The automobile’s arrival made the countryside newly accessible to urban American families.

Evidence

Their newly acquired leisure time and the mobility to use it to conquer space meant, to the urban masses of America, something very particular. The countryside was no longer inaccessible. For millions of New York fathers, thanks to the machine parked near their door, no longer did a Sunday outing have to be to a Bowery beer garden or a hard-surfaced playground framed by the grimy buildings that they saw every day. Suddenly, it could be to grassy meadows beneath expanses of blue sky, perhaps even to white sand and sparkling surf. They could escape the city, and, more important, they could free their children for a time from its clutches; they could take them boating and hiking and camping, could roam with them through fields and forests, sprawl with them eating picnic lunches on blankets. They could let them do the things that they themselves had done so seldom when they were children. When they taught their sons to swim now, it would not have to be in the East River. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 633

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the mobility/leisure history themes in later 20th-century auto-and-suburb literature; a scaffolding of the demand-side problem Moses’ parks would answer. — connects to: Modern urbanites create dispersed villages linking private spaces by car — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 805
• SEED: The auto as the machine that unlocked rural leisure for the working class — an angle on infrastructure as demand-creating rather than demand-serving.

Broader Connections

• Modern urbanites create dispersed villages linking private spaces by car #responds-to (0.78) — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 805