A newer old Long Beach is the subject of this year’s final Smithsonian Week event: “Edge City, Suburban Design: Now and Then,” a lecture and discussion of ’50s and ’60s Long Beach, as framed by architectural historian Alan Hess.

But Hess—chronicler of midcentury architecture in such books as Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture—won’t just be telling another city story. This one’s as much about America as about the homes they built in Long Beach after the war and the people who lived in them. It’s about the ’burbs.

“I’m going to talk about architecture and planning, and how Long Beach—as well as much of Los Angeles and Orange County—created kind of a new city after the war,” Hess says in an interview from Irvine, where he’s still researching a book on the men who master-planned that city. “And it involved things like ranch house subdivisions and car culture buildings, because of the car culture.”

Especially, it involved ranch houses; the northeast quadrant of the Studebaker Road/Spring Street intersection is still home today to the Rancho Estates: an entire subdivision of sprawling, A-framed, backyard-facing houses by the man who’s credited with inventing the ranch, architect Cliff May.

“I’m definitely going to talk about the Rancho Estates subdivison,” Hess says. “But I’m also going to talk about some other more conventional ranch house neighborhoods. I’ll also talk about Lakewood, of course.” Of course Lakewood—which for years wore the civic motto “Tomorrow’s City Today.” And of course the Ranchos.

“What I find fascinating about the ranch house specifically was it was invented. There was nothing like it before,” Hess says. “It was really a very tangible embodiment of the fact that the future was just going to get better—finally. After the war, after the Depression.

“When [people] were able to afford a brand new home on its own piece of property, with a backyard, modern appliances, modern floorplan, that really was the embodiment of the American Dream fulfilled.”

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Tags: alan hess, cliff may, lakewood, Long Beach, ranch homes, rancho estates