New York’s suburban mega*domain*ia
East End Windmill (First published November, 1985)
( orig. pub. November 17, 1985)
Here on the east end, megadomainia is rearing it’s poisonous head, looming shadowy over shrinking real-property lots.
The craze that began quietly at the dawn of this decade now shares a swelling, Godzillian wave with the Beta Max, Culture Club and the Deficit Reduction Act, unlikely to break any time soon.
It’s riptide is poised, broiling, to wash over the East End with little question in it’s wake as to the “why”s and “how”s…. The inescapable inertia of the contemporary social climber asks nothing and answers less.
Short of the planet expanding with the burgeoning population, land remains our most finite resource, and each ensuing generation must needs accept an exponentially- narrowing sliver of this American Dream dessert.
The rabid thirst for status knows few equals on the East End, or, for that matter, in much of the metro region. While our planet’s mass cannot be easily expanded, our homes can, at the expense of open, green lawns, fodder for wasted hours astride a lawnmower; missed games on the tube.
Two birds:
While preservationism may continue to restrict available land, it won’t as easily restrict home dimensions within the parameters of a given lot size.
Nestle increased chocolate bar volume by adding comparatively inexpensive puffed rice to it’s offerings, creating the “Crunch bar”….inexorably selling less chocolate, and more air, to generate higher margins.
Ronald McDonald, sensing with his infallibly fine-tuned red nose, a tendency toward lighter fare, thus gave us the Chicken McNugget.
Metro region NY developers, intuiting such logic while enjoying Drive-thru or munching on a crunch bar, developed a manner by which to increase profitability while keeping the package (lot) size the same. The fate of these McMansions, however, may be intertwined with that of the McNugget: The MSG-laced McFowl were implicated in the recent shooting spree in San Ysidro, said to have been fueled by the assailant’s intolerance to the sometimes-mood-altering glutamate.
The glutamate of the Mcmansion may prove more spatial than chemical, as the structural density of these McNeighbourhoods creates McCanyons throughout the McSubdivisions, both here on the Mceast End and back in my McHome in the McHudson region.
In either neighborhood, space now joins land in the pantheon of limited resource. neighborhoods might eventually become McTenements, and it would follow that The East End’s estuarine marshes may become vast, desolate McSeptic systems.
JJ Westerveld
SH
