Because I’m the only person left alive that likes the kooky popular music of the late ’10s and very early ’20s, I usually play my beloved Grafonola when I’m home alone. The big Viva-Tonal Grafonola, of course, comes into play at every party, since it’s capable of playing the more up-to-date recording processes used in the late ’20s and ’30s. It’s when I want to hear the somewhat deranged strains of “Mummy Mine” or “When Buddha Smiles” that the older Graf gets drummed into service.

Apparently, the last time (oh, say, two days ago) that I had one too many shots of bourbon and decided to bond with 1921, I played a record of “Doodle Doo Doo,” because that’s what was sitting on the turntable when I wound up the record player. Feeling lazy, I just flipped the record and played the other side, a nice but forgettable little foxtrot called “Back In Hackensack New Jersey.”

Hackensack??? Who the hell rhapsodizes about Hackensack? Admittedly, being a rootbound Marylander, I’ve only seen the place once, but it was best (and most kindly) described as benighted. Oh, sure, there are indications that it was a nice suburban locale once upon a time, but that time is easily forty years past. It’s now a rotten, half-destroyed downtown core with a ring of frowzy and run-down ’50s and ’60s shopping strips. In other words, suburbia gone wrong.

What is truly sad is that the song I heard tonight is waxing poetic about a rural town. In 1921, Hackensack was still a nice little farm and market city several miles from New York’s bustle, much as modern Hanover is to Baltimore. Over the years, as New York’s suburbs engulfed millions of acres per decade, the pretty little market town became first a fringe suburb, then a mainstream middle class suburb, and finally a ruin as the middle class fled from Hackensack as surely as they’d once fled the South Bronx. In the space of seventy years, this poor town has gone from someplace so sweet and idyllic that it merited a Tin Pan Alley paean to someplace so blighted that it merits nothing but a pained groan from people of fashion.

This is, apparently, the American way. Observe Towson, Maryland; once the sleepy seat of Baltimore County, it has been transformed into the new downtown of the metropolitan area. It first became a suburb; then as suburbs moved farther and farther out, it became a major business district in its own right. Now people actually don’t want to live in Towson because it’s too urban. Or Pikesville, the hearthstone of Baltimore’s Jewish community — which has gone from being a country town to the height of Hasidic fashion to someplace undesirable. Pikesville has gone as far downhill as its southern neighbor Pimlico. The children who grew up in Pikesville of the ’60s now grimace when they admit the fact; they live in Owings Mills now, or are building a new shag-n-sheetrock palace in Finksburg (do you really want to admit to living in a town called Finksburg?) because Pikesville is so outré. Washington is going through the same skin-shedding; once-fashionable Silver Spring gave way to Rockville. Now, that former sleepy town that houses F. Scott Fitzgerald’s shuffled mortal coil is becoming the realm of run-down garden apartments as the booboisie move inexorably outward.

Some, evidently, are seeing the light, and are moving back toward the cities, perhaps realizing that their three-hour-each-way commute is not worth the bigger house or the huge lawn.

A while back a guy I know who’s driven a Baltimore cab for years told me that he was retiring to Cockeysville (known to many city folk as Kookysville). Once a sweet little town with a rye distillery and named for the lordly Cockey family, it too has been swamped with vinyl-sided terror. He said bluntly that after forty years, he “deserved more than a Kavon Avenue rowhouse.” I had to wonder. He’ll trade up, surely, to a Candy Cane Lane or Gandalf Garth house... which will have three bedrooms on one floor, much smaller than the three on Kavon... and no porch... and a giant backyard that will have to be mowed constantly... with neighbors who don’t know you... the closest market a two-mile drive instead of a one-block walk, your parish church six miles off instead of around the corner... no shady trees, no neighborhood block parties, no community picnics. I wonder how long he’ll live there before he learns the names of his next-door neighbors? From what I’ve seen of new suburbia, the poor man will be dead in his grave before any of them know who he was. And, he’ll probably be buried out of the Shrine of the Little Flower church, right around the corner from the house where he lived for forty years. His old neighbors will be there in droves, but the new neighbors in Cockeysville won’t even know he’s dead. Sure, he’s trading up; he’s getting vinyl instead of honest red brick, and he’ll be in the stylish place for middle-class folk to be now. Still, I wonder how often he’ll sit out in his backyard and wonder why there’s no one saying hello across the fence anymore, like there had been in town.

Sure, cities have problems. But don’t think that suburbs don’t have them too. Worse than city crime is suburban encapsulation and separatism. Damn the occasional noisy party or plastic bags in the trees, give me Kavon Avenue.