October is here, and it’s a good time to let your lawn go to hell.

You could do this literally, via Halloween skeletons and a few well-placed ghouls. Or figuratively, via inattentiveness and noncompliance with civic ordinances, letting autumn take its course, browning away emerald until you’re left with straw. Should you choose the latter, understand: You are not alone in feeling a big fat shrug. The American front lawn, the postage stamp of grass spread before a set-back house, the stage upon which you display status, the frame inside which you project taste, that one-time signifier of leisure that came to suck up leisure time, is increasingly seen as a waste. When it’s seen at all: It’s hard to spot a front lawn in pop culture these days. Meanwhile, in the real world, home developers, real estate agents and landscapers say you want less lawn.

Sometimes, no lawn.

“I don’t know if it’s a majority of homebuyers,” said Allen Drewes, president of the Home Builders Association of Illinois, “but people don’t have time to devote to lawns — or local codes for maintaining lawns. I swear, if people could have plastic shrubs they would.”

According to NASA, there are 40 million acres of turf grass in the United States — lawn, in a sense, is our largest crop. Individually we spend, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 70 hours a year mowing our lawns; and as a nation, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, we pour 9 billion gallons of water daily on those lawns. Nevertheless, in the past two decades, according to the U.S. census, the average new home has grown 21 percent, even as the average parcel of land it sits on has shrunk 400 square feet. And now, as millennials leave cities for suburbs, “They just don’t want the commitment that comes with lawns,” said Chicago real estate broker Erin Ward. “They’re happy with a tiny patch — they don’t equate their front lawn with status.”

So, a modest proposal:

Since we’re already questioning the foundations of our nation, toppling monuments to institutions that no longer work for many, how about rethinking another cultural icon?

The front lawn.

After all, your front lawn is not an inevitability. It’s a work of art — an antiquated design aesthetic, a handed-down invention, one we stopped noticing ages ago yet remain coerced by property codes to maintain. There was a time when the front lawn was tied largely to contentment, to everyday middle-class life: Anyone who grew up in a suburb has a mental slide show of images — bikes cast to the side, lazy games of catch, parents admiring their green thumb, trick-or-treaters, snowmen and nervous dates idling in curbside cars — linked inextricably with front lawns. In earlier eras, these were reflected through sitcoms, light family comedies, late-century Updike novels. When we had free-range children, a kid’s weekend would begin a lot like that image of John Wayne in “The Searchers,” hovering at the front door, an expanse of land before them. Then, at least since the 1970s — John Carpenter’s “Halloween,” say — our image of American front lawns became less benign.

On the cover of “Little Fires Everywhere,” the new best-seller by novelist Celeste Ng, we see the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, an overhead of front lawns and homes at dusk. Nothing is happening, and yet it’s hard not to look askance at a neighborhood so seemingly perfect, said Jaya Miceli, the book’s designer. “You know all can’t be right.”

The American front lawn, in short, outlived its original meaning.

As Tom Stoppard wrote in “Arcadia,” his 1993 play about time and gardening: “English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the grand tour.” But in the centuries since that luggage arrived in U.S. suburbs, we came to take the front lawn for granted, said Ted Steinberg, a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and author of “American Green,” a 2007 history. “If we’re only now on to what a boondoggle the lawn is, it’s because we’d forgotten that lawns are a multibillion dollar industry, and a story — with a beginning, a middle and, likely, an end.”

We forgot that front lawns once meant something deeper than Kentucky bluegrass.

Think, for instance, of that uncomfortable scene in “The Great Gatsby” where Jay Gatsby stands with his new neighbor, Nick Carraway, at their property line and, unable to resist, blurts out that Nick needs to mow his lawn. Nick narrates: “We both looked at the grass. There was a sharp line where my ragged lawn ended and the darker, well-kept expanse of his began. I suspected that he meant my grass.” By morning, disturbed by this hiccup in their pastoral landscape, Gatsby has chosen the nuclear option of suburban passive-aggression: He sends over his own groundskeeper to mow the grass.

Gatsby, a man with an infamous yearning to live above his status, understands that, however immoral he may be in other matters, the front lawn is a cultural agreement to take seriously. Nick may not be as successful as Gatsby, but keeping one’s front lawn in order, doing one’s part to maintain the unbroken green carpet you share with your community — it’s all part of the social contract. Fitzgerald’s lawn was a kind of a quiet reminder of the contradictions of the American Dream. We want to stand out — but fit in.

Which may be an American truism, but the front lawn is also a Chicago story. Never mind that, according to Bloomberg, the Chicago area has slightly more than 10 percent of the 100 wealthiest suburbs in the U.S. — including Winnetka (No. 10), Glencoe (No. 12) and Wilmette (No. 95), epicenter of the John Hughes-verse, which provided some of our most pervasive images of front lawns in pop culture. The Chicago area holds both the origin, and pushback, to the front lawn.

The classic suburban image of a stamp of grass and a home set 30 feet from the street: In the United States, this was pioneered in the western Chicago suburb of Riverside, one of the first planned communities in the nation. It sprung from a 1869 plan by landscape artists Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, the latter of whom imagined a river of grass, flowing house to house as if the residents lived in a park. They were influenced by landscape designer and writer Andrew Jackson Downing, who likened 19th century America to a disheveled toilet; he sought a nation where yards were “mown into a softness like velvet.” Olmsted’s vision for front lawns was partly a hedge, so to speak, against the questionable taste of Chicagoans. As he planned Riverside, he wrote: “We cannot judiciously attempt to control the form of the houses which men shall build. We can only take care that if they build very ugly and inappropriate houses, they shall not be allowed to force them disagreeably upon our attention as we pass along the road.”