Levittown: The Archetype for Suburban Development

Say the name “Levittown,” and you’ve just opened the cover to an American postwar picture album. Go ahead, flip the pages: the aerial photograph of a landscape of identical houses looking like a black-and-white checkerboard…down below, a young ex-GI and his family smile broadly in front of their new home, a Chevy sedan in their driveway…inside the front door, Tupperware parties and paint-by-number kits…out the back door, a new power mower, pitcher of lemonade and a smoky backyard barbecue. Hear the saxophone?

Levittown, Long Island, the most famous American postwar suburban development, was a household name, the “Exhibit A” of suburbia. It came on the eve of the baby boom and just before the 1948 Housing Bill liberalized lending, allowing anyone to buy a home with 5 percent down and extending mortgage terms to 30 years. Millions of families needed homes. Housing starts were down during the Depression and World War II. Returning vets armed with their GI Bill of Rights and guaranteed Veterans Administration low-interest loans wanted to move into places of their own. The Federal Housing Administration was guaranteeing loans from bankers to builders, and Long Island farmland was going cheap.

Real estate developers Levitt & Sons saw an opportunity in the potato fields near Hempstead, N.Y., and they bought up the land, envisioning small, affordable homes there. They also rethought home building: Cut out the middlemen suppliers, streamline construction, circumvent local zoning codes and keep labor unions at arm’s length. When the last nail was driven in 1951, 17,447 houses stood in Levittown.

But Levittown was about more than just the houses. As the largest and most influential housing development of its time, it became a postwar poster child for everything right (affordability, better standard of living) and wrong (architectural monotony, poor planning, racism) with suburbia.

Levittown, right from the start, was famous. It was also an intensely image-conscious place. “It is a poor week when Levitt houses aren’t featured in at least one full-column story in the New York newspapers,” wrote a reporter in Fortune magazine in 1947. In the early days, everyone from Levitt & Sons’ P.T. Barnum-esque president, William J. Levitt, to the community’s residents was in on the promotion. In 1951 Levittown was featured by Collier’s magazine in “the biggest flash photograph ever attempted.” The picture was snapped from the top of Levittown’s 200-foot water tower, using 1,500 flash bulbs. Volunteers were not hard to find. “Nourished on national publicity,” the magazine reported, “the suburbanites pitched in.” Residents gleefully blocked off streets and raised the flash bulbs. “If this isn’t the biggest, brightest, most ambitious birthday card ever presented to a four-year-old,” gushed Collier’s, “what is?”

Levittown’s portrait may have been carefully staged, but it was in demand. Americans soon found echoes of the place everywhere, as overnight suburban communities mushroomed up from Park Forest, Ill., to Lakewood, Calif. Its seemingly magical creation—just a few years earlier, there were potato plants where those carports now stood—perfectly captured the pace of a hurry-it-up decade. Patience had been killed by 15 years of economic depression, war and an epidemic housing shortage. People wanted the full package—the affordable house, the new appliances, the suburban lifestyle—and they wanted it right away.

Levittown’s promotion was also a defensive reply to criticism. Attacks were launched by architectural critic Lewis Mumford; John Keats, author of the scathing antisuburbia novel A Crack in the Picture Window; and a handful of other writers who never set foot in the place but were content to lambaste it from their city offices. Ironically, Mumford’s complaint that Levittown was a “uniform environment from which escape is impossible” ignored the architectural sameness (block after block of overcrowded apartments) many new suburbanites were fleeing from in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to