Going Solo Read online

  Living alone offers several advantages: It grants sexual freedom and facilitates experimentation. It gives time to mature, develop, and search for true romantic love. It liberates young adults from difficult roommates, including good friends who turn out to be better friends when they are not always in the next room. It enables them to socialize when and how they want to, and to focus on themselves as much as they need.

  Why did the practice of living alone grow so popular among young adults, and how did it turn from a sign of social failure to a rite of passage and a reward for success? To answer these questions we need to look more closely at how the public life of cities and, more specifically, the subculture of singles encouraged new forms of individualism. For the urban bohemians who first experimented with solo living in neighborhoods like Greenwich Village did something that they hadn’t intended: They pioneered a lifestyle whose broad appeal would ultimately bring it into the mainstream. We also need to examine the private lives of families, because changes in the way we relate to one another inside the home have led more of us to grow comfortable in a place of our own. First, though, we should step back to see what we might call the “old” cult of the individual, if only to establish how different it is from the individualism we find in cities today.

  THE CONTEMPORARY VIEW of living alone as a productive experience grew out of a rich historical legacy. The monastic tradition, which has roots in ancient China, Egypt, and Syria, valorized asceticism as a path to knowledge and a meaningful life. According to monastic teachings, separating from society is the most powerful way to get closer to the divine. This is why the fourth-century hermit Abba Moses issued his famous instruction: “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”

  In practice, however, few hermits were true solitaries. Whether in the desert or on the outskirts of a town, they typically lived in settlements shared by other men and congregated with them for a variety of purposes. The historian Peter Brown writes that in Egypt, where “the theory and practice of ascetic life reached its highest pitch of articulateness and sophistication . . . [g]roups had to reproduce exactly, on the fringe of the desert, the closed-in, embattled aspect of the fortified villages”; he notes further that “the monastery of Pachomius was called quite simply The Village.” In ancient China, writes the Asia scholar Aat Vervoorn, the earliest versions of eremitism were secular and philosophical rather than religious, and the lifestyle involved not renouncing society so much as “a lack of regard for those things of the world that are common objects of human action, such as wealth, power, and fame.”6

  Over the centuries, these traditions have evolved and mutated as much as they have traveled. Today we find traces of the old cult of the individual in romantic ideals that emphasize solitude as a return to nature, in the spirit of Thoreau or John Muir; as a path to the sacred, as for Thomas Merton or Hesse’s Siddhartha; or, as the psychologist Anthony Storr put it, as a return to the creative self.7 These are all influential perspectives, and they no doubt fed the stream of ideas that gave rise to the belief that living alone is important for becoming an autonomous adult. But they also share a decidedly antiurban and antisocial bias, and are in many ways antithetical to the practice of living alone in the city. To find the sources of our contemporary ways of settling down, we must look beyond the traditions of the monastery and toward those of the modern metropolis.

  “The metropolis,” wrote the German sociologist Georg Simmel, “assures the individual of a type and degree of personal freedom to which there is no analogy in other circumstances.” Simmel was born in Berlin in 1858, when the population was about 460,000, and during his lifetime he witnessed it grow to more than 2 million people. Many of his contemporaries, particularly those who participated in the romanticist movement against modernity, lamented the moral and cultural changes wrought by urbanization. But Simmel doubted that the less urban life was more virtuous or meaningful. He rebuked those, like Nietzsche and Ruskin, who believed that cities crushed the individual spirit. “Small-town life,” he argued, “imposed such limits upon the movements of the individual in his relationships with the outside world and on his inner independence and differentiation that the modern person could not even breathe under such conditions.” The city, by contrast, offered possibilities for “social evolution,” because in it “the individual’s horizon is enlarged” and he “gains a freedom of movement beyond the first jealous delimitation” of the family or the religious community. In the city, the individual could participate in any of the emerging social groups, or subcultures, that matched his preferences and interests.8

  What evolved from this new social landscape, Simmel claimed, was a new, “metropolitan type” of individual, with a rational and intellectual orientation to the world, a deep psychological life, and a cool, blasé attitude that he designated as “reserve.” City dwellers were hardly inhibited. On the contrary, Simmel insisted that modern urban culture liberated residents and allowed them to cultivate the very parts of themselves that the village had repressed. “Individual freedom,” he wrote, “is not only to be understood in the negative sense as mere freedom of movement and emancipation from prejudices and philistinism. Its essential characteristic is rather to be found in the fact that the particularity and incomparability which ultimately every person possesses is actually expressed, giving form to life . . . We follow the laws of our inner nature—and this is what freedom is.”9

  For city dwellers at the turn of the twentieth century, being liberated from the tight grip of the family, the constraints of religious traditions, and the surveilling eyes of a small-town community was exhilarating. It’s often argued that modern urban culture helped usher in an era of great creativity and aesthetic experimentation, giving rise to avant-garde movements such as surrealism, Dadaism, and the Bauhaus. But modern cities induced extraordinary innovations in what Simmel called the everyday techniques of living, too, because they rewarded residents who gave up old habits and acculturated to the new social scene. While the aesthetes declared that they were treating “art as life,” even the less eccentric urbanites began to experience life as art, remaking themselves, their communities, and their homes to suit their “inner natures,” pushing back against “the concrete institutions” that the city and the state were already rebuilding.

  From today’s perspective, the act of taking a place of one’s own does not appear especially “peculiar” or “extreme” (to use Simmel’s terms), but at the turn of the century it was a bold and provocative way to use one’s social liberties. Not that young single adults were uncommon in the late nineteenth century, when young workers were abandoning their native towns to seek jobs in metropolitan areas. In 1890, the proportion of young single men (ages fifteen to thirty-four) living in large American cities was higher than it would be until about 1990, and at the time the average age of first marriage was also higher than it would be for another century, roughly twenty-six for American men and twenty-two for American women. The fact that these are averages means that many delayed marriage until they were even older. In 1900, fully one-third of all native-born American white men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four were single, as were half of all native white men that age in New York City. Hardly any of these bachelors lived alone, however. About half of all unmarried men, and a greater proportion of unmarried women, lived with their family (just as they do in parts of Southern Europe and in many developing nations today). Nearly all of those who left their family home to work in a distant neighborhood or city rented a room from another family or, to the growing dismay of social workers and sociologists, moved into a rooming house.10

  ROOMING HOUSES, which were known as “plain hotels for plain people,” were precursors to the small, private apartments that would ultimately house single urban residents. They were popular among people in skilled trades who made a steady but modest income and wanted to escape surveillance, but their abundance and accessibility made them attractive for many mig
rants to the city. “Hotel life,” writes the architectural historian Paul Groth, could be “virtually untouched by the social contract and tacit supervision of life found in a family house or apartment unit shared with a group.”11 This fact aroused great anxiety among moral reformers of all stripes, who feared that living outside a family home would lead to isolation and a host of social problems.

  Solo living was said to be dangerous for men because it made them selfish and vulnerable to wanton impulses, and for women because it made them lonely, hysterical, and depressed. As early as 1856, the poet Walt Whitman authored “Wicked Architecture,” an essay in which he listed the personal consequences of boardinghouse life as: “listlessness; emptiness; sloth; nerves; dyspepsia; flirtations; prodigality; vain show; perhaps—often, might we not say?—immorality, nay, infamy.” Fifty years later, a well-known Protestant minister warned that the rooming house system was “stretching out its arms like an octopus to catch the unwary soul.” And in his classic 1929 field study The Gold Coast and the Slum, University of Chicago sociologist Harvey Zorbaugh lamented that the typical rooming house has “no dining room, no parlor, no common meeting place. Few acquaintanceships spring up in a rooming-house . . . The keeper of the rooming-house has no personal contact with, or interest in, his roomers.”12

  Along with many of his contemporaries in the social sciences, Zorbaugh argued that living without a domestic partner was one of the key urban conditions that generated “personal disorganization” and “social anomie.” To illustrate the point, he offered statistics that showed a concentration of suicides in the neighborhoods where boardinghouses were common as well as a series of horrific stories from the “world of furnished rooms.” In the story of a “charity girl,” a young woman from Emporia, Kansas, moves into a rooming house when she arrives in Chicago at age twenty-two to attend music school. She reports that it is impossible to make friends there, and within a few months of her arrival “‘my loneliness amounted almost to desperation.’” The “charity girl” endures a series of horrors. Her mother dies. Her father won’t talk to her because she has moved to the city. Her music teacher blithely tells her she’s not good enough to really make it. And she has no one to comfort her, not even the other souls who share her home. “‘I began to look at my life in Chicago. What was there in it, after all? My music was gone. I had neither family nor friends.’” For Zorbaugh, this was a parable about the dangers of urbanization. “‘The city is like that,’” he quoted her as saying, and added his own conclusion: “Such complete anonymity could be found nowhere but in the city of today, and nowhere in the city save in the rooming-house.”13

  Some city dwellers relished this anonymity, however, because it liberated them to live by their own “inner laws.” In another classic study from the University of Chicago, The Ghetto, sociologist Louis Wirth explained that in the early twentieth century a number of Jewish hotels popped up in Chicago to house Jews who wanted to escape the confines of their local community. During the same era in New York City, writes one historian, “the first full-blown generation of American moderns” moved to Greenwich Village so they could enjoy “life without a father” (to use Gertrude Stein’s phrase) and forge “a community of dissidents who prided themselves on living a life apart.” Villagers took up a great variety of personal, political, and aesthetic causes. But, as Ross Wetzsteon argues in his neighborhood history Republic of Dreams, they were motivated by one common aspiration: “the liberated self.”14

  The Village of the early twentieth century was famous for its intellectuals, artists, activists, and eccentrics, including celebrated figures such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Emma Goldman, Eugene O’Neill, Alfred Stieglitz, Walter Lippmann, Claude McKay, and Eleanor Roosevelt. But even the more ordinary Villagers enjoyed the freedoms available in what the historian Christine Stansell calls “the cradle of liberated personae,” a place where “closeted identities can come out of their hiding places” and all variety of individuals could “foster more fully realized selves.” Women’s ability to find work in the paid labor market was a key part of this self-actualization, because it gave them a degree of financial autonomy, as well as a way to break out of the domestic sphere. The community, Stansell continues, nurtured “a population of single women supporting themselves outside traditional family situations . . . Ladies went to work by themselves every day. They rode streetcars alone,” and their discussions focused “on how women might live outside traditional domestic roles.” Whether in New York, Chicago, London, or Paris, experiments like these spawned a new story line in the day’s novels. “The pleasures and dangers of being alone in the city excited the imagination of female contemporaries,” writes Judith Walkowitz. “Heroines,” adds Stansell, “lit by the high ambitions of their generation, set out to prove themselves in the world, rejecting romantic love, determined to find new stories for themselves beyond marriage.”15

  The bohemian culture of the Village was not entirely due to the spirit of its residents. The neighborhood’s spatial arrangements—its narrow, windy streets; its intimate cafés, salons, and saloons; its great central gathering place, Washington Square Park—provided both privacy for personal experimentation and a zone for self-expression and public display. At the beginning of the twentieth century the area had a great number of tenement buildings that warehoused large families. But over the next few decades builders developed an ample supply of small, relatively inexpensive residential units in rooming houses and apartment buildings, which enabled the modern men and women of “the place where everything happens first” to live alone. In 1917, the year that Marcel Duchamp and friends ascended the Washington Square Arch and declared the area “a free and independent republic,” the writer Anna Alice Chapin identified a building nearby as “the first all-bachelor apartment house erected in town. It is appropriately called ‘the Benedick’ [from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing], after a certain young man who scoffed at matrimony.” By the 1920s developers were converting single-family houses and tenements into one- or two-room apartments, and women as well as men rushed to fill them.16

  The sources of this demand are not hard to identify. Between 1920 and 1930, the population of children under age fourteen in the Village dropped by around 50 percent. By 1930, about half of the adult men in the Village were unmarried, as were 40 percent of all women. These changes were consistent with the general population trends for New York City, but they happened faster in the Village, and in more exaggerated fashion. In a decade, the community of families had turned into an urban enclave for adults, particularly for singles. A growing vanguard lived alone, and the rest of the city would soon follow its lead.17

  Like the bohemians, gay men at the turn of the twentieth century also moved to cities and sought housing that would free them from supervision and social control. The historian George Chauncey has documented how gay friends in New York City helped each other identify places where landlords and neighbors were tolerant, recruiting other gay men for adjoining units, lest someone more judgmental and intrusive move in. Rooming houses were especially attractive, not only because they maintained a culture of privacy, but also because they allowed residents to pay by the day or week, which made them easy to abandon if something went wrong. Chauncey reports that certain hotel residences in Manhattan attracted large numbers of gay men, as did the apartment houses where, as one analyst put it, “your neighbor is just a number on the door.” Entire neighborhoods—in Greenwich Village, Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen, the East Fifties and Sixties—became gay enclaves, organized around bars, cafeterias, cheap restaurants, literary societies, and community centers that helped men support each other in the quest to define themselves. By the 1920s, these areas had established reputations as places where people of all sexual persuasions could come together to enjoy their autonomy, without worrying too much about whether anyone else was watching.18

  In fact, before long, people went to New York City’s bohemian, bachelor, and gay neighborhoods pr
ecisely so that they could watch, if not participate in, their distinctive subcultural scenes. It is well known that during the Harlem Renaissance middle-class whites traveled uptown for a taste of the neighborhood’s exotic jazz clubs and intoxicating nightlife; so too did they go downtown to sample the Village’s bohemian offerings. The Village attracted visitors at all hours, but at night its busy streets and buzzing cultural institutions transformed the area into a theater of the new, modern lifestyle, and an adventuresome audience from the city and beyond flocked to the site. This is precisely what happens when a city’s public life is robust: Strangers meet in a densely packed, diverse social environment. The stage and street merge. A new public geography develops. And then, as Richard Sennett argues in The Fall of Public Man, “the imaginative limits of a person’s consciousness [a]re expanded . . . because the imagination of what is real, and therefore believable, is not tied down to a verification of what is routinely felt by the self.”19 The idea that one could live quite socially while keeping a place of one’s own shifts from being strange and unimaginable to being tantalizing and concrete.

  Just as white middle-class exposure to African American music, dance, art, and literature during the Harlem Renaissance began to nudge blacks from the margins to the mainstream of U.S. popular culture, so too did the middle-class engagement with the world of bachelors and bohemians plant the seeds for the slow growth of new ideals about how to live. This is not to say that great numbers of Americans, or even New Yorkers, suddenly abandoned their aspirations to settle down in a traditional relationship. In fact, between the 1920s and the 1950s the dominant practice among young adults involved making a quick and early start to domestic life, and the average age of first marriage dropped by about two years for men (from 24.6 to 22.8) and one year for women (from 21.2 to 20.3). But during those same decades an alternative lifestyle—modern, independent, and single—was sprouting up in cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. “New Women,” as the most liberated called themselves, were at the forefront of the change.