There was a time when city life occurred mostly outdoors and was mostly unsupervised. America was truly the shining light of freedom in the world following the victory in World War II. Unlike Europe, whose cities were piles of rubble from the bombings, the U.S.A. put its factories back to work building automobiles that looked like rocket ships and rocket ships that looked like, well, airplanes without the wings.

We didn’t know much about nature. We never paid much attention to the moon except on those rare occasions when I glimpsed it through the canyons of the apartment houses that lined the block I lived on. Heck, the way I knew spring arrived was when my dad rolled the television out to the sun porch.

“The good thing about nature is it’s outside,” he used to say, only half-jokingly.

The developers who created the suburban developments, instead of taking the best of both worlds — urban and rural — ended up disconnecting the worst part of urban (huddled masses living too close to one another) and the worst part of nature (existential angst and loneliness) and merged them into a kind of emptiness that precluded any kind of curiosity.

The suburb my family moved to when I turned 14 had been a farm, and there was a woodsy patch of land just beyond our back yard. Our house was one of 13 in the subdivision. There were no sidewalks; just lawns ending at curbs and a black asphalt keyhole-shaped street around which the homes were built. The developer went bankrupt, and the house we lived in turned out to be prone to floods from a nearby creek.

But we had the American dream: a house all our own in the fresh air of the outdoors. That did little to ease the loneliness that came with suburban sprawl. On my bike, I pedaled up one street and down the other, the lanes curving and rolling over land that used to grow corn and housed animals. In the suburbs, the raccoons outnumbered people, or so it seemed. On those journeys, I saw no one walking. No people out and about. If they were out, they were in their backyards growing flowers or vegetables.

At evening time after dinner, the suburbs were as quiet as a funeral home. If you walked outside after dinner in the suburbs, all you saw was the icy blue light from inside where the television had replaced families sitting out on the stoop, neighbors talking to neighbors. What you didn’t see were the children riding their bikes under the streetlights or neighbors sitting outside under the stars talking to each other. That sense of community was left behind when developers took over the farmland.

Although I was only 14, I could feel the loneliness of the tract homes I passed on my bike. I was aware of the stark contrast between our suburban home and the apartment and neighborhood we left.

In the old neighborhood, life took place on the street with all the excitement that ensued. Here in the suburbs, you lost that direct person-to-person relationship. Those of us who grew up in the typical suburbs hardly knew our neighbors. Nature had been tamed down to a level that would fit within a flat screen TV.

And that is considered progress.

Bob Kalish can be reached at bobkalish@gmail.com.