August 27, 2024
I got caught in the great airline IT mess last month. Took three airport departure attempts and a last straw ticket purchase to a different city to get from NYC to the West Coast. Wrote a story about how “I live in the airport now” that isn’t fit to share but made me feel better and actually laugh in the end.
A bonus from the delays was that I spent a day in NJ with my friend Sharon. We grew up together in Franklin Township — and have been friends for fifty years. She had an appointment in New Brunswick, so we headed out together. After lunch, I went to write at the dining table, and Sharon to work on her sister’s beautiful screened porch (complete with adorable cat).
I realized I was 15 minutes away from Franklin Township, where my family lived from 1974-1982. Sharon was deeply immersed in a zoom meeting. I called a cab and headed to the street where we’d lived.
My cab driver had recently visited his mother’s childhood neighborhood in Lebanon, and was delighted at our mission to visit my old house and my former elementary and middle schools. He’d moved to the area in 1984; we’d left in 1982. We shared what the area was like now, and how it had been decades ago. As we drove up to the corner of our street, he slowed and turned around, “Here are the sidewalks that know your feet.”
I named the families who’d lived in houses as we slowly drove down the street. I pictured the nearly 40 school age children tearing around on a summer day; kids ranging from K through high school, piles of bikes and Big Wheels in driveways where kids managed to get relief from a parent who let them in for a drink or snack or had a sprinkler on in the backyard. No child, no adult, no dogs in view as we drove down the street. None.
And so few trees! For a neighborhood that has been active since the 1960s, I expected the trees to have grown over time, too. The trees from our childhood were gone. Trim and tidy, the yards were a bit parched from the summer heat. Most of the houses were painted white, adding to the starkness and exacerbating the repetitiveness of the three primary house styles on the block. Everything felt maintained and landscaped, but not tended. The Pacific Northwest that has been my home for 26 years feels extra lush right now, with bursting gardens even in the summer heat.
At the cab driver’s insistence, I knocked on the door of our former home. Unlike others on the street, this had a few varieties of large trees and a small flower bed in front. The current owner remembered my parents stopping by years ago. She had just finished staining the newly installed hardwood steps; these were clad in red carpet when my family lived there. A large addition in the back expanded the family room to more than twice its original size; this room had a tri-colored shag brown and yellow rug with a velvety brown L-shaped couch when we lived there.
This is still the home I dream of when I dream of home. The proportions of the rooms downstairs felt as comfortable as I remembered. And I could easily picture where our harvest gold side-by-side refrigerator presided over the kitchen. The generous homeowner saw me tear up. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her it was the memory of a refrigerator that brought up emotions.
I shared the essay with Sharon a week or so ago, and the visit and our conversation about pitchers of sugary drinks in summer heat seemed a good prompt to share an essay I wrote in 2013 for Share Document, Edited and Design by Clifton Burt and Nicole Lavelle. Below are a few photos of the school building mentioned in the essay to give you a sense of the place.
And yes, I sadly still have the much-hated fridge described in this essay in our home.
Link here or read below: The Fridge is Dead, Long Live the Fridge, designweekportland tumblr
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The Fridge is Dead. Long Live the Fridge.
By Namita Wiggers
Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
—Alain de Botton
At its most basic, the refrigerator is the workhorse of the kitchen, a box—albeit a special box to keep food fresh. Owning one allows us to buy and preserve things until we are ready to eat them, freeze them, or, later, to dispose of them. This particular hinged box comes in a wide variety of configurations: top mount, bottom mount, side-by-side, french doors, and distributed models. It is offered in a variety of sizes, colors, finishes, and price points to meet a broad range of lifestyles and a finite industry standard for countertop depths.
For children, a refrigerator is magical. It contains the milk, the cold juice, and the popsicles. Reaching the age when we are allowed to enter the fridge on our own to remove and replace items is an important right of passage. As we grow older still, we stand in front of its wide open doors staring into the depths of brightly lit whiteness where silhouettes of boxes and containers refuse to reveal something, anything to eat.
It is an object we might “inherit” with our residences. In these cases, the refrigerator is an object on which we deliberately work to erase its past, to obliterate evidence of use and past ownership because the idea of a stranger’s filth runs completely contrary to our need to know that the refrigerator will keep our food fresh and pure. In some cases, we cart a refrigerator with us from apartment to apartment, home to home. In others, we abandon refrigerators for the next tenant or homeowner without regard for what happens to the object.
Unlike a Patek Phillipe watch or a Subaru car that we “take care of for the next generation,” the refrigerator is a luxurious disposable electronic appliance. We don’t love our refrigerators, we love that they make work seamless in our lives. Once situated, the refrigerator itself is rarely a topic of conversation unless, perhaps, a visiting friend is purchasing one. Otherwise, the fridge is a location (in the fridge) or a compartmentalized storage unit (in the vegetable bin). It must be filled when empty, emptied when overly full, and make a meal magically appear when we stand, doors splayed, staring into its brightly lit cavity.
We pay little attention to the refrigerator itself. Like a water heater, the refrigerator is ignored unless it is broken, not doing its functional work. Like an iPhone, it can be a marker of our identity and status; a disposable object.
How does an object designed to disappear function in daily life?
***
The house felt right the minute I entered. I knew it would be the place we would raise our children, make memories, and grow old together. The real estate agent hosting the open house offered a plastic, patient smile at my warning that she had better not sell my house before my husband arrived on Monday. Little did she know an appliance confirmed my feelings about this being my future home.
I knew this appliance. It was a 22 cubic foot Harvest Gold side-by-side KitchenAid refrigerator with an ice maker and inside-the-door water dispenser. This was the refrigerator my parents purchased in 1974, and owned for the next 25 years. I have never once seen the same fridge in any other home or apartment. Ever. This fridge evoked home. I didn’t just know this refrigerator, I was deeply, intimately connected to this refrigerator.
Luckily, the real estate agent had no choice but to sell us the house, and we took up residence in Portland in 1998. As we had done with every other move since leaving our parents’ homes, Scott and I cleaned the fridge. The bleach, sponges, brushes, and towels removed any remaining residual evidence of the former owners and their leftovers. This is a ritual we all know well as most of us have lived in any number of places before actually experiencing the luxury of filling a brand new refrigerator for the very first time.
***
The KitchenAid side-by-side entered our family’s home when my parents moved us from Cincinnati, Ohio to Franklin Township, New Jersey. It was their second home, a sharp contrast to their first—a 1920s English Tudor-style home in North Avondale, a Victorian suburb with elegant and grand cottages and mansions that once housed the city’s mercantile elite. When they purchased the home in 1970, this part of the neighborhood was enmeshed in renewal, shifting from a predominantly wealthy white population in the early twentieth-century to a an economically diverse African American population following the end of the World War II. In 1970, the North Avondale was ethnically and economically diverse, with homes ranging from their “cottage” to large mansions on the corners.
In contrast, the home in Franklin Township was built in 1965, a split-level Colonial with over 2500 square feet dedicated to suburban living. The floor plan was developed by none other than the founder of the American suburbs himself: William Levitt, of Levittown fame. [1]
Less than ten years old, the New Jersey house felt modern, contemporary. Now. While my father commuted to Staten Island, where he worked for Proctor & Gamble, my mother worked in hospitals in nearby New Brunswick, where Rutgers University is located. With over forty school-age children on the block and many parents commuting into “The City” (aka New York City), the neighborhood was a dictionary definition of suburb. Much like the former neighborhood in Cincinnati, the street on which we lived in NJ boasted an incredible range of families, with economic, racial, ethnic, and religious diversity that epitomized the melting pot ideals of the 1970s.
My best friend, who lived in exactly the mirror image of our house, joked that we could always find the bathroom growing up, no matter whose house you were in. The similarities ended there. The floor plans may have been the same, but the interiors were anything but similar. There was economic diversity: the same floor plan housed a family with a Rolls Royce in one home, and another sported a T-Bird that seemed perpetually under repair in another. Irish and Polish Catholics, Nation of Islam, Reformed and Orthodox Jews, Protestants, Baptists, and a Hindu family were all raising their children on the same block.
In classic Levitt style, the house was designed to raise a family and to entertain. The foyer and staircase formed the central core. Moving in a clockwise direction, a walnut-paneled dining room led to an eat-in kitchen with all counters and appliances arranged against the wall for maximum efficiency, as well as a family room with easy backyard access through sliding glass doors. Up the first flight of stairs was a large room my parents designated as the strictly-off-limits formal living room. Up the second flight of stairs were four bedrooms with huge closets, plenty of light, and two full bathrooms.
***
My mother recently explained that she’d selected the fridge because the Harvest Gold color was the newest color and style at the time. In fact, it was the height of fashion for kitchens from the late sixties, through the seventies, and left behind only when the styles shifted to slick black and shiny in the eighties. The side-by-side model intrigued her. This model, too, although first introduced in 1949 by Amana, did not gain popularity until the mid-sixties. The final touch: the fridge dispensed cold water through a push button spigot on the inside door, and the ice maker produced a steady stream of moon-shaped crescents for all their entertaining needs. Through color choice, design that was new for its moment, and unique special features of the ice and water dispensers, the refrigerator provided my mother with the opportunity to represent herself in a modern, simple, and forward-thinking mode. She “wore” it well, and ensured that the home did, too.
The fridge held a place of prominence our kitchen, partly because of the Levitt-style counter layout, and partly because it was the first thing you’d see when you entered the kitchen from either doorway. The rest of the house followed suit—physically, conceptually, and aesthetically. It was a model for a family living with accessible contemporary design. In addition to colorful plastic, chrome, and handmade macramé hanging planters, architectural plants in deep shades of green (jades, dieffenbachia, and ferns) filled corners and the fronts of windows. My mother’s morning ritual, typically dressed in her flowing caftan, involved moving the rings to the correct month, weekday, and date on the plastic Euroway Torino Ring-A-Date wall calendar, designed by Brusasco & Torretta Architetti in 1972 (Ours, purchased from MoMA’s Design Store in 1976, was red, white, and blue to celebrate the bi-centennial). The brown sectional in the family room coordinated with the tri-colored shag rug. The white with a light gold woven stripe sectional set the stage for the strictly-off-limits living room, lit by a chrome arc lamp paired with a nylon wrapped Lucite hanging chandelier. The bedrooms held crisp white minimal furniture against brightly flowered wallpaper and boldly colored rooms. Our dishes were Dansk, sheets by Vera and Marimekko, and furniture Danish and Scandinavian. When we finally got a color TV, it was a huge piece of furniture, a white and chrome encased floor model with a remote that appeared like something out of Clockwork Orange. Not only did our house look different from every home on the block, it didn’t look anything like the homes of our Indian friends from around the tri-state area, either.
***
Upon reflection, I recall that the Harvest Gold color dictated the kitchen wallpaper, décor, and the tablecloths, exuding the seventies’ love affair with all things natural, fresh, and full of California sunshine. The thing about the Harvest Gold appliances, or, perhaps, this particular KitchenAid refrigerator, is that the color is not a solid tone. It was yellower in the middle of the panels, nearest the handles, and grew slightly browner as it widened to the edges of the refrigerator. Rather than the solid pink and yellow of the fridges of the 1950s, this appliance had a subtle, gentle, almost imperceptible gradation of tone, much like LeCreuset enamelware. It was quite interesting, variegated like Heath Ceramics tiles of past decades. The spectral shift allowed families who purchased such appliances to decorate in tones from yellow to brown, and to use the appliance as a visual guide or catalyst for a broader color scheme.
Today, the irony of the name “Harvest Gold” is not lost on me. The fridge defied all real efforts at eco-consciousness. It was, in fact, designed to guzzle—much like cars fabricated in Detroit before the gas crisis sent everyone to the pumps (and Japanese cars). While we were soundly scolded if we left a light on in an unoccupied room, my parents seemed unconcerned about the amount of time we spent filling glasses or pitchers of water. This worked out well for us. We were the two scoops plus two quarts equals a pitcher of Hawaiian Punch/Kool Aid/Tang generation. And with forty school-age kids on the block, and no other home with a fridge that dispensed cold water, we spent much of the summer making pitchers of sugary, chemically-produced watery confections while standing in front of the energy-guzzling KitchenAid.
Ironically, after years of living with this refrigerator in my parent’s home, and then owning the same appliance years later in my own home, I barely remember what the inside looked like. My siblings and I recall two pitchers that remained constantly full in the fridge for years, both plastic, but very different: a two quart pitcher with a Toulouse Lautrec reproduction and a yellow lid, and a slim, bright red one quart pitcher with a matching stirrer. But I cannot conjure up an image of the shelves, plastic door trays, or knobs and buttons inside. In fact, while I distinctly remember the refrigerator in the NJ home, I cannot recall where the fridge was located in the kitchen in our home in Spring, Texas (1982–1987), or what it looked like in either of the two Dallas homes in which my parents lived (1987 to the present). I can visualize the exterior of my own KitchenAid fridge sitting in my own Portland kitchen—but cannot conjure the interior at all.
I can, however, remember how the fridge required incredible skill at “storage through Tetris” whenever my parents entertained, which, in the seventies, was very often. Monthly parties involved 50–60 people, with children, parents, and grandparents. Indian families from all over NJ and NY would come bringing food in disposable silver foil trays from the grocery store, Corelle cookware embellished with the spray of blue flowers, or melmac that didn’t quite make it back home to relatives on their last trip to India. Prior to their arrival, my brother recalls regularly knocking over stacks of trays filled with canapés—Pepperidge Farm toasts with a Campbell’s mushroom soup-based topping, or hundreds of tiny triangles of spanikopita. I distinctly remember the visual shift of the contents, if not the space, from pre- to post-party. The fridge’s compartments moved from silhouettes of bottles and packaging to carefully balanced stacks of trays and dishes in waiting, to the end-of-party silhouettes of orange and green Tupperware mixed with silver foil stacked in cubes and boxes.
***
By the time my parents moved to Dallas, Texas in the late 1980s, most side-by-side refrigerators were black, shiny, and boasted in-the-door water and ice dispenser. A perfect appliance to house your Nagel prints, and to serve meals on funky, oddly shaped plates with whimsical cutlery—think New Wave meets Art Deco. The Harvest Gold KitchenAid began to show its age.
It wasn’t until 1999, however, that the fridge could no longer be repaired. It expired at the ripe old age of 25. It may have been built to guzzle, but like those old Detroit cars, it was made to last. All that remains of the family fridge are a collection of magnets from the era—Hollie Hobbie, Snoopy, and Ziggy—that now adorn the side of the stainless steel fridge in my parents’ home. Where they once held papers, schedules, permission slips and pictures, they are now the last vestiges of the KitchenAid by proxy.
***
In 1997, I took a position as a Senior Researcher at e-lab, a design research firm in Chicago co-founded by Rick Robinson and John Cain. E-lab employed ethnographic methods to help clients understand user behavior. From close observation of how people used products or space, for example, our teams of designers and researchers would be charged with helping the client understand their problem, structure research to understand it, and make design recommendations to improve the product or system.
One of the last projects I worked on involved a study of how people used their refrigerators—specifically, how they understood capacity and space with regard to the ice makers in side-by-side refrigerators.
For several months, refrigerators consumed my life. Clippings from design magazines provided understanding of current trends and styles as we sought to comprehend how people valued the refrigerator and where it sat in consumer culture in 1997. This revealed the trend towards stainless steel, as industrial-looking equipment entered the kitchen in part to heighten the cleanliness that Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller describe in The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste, as well as to emphasize the industrial chic trend that implied real cooking, even in rarely-used kitchens. If the kitchen was not full of stainless appliances, then the walls, at least in high-end homes, were clad in wood. It was the moment in which the kitchen was morphing into a modified living room, becoming redefined as the center of the home. As a result, another strong trend involved masking all signs of machinery —with the exception of the stovetop—behind a veneer of wood cabinetry. Ironically, for most of us working on the project, the very idea of buying our own fridge was years away. We lived in tiny apartments in Chicago with inherited fridges.
But we relished guerrilla research moments in which we posed as couples purchasing a fridge, learning that the point of purchase was exactly the moment when salespeople taught you what your biggest fears should be about your appliances. You should worry about the Thanksgiving turkey fitting in, or how to slide a full sheet cake in for your child’s birthday party, or how to know when to change the filter on the water dispenser. (Actually, the last one—the water filter—is important. I realized that our “Family Fridge” had no water filter or way to replace the plastic tubing. I stopped drinking cold water from my parent’s refrigerator that same day). It was from appliance salespeople that we learned that you must be concerned about how easy shelves are to move up and down while holding a lidded casserole in one hand, and that the two-liter soda bottle holders are the most exciting invention since the wheel.
We learned about the difference between a side-by-side fridge created for storage versus display. Most of us fall in the former category. Our fridges are storage units, boxes with compartments that allow us to stack and stuff inside the larger box of the fridge itself. This allows us to put more in, and to understand that seeing what is within inevitably requires taking another thing out. Not so with the Sub-Zero, which takes up precious real estate in its expansive occupation of wall space. The Sub-Zero’s shallow depth allows the fridge to reveal itself fully to you when you open the doors. All is visible, all is available. Here, luxury is about room to span versus the need to stack, a refrigerator that is about showing versus storing.
I discovered the refrigerator I wanted in this process. While the Sub-Zero is beautiful, I knew that it was not going to be an option for our lifestyle. I fell in love with the Amana top mount. The logic of putting the fridge on top and the freezer on the bottom made me wonder why they’d even made a fridge in any other configuration. The doors could hold a gallon jug of milk, and the vegetable bins were large—all perfect in anticipation of starting a family in our new Portland home.
***
But the Harvest Gold side-by-side KitchenAid in my home was not ready to call it a day. My parents’ fridge gave out in 1999, but ours hung on until 2003. Looking back, it was shortly after that initial cleaning of the refrigerator upon our arrival in 1998 that we began to strip wallpaper and paint walls, to make the house our own home. It was then that it dawned on me that while the refrigerator was a sign of “home”, I no longer wanted it in my home. The object shifted from a marker of comfort and familiarity to a reminder that the kitchen in our home had been redesigned c. 1981. I wanted to live in the 2000’s, in my own moment.
The side-by-side began channeling high-pitched whiny voices in its last few months, a chant that continued until you hit the fridge, rocking it like you might an errant vending machine. It was easy to ignore at first because it happened so infrequently. Then it became impossible to ignore because it would happen at naptime, at 3 a.m., or while you were on a phone call. As if the whine wasn’t enough, the sound drove our dog into a spinning, barking frenzy that ensured that the sleeping baby or toddler awoke. Sears said it would cost a significant amount to fix it, and wasn’t even sure they could get the parts. Adios, Harvest Gold KitchenAid. Hello, stainless steel Amana.
The Amana ran beautifully and served our needs seamlessly—until December 2011. After two weeks of heavy duty cooking, entertaining, and with a refrigerator full of weeks worth of food, the refrigerator gave out. The cost to fix the damaged part nearly equaled the cost of a brand new refrigerator. I was furious. How could this fridge have lasted barely 8 years? Not only was the refrigerator now landfill, but we were also forced to dispose of hundreds of dollars worth of rotting food.
The kids and I trekked to Sears to purchase a new fridge. I was furious at the excessive wastefulness of the situation. I did not want to buy a new refrigerator. I wanted my refrigerator to work. I had researched this product, chosen it for its functionality and style. My purchase reflected who I am. I can easily ignore the vestigial remnants of the early 1980s kitchen remodel with its heavily oak clad cabinets, yellow Formica counters, and tiled island because our fridge revealed our story, our terms of how we want to be in the world. We choose to invest in thoughtfully chosen appliances, and the Amana failed us. I’d chosen poorly in the end, and less than a decade later, we were back in conversation with appliance salespeople about shelving and ice makers.
Unlike nearly every other appliance in our home, the Amana was not purchased from Sears, and had no long-term annual warranty. This time, we headed to Sears. Because of the layout of our kitchen, the opening into which the refrigerator slides is small. It’s structured for appliances from the 1970s. Today, refrigerators are designed for the miniature versions of Versailles that consume the space between our cities and farms.
My frustration clouded my judgment and I chose too quickly. It had been three days of efforts at repair. We needed a fridge, and we needed it now. As we opened and shut door after door, the kids pointed out a french-door stainless fridge with a bottom mount as the same refrigerator in my parent’s home today. I stared into the space. My mother had selected a refrigerator that had served our family for over two decades. My research findings led me to a fridge that lasted less than one decade.
We bought the Kenmore refrigerator, and headed home.
Unfortunately, the refrigerator I purchased is a smaller version than the one in my parent’s home today. After nearly two years, I still cannot get the shelf configuration to work for our needs. The KitchenAid may have been dated and ugly, but it served a growing family very well. This new refrigerator would best serve a family of two. The vegetable bins are ridiculously small, and the shelves on the doors poorly proportioned. After living for years with a fridge that wouldn’t die, and then with a fridge that died too young, I find myself, in the words of Meatloaf, “praying for the end of time so that I can end my time” with this refrigerator, and return my kitchen to the kind of space that reflects my own identity and vision for how we choose to live with—and easily and properly ignore—our own appliances.
As I complete this essay, which has devolved from reflection on how an object fits into our lives to a rant about ineffective design, the motor in the fridge whirs. It’s adjusting its temperature, doing its work of keeping our food cold and ready for use. The sound grates on my nerves. At my mother-in-law’s suggestion, I check online, and discover that the Amana I had, my Amana, is now available at Sears. I could sell the Kenmore on Craigslist, she points out, and use the money to buy what I want. It is a tempting idea, and one I consider.
Replacement, however, is not a simple decision. It seems simple. A refrigerator is a disposable appliance, a thing made to do a particular task for a determined length of time and designed to be replaced. A refrigerator is not intended to be what Sherry Turkle describes as an evocative object. Pablo Neruda wrote no ode to the refrigerator. It does not feature in Akiko Busch’s Geography of the Home, nor has anyone, to my knowledge, applied Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space to this particular object. Rob Walker’s writing can help us understand the refrigerator as part of consumer culture, and Arjun Appadurai could help us consider the social life of the fridge.
Reflecting on the refrigerator makes me want to reveal the power of the everyday. As a curator of craft and design, my work is expected to focus on the unique, the spectacular, the singular objects that represent cultural production. For me, the refrigerator is not just a fridge. Objects, as Orhan Pamuk’s brilliant Museum of Innocence project has shown us, are never simply objects. They are part of the fictions that make up our lives, our cultures, our history. Designed objects like refrigerators are meant to fade into the background. When brought forward, the simplest of disposable goods can reveal the power of things, the impact of the everyday, and a whole realm of possibilities for further exploration. I don’t know yet if I will replace our fridge. I do know that there are many other overlooked objects ripe for investigation .
The Fridge is Dead. Long Live the Fridge.
Special thanks to Elisabeth Agro, Clifton Burt, Anjali Gupta, Mina and Monoj Gupta, Rahul Gupta, Garth Johnson, Ben Lignel, Rajiv Mote, Damian Skinner, and Scott Wiggers for their thoughts on this essay.
[1.] If You’re Thinking of Living In/Somerset, N.J.; Diversity, Stability and Convenience
Jerry Cheslow, The New York Times Published: May 20, 2001
Somerset is minutes from Interstate 287 to the west and the New Jersey Turnpike to the east. Easton Avenue, a section of Somerset County Route 527 along the northern edge of Somerset, is lined with shopping centers, and two major malls—Bridgewater Commons to the north and the Brunswick Square to the east—are within 15 miles.
The neighborhoods most in demand are the 996-unit Levitt Homes, built in the mid-1960s off John F. Kennedy Boulevard and DeMott Lane, and Foxwood, a 300-unit development of three- and four-bedroom split-levels and bilevels built in the early 1960’s off Franklin Boulevard. Four-bedroom Levitt Cape Cods, colonials and ranches on streets like Landry or on Renfro Court sell for $200,000 to $280,000. Foxwood houses bring $175,000 to $200,000, Mrs. Barrood said.
Photos from Franklin Township in July 2024.
