Nightmare on Dream Street

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

In Douglas McCulloh’s very first visit to the strawberry fields that would become Dream Street, he met Eric and photographed him. A few days before, Eric had been attacked by a couple of assailants who in their final stroke of beatdown had put out his eye with a stick before taking his bucket of flowers. Even in McCulloh’s still shot, you can see Eric’s energy is frenetic, if not downright methy.

Time goes on. They prepare the fields for homes. Jesus and Jesus (one goes by Chuy and speaks only Spanish while one goes by Jesse and is teased by his coworkers for not speaking any) build a wall to block the unappetizing view of the neighboring trailer park. The wall is tagged “White Pride.”

Houses rise quickly where there used to be dirt. A pair of 11- and 12-year-old brothers crawl around the rafters, installing the HVAC system for $5 a house, subcontracted by their dad, who does not have a license to install HVAC, but is subcontracted out by another man, who lives somewhere like Bakersfield and presumably doesn’t oversee the job himself.

Before the landscaping is even in, people are begging for chances to buy. A black family beams for the camera in front of the house that is supposed to be theirs—until the finance team gets a load of their credit, and they are never seen on Dream Street again.

At a charity event some years ago, photographer Douglas McCulloh won the right to name a street in an upcoming San Bernardino housing tract. He started lurking about the future site of Dream Street, documenting one street in one of a thousand new developments as builders rushed to take advantage of the hundreds of thousands of dollars people were willing to borrow for a home of their own ($1600 moves you in! reads a billboard), and which banks were too eager to lend.

In his new book Dream Street, McCulloh photographs and tells the stories of the street. He was a constant presence there, a bit of a beloved godfather, having named the road on which the model homes sat. He became enmeshed in the life of the street, his street, setting aside what you could call the National Geographic Principle of photojournalism: never interfere when a baby zebra is about to get ate.

Last Friday, Farmlab presented McCulloh and suburban historian D.J. Waldie in a conversation and slide show about the birth of tracts like these. In a fascinating back-and-forth they contrasted Dream Street with Waldie’s specialty, the imagineering of solidly blue-collar Lakewood after the war. McCulloh’s aggressively human photos of the people building and buying the houses meshed seamlessly with Waldie’s presentation of an old staged Life photo of an entire street of moving vans pulling into every driveway in the spanking new suburb and aerial shots (by William A. Garnett) of Lakewood going up in its sterile, almost sinister, humanity-free rows. He described them, beautifully, as “shots in which no human is visible, no human dimension. It’s ominous, inhuman, ‘the place where evil dwells.’” And yet what might have been horrifyingly conformist then (and today), the kind of suburban miasma that inspired horror shows like Night of the Living Dead and all its shopping mall successors? Once you compare them to today’s exurban tracts and Dream Streets, you can only shake your head with a curious new bit of respect. At least those damn houses look solid.

 Lakewood was produced whole-cloth by men who could then move on to the nascent aircraft manufacturers and afford to buy the houses they had built. It was, Waldie said, “a pragmatic, utilitarian solution to the national problem of a lack of affordable housing.” Now there are men like Ernesto building the tracts in Riverside and San Bernardino and Orange County and L.A., making about $220 under the table per week, working seven days a week, 14 hours a day. Sure, the billboards promise that $1600 move-in. But it’s doubtful Ernesto will ever even have that.

The most infuriating aspect of the homes going up on Dream Street (and they are legion) was McCulloh’s explication of the piecework system. It’s a particularly feudal way to make a living, with everyone taking a slice of the pie before further subcontracting out the actual work, until the men who frame the houses make only $300 per house—shared among the whole crew of six to eight. If you’ve ever wondered why your brand-new house has windows that one day simply explode in their sills (“You might want to consider not buying a house built after 1980,” McCulloh noted drily, “there’s a case of the ‘Fuck-Its’ in everyone out here”), it’s because the men who erect the houses are rushing through several a day in order to earn an amount that still won’t keep them. (They’re the same men building your McMansions, and just as quickly, so if you think your beige, granite-countered million-dollar baby is of any better quality than the semidisposable shelters in San Berdoo, you’re quite, quite wrong.) A generation ago, a carpenter or roofer was unionized and could raise a family (at least in Lakewood). That’s gone now, as are the unions; the entire time they’re shingling your roof, the guys are listening to AM radio and believing they’re libertarian cowboys.

Despite what we’d just seen, McCulloh pointed out that the builder, Young Homes, is considered by its workers to be “state of the art; they pay their people, they show up on the job site. The guys working there say, ‘You want fucked-up, check out KB!’”

Learn more about Douglas McCulloh and Dream Street at www.douglasmcculloh.com.
Buy Dream Street.

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