If Los Angeles is to remain whole, Angelenos will first have to embrace the imperfections of their urban reality and come to terms with the closing of their suburban frontier.

The ribbon cutting was simple but served to highlight the growing black exodus from the nation's capital toward the suburban frontier.

A new range war has broken out, this time on the suburban frontier.

Such ranches on the suburban frontier, which recalled both local Prairie style as well as a distant place called California, were built horizontally, on one level, with everything within easy reach, physically fostering togetherness.

When the Tappan Zee Bridge was completed in 1955 at a cost of $81 million, officials spoke with pride of the new suburban frontiers that it would create.

(Op-Ed, March 3): While the inner Los Angeles basin is fairly built out, we cannot declare the suburban frontier closed.

As the suburban frontier seeps across the countryside, officials here in Howard County are trying to convince farmers that their new neighbors are an untapped market rather than the ushers of doom.

Either way, they join congregations in large numbers on the suburban frontier.

At the time Woodbury was on the suburban frontier, still mostly farm fields and forest, and the Gates aimed to distinguish itself from the cookie-cutter subdivisions then spreading out across Long Island.

In the beginning the suburban frontier stood in places like Brooklyn Heights, first made accessible by steam ferry in 1814, but the city quickly followed, folding Brooklyn's row houses into its expanding grid.