train. For a kid who had barely been out of the congested environs of Jersey City, it was an eye-opening experience, introducing me to the vast open spaces that were a prime feature of the western landscape. When I arrived in Tucson it had just over 45,000 inhabitants and was unlike any city that I had experienced. The city was essentially flat, with a small downtown and a scant skyline. Most of the buildings were relatively small, with numerous white or multicolored, one-story bungalows, sometimes of adobe, with weird devices on their roofs (solar hot water heaters and evaporative coolers). Palm trees, the first...

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