Page 15 - C.A.L.L. #43 - Winter 2017

From socialism to the

suburbs: The Life of a

fading community

Usonia was an intentional community built by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1940s. Has it
become little more than a Westchester suburb?

Amelia Schonbek, Westchester, NY; Curbed.com

If you look at an aerial photo of Westchester County from the 1940s, as the founders of Usonia may well
have done, you’ll see a number of towns dissolving into farmland or woods, divided by a few highways
but not much else. It was exactly what the founders were looking for: some verdant, empty land on
which to build affordable homes, raise their children, experience nature, and form a community
together. They were a group of mostly young Jews from New York City, not really hippies—they had
professional jobs and intended to keep them—but they had socialist leanings, a strong desire to escape
the claustrophobia of New York, and a set of plans drawn up by Frank Lloyd Wright for a 47-family
intentional community: a long swath of land with houses scattered across it on circular plots that all
blended into one another. Wright was against fences, and they wrote a prohibition on demarcating
property into Usonia’s covenant.

Standing in the
middle of Usonia
today feels almost
like standing in the
middle of that
midcentury vision.
Hundred-foot trees
rise all around, and
the homes, made of
wood and glass and
stone and designed
by Wright or his
apprentices, are so
well placed among
the hills that it feels
like they grew out of
the land. It’s very, very
quiet. But walk
outward and the spell Photo: Ashley Gates
breaks a bit. In the
driveway of one home, a basketball hoop has been affixed to a Wrightian natural stone wall. On the
northern edge of the neighborhood you can hear cars whizzing by. Today’s aerial maps show, all around
Usonia’s deep green woods, rows of tiny square houses and square lawns. And next to one property in

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