An answer I made to a Reddit question. July 3, 2016

It’s not uncommon that we see the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s being romanticized today. But those of you who grew up during these years (or even before that), what periods were people romanticizing back then?

My own dim recollection of the “40s and “50s was of an era more fixated on progress than on the past. Old stuff was being torn down to make way for the modern. For example: Penn Station in NYC and almost anything that Robert Moses touched in NYC and on Long Island. The developing Interstate Highway System, which certainly helped the economy generally, was a disaster for small towns and the small businesses that bordered rural highways. We certainly had no nostalgia for two world wars, the depression, or the dust bowl. What romanticism there was was directed further back to the world of our grandparents: Victorian poetry and pre Raphaelite and impressionist art. But even in art most attention was directed at living artists like DeKooning, Pollock, and Picasso in painting. Kerouac and Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti in poetry and literature were hard nosed realists not in the least romantics. This was the era which began the functional lookalike domino skyscrapers of today. The horrid yellow brick buildings of the era were cheap and quickly erected but never intended to last long as had been those of earlier days since “planned obsolescence” would certainly quickly make them outdated. Currently a new bridge is being built between Westchester and Rockland counties in NY because the 1950s era Tappan Zee bridge was only intended to last fifty years. Understandably, the greatest generation wanted nothing to do with its immediate past. It wanted higher education not just a lifetime job. It wanted a little house in the suburbs and a car, not an apartment in the crowded and dirty cities. I’m 78 and have little sympathy for those who lament the destruction of the urban slums which was what very many of the destroyed “neighborhoods” were with their “ethnic” poverty, racism and discrimination. Nor do I like it when guys like “Gunny” on TV portray WW II armaments as anything but the tools of horror and brutality that they were. GIs of that era did what had to be done but looked not backward but forward to “When The Lights Go On Again All Over The World.”