Help: Little Boxes (Malvina Reynolds) ticky-tacky?

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Help me I need to find this song
From: GUEST,cornnr.aol.com
Date: 02 Feb 01 - 12:46 PM

Iwould like to find the words to little boxes a folk song

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Help me I need to find this song
From: Tinker
Date: 02 Feb 01 - 12:52 PM

Cornner, if you type Little Boxes in the DT Search line you'll find several versions.

Tinker

Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Help me I need to find this song
From: NightWing
Date: 02 Feb 01 - 05:07 PM

Little Boxes, on the hillside
Little Boxes, made of ticky-tacky ...

Story of my life at this point in time.

BB,
NightWing

Subject: Ticky-tacky
From: Stu
Date: 19 Apr 04 - 09:52 AM

Malvina Reynolds, her 1962 song "Little Boxes", says they're all made from ticky-tacky.

What's ticky tacky then?

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Rasener
Date: 19 Apr 04 - 09:57 AM

I think this will help.

NOUN: Shoddy material, as for the construction of standardized housing.
ADJECTIVE: 1. Made of shoddy material; cheaply built. 2a. Marked by a mediocre uniformity of appearance or style: ticky-tacky rows of look-alike houses. b. Tawdry; tacky.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: open mike
Date: 19 Apr 04 - 10:14 AM

made out of tic tac breath mints?

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: mack/misophist
Date: 19 Apr 04 - 11:04 AM

No matter what the phrase may literally mean, one need only see the houses she was talking about on the hills above San Francisco to understand that they were mindless, artless, doghouses for people. If they hadn't also been cheap, they never would have been built.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Once Famous
Date: 19 Apr 04 - 11:33 AM

I hated this song.

Agreed, Tract houses built in the 1950s were pre-fabricated and not too stylish. But for many WWII veterans having families and getting started in life, they were their castles and their American dream.

The song was very snobbish.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Dave Bryant
Date: 19 Apr 04 - 11:40 AM

I was once running some folk events at a waterways festival in Milton Keynes UK. The mayor was being shown round and asked if we could think of a suitable song for his town. We all looked at each other and without any discussion launched into "Little Boxes" - although the mayor smiled, I don't think he was very happy !

Incidently, does anyone have the words of the parody version - about cricket "protectors".

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Steve Parkes
Date: 19 Apr 04 - 11:41 AM

Maye we could do with some in Britain! There's almost no affordable housing for first-time buyers, and prices continue to go up at a silly rate. Houses built as starter homes twenty years ago soon got priced out of the first-timers' market, so a good idea that didn't help much in the end. What we need is some decent quality but horrible to lok at housing that nobody will want to pay an inflated price for: either the first-timers will stay (because they're good quality & they can't afford to move), or they won't get a great increase on the price (so new first-timers can move in), but just enough to get on the next rung of the so-called property ladder. Remember how nobody wanted to move out of their prefabs?

Steve

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: GUEST,harlowpoet
Date: 19 Apr 04 - 12:29 PM

Coming from Harlow, this song brings to mind the houses created here after the war.

"All made of ticky tacky and they all look just the same"

Of course the designer Sir Freddie Gibberd didn't live in one himself. His was a big house away from the plebs.

No disrespect to his widow or Harlow, but after the success of Letchworth a generation or two before, where space was important, we're all boxed in. On top of this the council want to concete over our precious greenspaces for Stanstead airport expansion.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: SueB
Date: 19 Apr 04 - 01:33 PM

At least in the song, there are red ones, blues ones, green ones and yellow ones, which as a child I always thought was nice and colorful - in the last ten years I've seen all the land on the west side of the Rio Grande from Albuquerque to Bernallilo -that's miles and miles of previously open space- become completely built over with nearly identical single family homes, each and every one of which is roofed and painted with slight variations of a single color - diarrhea brown.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: YorkshireYankee
Date: 19 Apr 04 - 05:33 PM

Have you heard Joanna Kazden's parody/update?

Here's the 1st verse:

Little boxes on the boulevard
Little boxes made of plexiglass
Little boxes stacked on topses
Little boxes all the same
There's a clear one, and a clear one, and a clear one, and a clear one
And they're all made out of plexiglass
And they all look just the same


Great stuff!

YY

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: DonMeixner
Date: 19 Apr 04 - 11:35 PM

Bill Staines did a new age version of this tune. Where Ticky Tacky was a blow against post war mediocrity and sameness. Bills was a blow against new age arrogance and politcal correctness and sameness.

"Little boxes made of Lincoln logs and they all look just the same."

Funny how the circle is a wheel, ain't it.

Don

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Dave Bryant
Date: 20 Apr 04 - 12:07 PM

No-one seems to have come up with the "Cricket Boxes" parody yet.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Ed.
Date: 20 Apr 04 - 03:54 PM

Why don't you enlighten us, Dave?

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Bill D
Date: 20 Apr 04 - 04:44 PM

in about 1971, I flew out of San Francisco airport, sitting on the right side of the plane, and suddenly, there they were! I grabbed my camera and shot 6-7 slides of them....all bare on the hillside and red and green and yellow and ...umm...tacky. Whether or not folks were happy to have them, it sure was obvious why Malvina wrote the song. I'm sure it all could have been done a bit more tastefully.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Gypsy
Date: 20 Apr 04 - 11:10 PM

Love the interview with her...........and i quote "PUll over, i feel a song comin' on!" She had her first look at Daly City. Malvina was great........most of her songs came from situations, or even headlines.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Dave Bryant
Date: 21 Apr 04 - 06:06 AM

Ed - On the assumption that you don't know much about the game of cricket, a "box" is the name given to the protective device that a cricketer wears around his "wedding tackle" - to prevent a fast ball from leaving him singing soprano. I have heard a parody of "Little Boxes" on the subject.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: GUEST
Date: 21 Apr 04 - 07:47 AM

Little boxes, little boxes,
little boxes made for cricketers
and you stuff them down your trousers
when your playing in the game.
There's a pink one and a blue one
and one made of aluminium
but if you stop one from Ian Bothem
it will hurt you just the same.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: GUEST
Date: 21 Apr 04 - 08:08 AM

Further to that, I don't know who wrote it, but I heard it sung by Fred Wedlock I think.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Firecat
Date: 21 Apr 04 - 04:46 PM

And there's me thinking that it was something completely different! When I was little (and even now sometimes!) I watched a kids programme called Blue Peter (UK show). The programme involves quite a few makes, some of which use stickyback plastic, and I always thought the houses were made on Blue Peter! I was only about 7 at the time though!

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: MickyMan
Date: 24 Apr 04 - 11:30 AM

Does anybody know whether the actual term "ticky-tacky" was previously used, or did Malvina Reynolds come up with it?
   Very interesting comment about those houses being castles to those who finally afforded them. I grew up in one such identical Cape Cod style early 50's development house. Kids don't care at all. I didn't realize that the houses were all designed the same until my early teens. Your eye goes for the differences...this one has a fence and that one has a shed in back. My parents still live there and when I look at them now the similarities are much more pronounced.   
    The message written above by Martin was so very true. My GI Bill financed school teacher father would have had to raise us in an inner city apartment if it wasn't for these mass produced houses. Still... one only has to listen to several Malvina Reynolds songs to know she was no snob. It's just so overly obvious to an outsider that the variety is missing.
   Mike in suburban CT, USA

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Gareth
Date: 24 Apr 04 - 02:07 PM

Steve Parkes

Errr "Prefabs"??? Or have you forgotten Nye's housing drive !!!

Gareth

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Charley Noble
Date: 25 Apr 04 - 10:16 AM

I don't know about "ticky-tacky" but "Jerry-Built" for shoddy contruction of suburban housing goes back to the late 19th century, as is evidenced by the protest song "This is the House that Jerry Built" by T.S. Lonsdale, © 1885, music by W.G. Eaton.

Warm regards,
Landlady's Daughter

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Roger in Baltimore
Date: 25 Apr 04 - 11:39 AM

In my dim memory, the term "ticky-tacky" preceded Malvina, but as an adjective not a noun. Malvina's creativity was to say the house were made of "ticky-tacky" instead of they having the quality of beint "ticky-tacky".

I remember being crushed when Karen Rauch (the resident Bohemian of my High School's Junior class) described me as a "Ticky-tacky guitar player". Ah the joys of memory. I'm sure there are much nicer things I could have remembered from 40 years ago which instead I have forgotten.

At least today, I know I'm not a "ticky-tacky guitar player".

Roger in Baltimore

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: GUEST
Date: 25 Apr 04 - 04:13 PM

Surely Malvina can object to the paucity of imagination and design of affordable housing without being accused of being a snob. Ordinary people should be able to live in attractive, original housing.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: MickyMan
Date: 25 Apr 04 - 04:22 PM

Yes.....well put there, whoever you are.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Steve Parkes
Date: 26 Apr 04 - 04:38 AM

Gareth ... I remember Nye (just), but not what he did!

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: GUEST,Charles H. Smith
Date: 02 Feb 07 - 02:26 PM

I don't know whether she invented the term or not, but the Oxford English Dictionary ('OED') credits her with the first printed use of the term (at least, that they know of). For what it's worth, I just checked our electronic version of the New York Times, and the term first appears in that paper in 1965 (with over a hundred uses since), so that tends to reinforce the idea that Malvina invented it herself.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: ClaireBear
Date: 02 Feb 07 - 03:13 PM

All this discussion, and it doesn't appear that anyone has posted a photo link. Allow me to remedy that: little boxes

Don't know how long this link will be alive, since "beta" appears in the URL; don't miss your chance to see exactly what Malvina was writing about!

Cheers,
Claire

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Alec
Date: 02 Feb 07 - 03:32 PM

Thanks for that link ClaireBear (It worked fine when I followed it)
I still tend to the view that it is an elitist and unfairly judgemental song but perhaps understand her POV better from actually seeing the environment she was referring to.The cold grey uniformity that is barely camouflaged by the garish colours.
It's too bad her lyric could be (and is) construed as blaming the victims though.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: ClaireBear
Date: 02 Feb 07 - 04:19 PM

I was hoping you'd understand her POV better, having seen what she was writing about, but I wanted to let you get there by yourself. I'm glad you did!

These houses are truly awe-inspiring in their uniformity. There are many other quite pleasant post-war tract homes, duplexes and apartments (in a couple of which I have lived) nearby that, though similarly mass-produced, did not have the mind-numbing sameness to invite the criticism these did. As far as I know, Reynolds didn't write about those.

Incidentally, I think that this development was not actually meant to be affordable housing as much as an icon of the new prosperity. The words of the song reflect this. The fact that the adults "all drink their martinis dry" while "the children go to summer camp and then to the university" does not sound anything like the Bay Area working-class culture of the 1950s/early '60s. (I was here then, so I know!)

By the way, this neighborhood has looked just the same ever since I first passed it in 1958.

Cheers,
Claire

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Alec
Date: 02 Feb 07 - 04:23 PM

That explains a lot & may require me to reconsider my view on the song ClaireBear.Thanks for posting.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: GUEST,Scoville
Date: 02 Feb 07 - 05:38 PM

My dad used to sing:

"Litter boxes in the bathroom,
Litter boxes full of ticky-tacky . . ."

back when we had a cat.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Wordsmith
Date: 02 Feb 07 - 11:51 PM

I'm glad to see after reading the entire thread, that someone actually got Malvina's point...and the photo almost says it all. What she was saying was that despite the color of the houses, they are a way of homogenizing people...communities that sprang up like these...developments...and not for the poor. The trend toward suburbanization - where everyone has to blend...back in the 50's that included the perfunctory cocktail(s) before dinner. I think the ticky-tacky aspect refers to both the flimsy pretense on which these communities are based and to the tackiness of them as well. I actually remember seeing Malvina Reynolds on television...another somewhat tacky development of the 50's. I now understand after reading that they dozed areas, and probably clear-cut, to build these edifices of conformity. I don't know which bothered her more. I always pictured Levittown when I heard "Little Boxes." I do remember thinking how simple a song, yet amazing subversive, at the time, yet appearing to be quite innocent. Well, that's my take on it. :)

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Joe Offer
Date: 03 Feb 07 - 03:41 AM

If you drive north from Santa Cruz this time of year, the hillsides along the Pacific Coast are a beautiful site. You pass two lighthouses, wonderful surf, and spectacular rock formations. Then you round the bend at about Half Moon Bay or Pacifica, and the once-beautiful hillsides are covered with those ticky-tacky houses that Malvina warned about. I suppose those little houses are worth $750,000 or more apiece nowadays, but they were affordable GI no-money-down pastel stucco tract houses when they were built.

Now we're seeing lots of those San Francisco people moving here to the Sierra Foothills, a hundred miles to the northeast. They collect their windfall from their tiny stucco houses, and then they come here and put up fences, bright lights, and "McMansions" - and they pull out the Valley Oaks and Ponderosa Pines.

And they buy big trucks and SUV's and drive them like race cars.

-Joe Offer, Applegate, California-

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 03 Feb 07 - 10:08 PM

very interesting to see the houses that inspired a song I've known for yonks. Thanks for posting it, Clairebear. It's also good to get a local perspective, Joe.

It's also very interesting to see how the website picked up this thread!

In Oz our returned soldiers & their mates built their own homes using fibro sheets, and many families lived for years in a garage while slowly building the house. Some houses were never finished.

Some are still as originaly built 60 years later, others have been covered in brick cladding, or demolished & replaced with brick houses or MacMansions.

I grew up surrounded by these fibro houses, tho we lived in a brick house that Dad's Dad built in 1916, then another, older, decrepit weatherboard house.

sandra

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: GUEST,Gerry
Date: 04 Feb 07 - 06:02 PM

Sandra, you may have to translate the word, "fibro," into American. I don't think
the word has made it across the Pacific.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 05 Feb 07 - 10:20 AM

At least those houses have a little variety in color. You can't even say that about a lot of them built in new neighborhoods around here in North Texas. Builders are obligated to stagger the house plans so they don't look so uniform, but look at the features, building materials and lot placement and they're pretty bad.

These are from a few miles south of us, and it was this shot that was able to convince the neighbors here that they should insist in larger lots in a planned development being established in our neighborhood. The lots are a bit wider, but alas, the zoning folks weren't paying attention when the developer asked if he could shorten the lots from 105' to 80'. "Sure, sure," they said. And now the new lots are too small for anything much other than just the house.

Close in neighborhood

Backing up a little

I'm in town, in a subdivision like everyone else, but I searched high and low for a house and a lot that had a little elbow room. My lot is a half acre, not that large by most standards but in this region with shoulder-to-shoulder building, it's substantial. There is a lot of undeveloped land around us that gives the impression of more space (marginal flood plain). My area.

There are embellishments on the houses that offer a sameness to otherwise varying designs. In the 1970s they put these little rock or brick things I refer to as "shoulders" on the front of each house, an affectation of some sort that lets you pigeonhole the date and the builder. I discovered last summer that there is a hot wire into each one where there was a lamp at one time. I'm going to have an electrician in this summer to take out the lines and then I'll dismantle the walls. I've approached muting the sameness of the house by creative landscaping and am pushing the boundaries of the tree placement rules (I've ignored the rule that says they have to be 10' back from the street--if you want good looking street trees they have to be closer to the street, and too many others have ignored the rule for too long for the village to come along and try to enforce it). Pulling back from my neighborhood reveals some small houses to the north, built in the 1940s in a cookie-cutter pattern (tied into a military base that is now dismantled). But though they are small and modestly priced they don't stay on the market long. Investors and young families snatch them up. They have a good layout plus hardwood floors and woodwork, and yards that are much larger than newe houses and established landscaping that makes them much less ticky tack than they might once have been considered.

SRS

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: GUEST
Date: 05 Feb 07 - 01:13 PM

I just want to say that there are a lot of new houses that have been built near me of late. They are all very ugly, made of ticky-tacky and they all look the same, they also cost about 600 thousand dollars Cdn.
Ugliness is not unique to inexpensive housing. Cheap is cheap, ugly is ugly, no matter what the cost.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: jacqui.c
Date: 05 Feb 07 - 02:55 PM

In a lot of places in the UK standardising of houses has been happening for a long time. I lived on two public housing estates, both of which featured row upon row of identical houses. The only difference was that the colour of the front doors was varied, but only using about four different colours.

I can think, offhand, of a few private estates in the area that I lived where the houses were all identical in structure. I think that the Brits tend to accept this more than do the Americans.

I must admit that I still find it interesting that, in any one road here in Maine, there can be so many diverse building styles. I think that is one of the major differences I have found here from the UK.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Tootler
Date: 05 Feb 07 - 04:05 PM

Malvina Reynold's song encapsulated for me, the suburban estates springing up in Britain in the 1960's and the attitudes of many who bought houses on these estates. Attitudes that were superbly sent up in the TV Series "The Likely Lads".

If SRS thinks his Texas houses are bad, you should see how they pack 'em in over here in the UK these days. And the houses are much smaller than they used to be.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 05 Feb 07 - 10:34 PM

'fibro' refers to asbestos fibre cenent sheeting - used on the outside, wet areas inside, and sometimes all the internal walls too, during a certain period. It was perhaps the cheapest cladding material.

'fibro' no longer is allowed to contain asbestos, but a similar product is still available. There is much pressure to have it removed appropriately from houses - many roofs also had a similar substance that looks like corrugated roofing iron.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: GUEST,Ingrid Frances Stark
Date: 06 Feb 07 - 01:06 AM

Asbesto shingles were used here in the U.S., as well. Wall and roof shingles. And there are non-asbestos versions of many building materials which used to contain it.

The name may not have crossed the pond, but the tech did.

Ingrid

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 06 Feb 07 - 07:37 AM

Google images of ticky-tacky fibro houses

'fibro and fugly seventies windows' leads to an interesting mix of suburban housing this isn't Sydney, it's Woy Woy

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 06 Feb 07 - 11:50 AM

Reynolds was using the mass produced, homogenized look of the houses as a symbol of a mass produced, homogenized culture, rather than as an architectural critique. And it's innaresting that almost nobody in the past 40-odd years has had trouble with what ticky-tacky means.

Subject: RE: Ticky-tacky
From: Wordsmith
Date: 08 Feb 07 - 02:28 AM

Exactly, conformity!

Subject: RE: Help: Little Boxes (Malvina Reynolds) ticky-tacky?
From: GUEST,Clemdane
Date: 18 Aug 10 - 09:06 PM

Must be nice to have the luxury of living in the early 60s and having the extraordinary luck that most talented people never have to be able to support yourself from your art. Guess Malvina was never forced out of necessity to work at an ordinary business job and become one of the doctors, lawyers and business men all made of ticky tacky who all look just the same. Apparently her artistic luck and perhaps a supportive husband enabled her to get on her high horse and look down on others.

Subject: RE: Help: Little Boxes (Malvina Reynolds) ticky-tacky?
From: GUEST,Patsy
Date: 19 Aug 10 - 03:11 AM

In Bristol England ticky tacky is a 'Bovis' development estate with walls so thin you can here everything going on next door.