Levittown

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The brainchild of developer William J. Levitt, the first Levittown sprang to life in 1947 on 1,300 acres of potato fields on Long Island. When completed in 1951, it encompassed over 5,000 acres and some 17,500 single-family homes, making it the largest mass-produced housing development in American history. Proponents hailed Levittown and others communities like it as the fulfillment of America's promise of home ownership for returning veterans, but critics derided it for what they saw as its aesthetic and social deficiencies.

Levittown's primary appeal was modest, affordable housing. Its first model, an 800-square-foot, four-anda-half-room Cape Cod-style house, sold for $7,500 and

included a fully equipped kitchen. Although all the houses were nearly identical, cosmetic variations in window arrangement, carport placement, and roof lines prevented total uniformity. Subsequent developments in Pennsylvania (1952–1958) and New Jersey (1958–1961) offered a wider range of models and a more carefully articulated community plan. In Levittown, Pennsylvania, houses were arranged on curvilinear streets in manageably sized neighborhoods. Residents were served by centrally located elementary schools and other shared amenities, such as community swimming pools and baseball fields, popular among families with children. Land was also set aside for churches and modern shopping plazas, the latter intensively landscaped to maintain the community's bucolic character.

The suburban trend was in many ways a by-product of the war. In 1946 the federal government estimated that five million new housing units were needed immediately to offset a critical shortage created by years of depressed construction and intense demand from returning veterans and their families. Congress did its part by passing measures designed to ease restrictive bank lending practices for home mortgages. The most important of these was the housing provision of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, or GI Bill, which permitted veterans to finance the entire cost of the home and eliminated conventional down payments. When combined with mortgage guarantees provided through the Federal Housing Authority (FHA), the bill dramatically expanded the base of potential home owners and boosted new construction.

World War II also provided builders with invaluable experience in mass production. In Norfolk, Virginia, Levitt built his first mass housing complex, a 750-unit development for Naval defense workers, using prefabricated materials and other factory-like methods. To speed construction and meet tight, government-imposed deadlines, Levitt reduced house construction to twenty-seven basic steps, with crews assigned to complete a single task. Crews moved down the line to stationary house sites, where they repeated that task at each site. In Levittown, this inverted assembly line combined with an economy of scale to produce houses cheaply and quickly. At peak production, workers completed a new house every eleven minutes.

Few if any developments matched the scale or scope of New York's or Pennsylvania's Levittown, but several, including Park Forest in Chicago and Lakewood, California, emulated both its architecture and community plan. Countless other developments were conceived on a much smaller scale, using construction techniques and styles, such as ranch houses built on slabs, first test marketed in Levittown. Cumulatively, it had enormous implications for both the housing industry and the American landscape. In 1955 housing starts reached a record 1.65 million and continued apace through the early 1960s. Two-thirds of these new units consisted of single-family homes, most of them built in the suburbs.

Despite its overwhelming popularity among home owners, Levittown was vilified by social critics and urban planners. Architectural critic Lewis Mumford declared it to be "mechanically well done" but "socially backward." Others criticized the shoddy practices of unscrupulous builders and lamented the new suburbs' lack of architectural and social diversity. Whereas Catholics, Jews, and other ethnic minorities were overrepresented, African Americans were all but excluded. In both New York and Pennsylvania, Levitt refused to sell to blacks. Levittown, Pennsylvania, integrated in 1957 only after state intervention.

By the 1960s Levittown had come to symbolize the cultural divide that separated the war generation from their baby boom children. For many young people, Levittown became a symbol of social conformity, middle-class inertia, and soulless consumerism, a sentiment expressed in such folk-music anthems as Pete Seeger's "Little Boxes" in 1963. For his part, William Levitt defended his communities and their role in extending home ownership to millions of Americans. "We give them something better and something they can pay for."

Popular Culture and Cold War; Teenagers, 1946–Present.

Albrecht, Donald, ed. World War II and the American Dream: How Wartime Housing Changed a Nation. Washington, DC: National Building Museum, 1995.

Baxandall, Rosalyn, and Ewen, Elizabeth. Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened. New York: Basic Books, 2000.

Kelly, Barbara M. Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.

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