Page 19 - C.A.L.L. #43 - Winter 2017

Brooklyn; the road out of town is lined with sprawling old houses. One minute you’re driving past
verandas and white picket fences, the next, after a quick turn onto a narrow, unmarked road, you’re in
Usonia.

It’s early spring, and a cloud of new, bright-green leaves fills the woods. All around is stillness and quiet.
I’d heard stories about flocks of children on bicycles trailed by a neighborhood’s worth of dogs, but I
pass only cars on the road as I approach Roland Reisley’s house at the southern end of Usonia.

There are three homes in Usonia that Wright designed himself, and Reisley lives in one of them. “Without
exception, you enter a Frank Lloyd Wright house through a narrow entryway,” Reisley tells me as he
opens his door, gesturing to the low ceiling overhead before stepping aside to welcome me in. Wright,
he explains, wanted to create a feeling of compression when you walked in the door, so that once you
stepped into the common space of the house, you’d feel expansiveness and release, the relief of coming
home. Reisley ushers me outside to his deck, cantilevered into the trees, and begins to tell me what’s
shifted in Usonia in the more than six decades since he moved in.

For the first 40 years that Usonia existed, the community was incredibly stable. Only 12 of the 47 houses
changed hands, and six of those were transferred from parents to children. But since then, as original
members have grown old and died, and children have moved away, it’s become possible to join the
community without being particularly interested in the “shoulder-to-shoulder, egalitarian” ethos that the
original members fostered. (The covenants, which are still in place and remain legally binding, don’t
require community members to commit a certain amount of time or labor to Usonia.) The houses have
also become markedly more expensive, sometimes selling for over $1 million. “The community would
acquire a reputation as an upper class haven,” Reisley wrote in his book. “The thought of Usonia as an
enclave for elitist millionaires would have appalled the founders.”

Original Usonians tend to see this as a generational shift. “This generation has different priorities,” Podell
tells me. “They come in expecting the community to give more to them. And this community, in the past,
was based on everybody giving to one another. That’s a big difference.”

There are, of course, some new residents who wish the community was as cooperative as it was in the
’50s and ’60s. “I liked the idea that this would be more than just people living on a street together,” says
Ellen Vellensky, who moved to Usonia from New York City around four years ago. “I did get the
impression that it was more of a community than it is. For me, that’s a little bit of a bummer. I haven’t met
all of my neighbors. Everyone moves in at a different point in their life. I think if I said to them, I'm going
to go rebuild the playground or something, some neighbors would be like, what are you doing?
Because they don’t have children.”

But others are less invested in the idea. Sarah Lash and her husband are also newer residents of Usonia—
the type who refer to themselves as residents, rather than members—who moved from Brooklyn four
years ago. “We weren’t assuming that this was going to be our social network, but it was nice to know it
was a patently more close-knit community than the typical,” Lash tells me. “The community is something
you can opt into, or not. Some people are really gung-ho, others do their own thing. I don’t think there’s
any pressure to be part of the community.”

Lash is right, in a sense: Usonians don’t need to actively build their community anymore. There is no land
to clear, no well to dig, no group mortgages to negotiate. And in the absence of make-it-or-break-it
moments, the decisions that preoccupy them—whether to cut down invasive trees, whether a proposed
addition to a house is in keeping with Wright’s Usonian principles—can feel rather insignificant compared
to the high-minded striving of the early days, when a bunch of kids in their 20s were trying to create
something like utopia.

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