AA-2026-3E026B
On the image
Someone stopped the car at the edge of a new kerb to take this, which tells you most of what you need to know about the 1950s: a strip of poured concrete and a semicircle of turfed grass was considered worth documenting, because it meant the future had arrived. Behind it lies a ploughed field doing what ploughed fields did for one more season before the surveyors came back with stakes and the tract houses started going up.
A single car sits far off on the unfinished road, and a blurred sign post stands sentinel over grass that has not yet been walked on. The distant skyline of low buildings and a water tower or two is the town this new kerb was built to reach toward, on the confident postwar assumption that if you built the road, the houses would follow.
They usually did. What the photographer could not have known is that the empty median and the raw field would both be gone within a few years, replaced by exactly the kind of ordinary residential street that made photographing kerbs seem, in hindsight, like a reasonable thing to have done.
The historian's note
The scene documents a common feature of American land-use in the 1950s: a paved roadway with kerb and planted median built in advance of the housing development it was meant to serve. Postwar suburban expansion frequently proceeded this way, with municipal infrastructure such as kerbs, drainage, and road curves laid down before construction crews reached the adjoining farmland.
The ploughed field beyond the median represents agricultural land in the last stage of its use before conversion to residential subdivision, a transition that defined the outer edges of American towns and cities throughout the decade. The distant low skyline, likely a small town's commercial core or grain elevator district, situates the new road as an extension reaching outward from an established centre.
Such images, though modest, form part of the visual record of postwar suburbanisation, capturing infrastructure investment at the precise moment before the land use it anticipated was realised.
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New Kerb and Median at the Edge of Town, 1950s Suburban Fringe. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-3E026B. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/new-curb-and-median-at-the-edge-of-town-1950s-suburban-fringe.
@misc{aaAA20263E026B,
title = {New Kerb and Median at the Edge of Town, 1950s Suburban Fringe},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-3E026B},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/new-curb-and-median-at-the-edge-of-town-1950s-suburban-fringe}
}TY - ART TI - New Kerb and Median at the Edge of Town, 1950s Suburban Fringe PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-3E026B UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/new-curb-and-median-at-the-edge-of-town-1950s-suburban-fringe ER -
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