Nothin’ wrong with a kid from the ’burbs, Bub

Gina Barreca

Monday, July 16, 2012 | 2 a.m.

Say it loud: I’m suburban and I’m proud.

I grew up in Oceanside on Long Island, a classic working-class suburb of New York, and, despite the recent bad press about suburbs, I’d say my neighborhood served me well.

So what if I say I’m from Brooklyn? It’s where I lived as a very little kid; to be honest, my real identity was shaped by living in the ’burbs.

And I believe it’s time for those of us who spent summers swimming in a friend’s above-ground vinyl pool to speak up — to come out of the suburban closet.

The latest research shows that the cities are growing while the suburbs are remaining stagnant. Personally, I have always thought that stagnation was one of the selling points (“Woo-hoo! I don’t have to see experimental theater anymore!”), but that’s no longer effective.

According to the 2012 census report, young people are flocking to big cities while middle-age people are moving back to them.

Older tenants in hip neighborhoods have to hire members of the former Soviet Navy to stand in front of their rent-stabilized apartments to prevent real estate professionals from ringing the doorbell and shouting “You’re not feeling so hot, right? Be honest. Here’s a flier about assisted living.”

My students certainly don’t want to live in the suburbs. Not one college kid in the last 25 years has said “To live in the suburbs is my goal in life, right up there with writing a Hollywood screenplay and winning ‘Dancing With The Stars.’”

Remember when “out of town” was the Great American Dream? Think Dick Van Dyke. Think “Leave It to Beaver.”

Think “I Love Lucy”: even the Ricardos and the Mertzes traded nightclubs for country clubs in the show’s final season.

More recent portraits of suburban life are framed by “Family Guy,” “The Simpsons” and “That ’70s Show.” The generic neighborhoods in these shows are inhabited by what might be termed “morons.” This might explain why 20- and 30-somethings aren’t packing the U-Hauls and snapping up split-levels but are renting lofts downtown instead.

Look, even 40 years ago, folks heading to the suburbs were not searching for the road not taken; they weren’t even looking for the road unpaved.

They were looking for the road rather close to the mall and not too far from the supermarket.

At least that’s what my parents wanted when they moved to the suburbs in the 1960s. It was a badge of honor to move: It meant your family had arrived. Even more important, it signaled they had left.

Your parents were no longer living on the same block or in the same house as the rest of their tribe. They were pioneers, sometimes moving a whole 20, or maybe even 25 minutes from where they’d grown up. Other members of the family would stand on the stoop and tearfully wave goodbye as if they were setting off across the Rockies in a wagon train.

In a way, they were seeking out new worlds and new civilizations. They were going where no subway had gone before. Actually, they were heading to places where public transportation was as rare as good rye bread.

The fantasy of the suburbs had resembled dreams of English country life. Somehow clipped hedges and rose gardens were involved. What they really didn’t get was just how much time they were going to spend in the car. They didn’t realize that all that leisure time they’d anticipated in hammocks was going to be spent in a Country Squire station wagon either commuting to work or dragging the kids to somebody else’s vinyl pool on a hot afternoon.

But for a backyard, a good public school, a library within walking distance and neighbors who can’t hear you argue or flush, nothing beats the suburbs. People filled the mortgaged houses on those tree-lined streets for the benefit of their kids and for very few other reasons. If you were lucky enough to have parents who did that for you, don’t say you came from “outside” some city: be honest and say you came from inside the suburbs.

And say it loud! Unless, of course, you’re in a cramped urban apartment where you might disturb the neighbors.

Gina Barreca is an English professor at the University of Connecticut and a columnist for the Hartford Courant.