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 infra structure, 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. 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.