Certainly for the inhabitants of Levittown, more disturbing complaints came from their Long Island neighbors. Wealthy Gold Coast residents were concerned with property values and a decline in prestige with the arrival of the urban working class in their “boxy little” houses. An editorial in a local news-paper, the Island Trees Tribune, noted this as early as December 4, 1947: “It seems that the people of the surrounding areas were a bit afraid of what sort of people would move into [Levittown].”

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Helen Hooper, 27 years old when she moved from Queens in 1949, remembered similar attitudes in long-settled nearby villages: “They resented it when they knew you came from Levittown.” She frequently felt icy, awkward stares: “When you went in there to shop, they kind of looked at you funny.” Even some of her own relatives felt she’d made a mistake. “They’d look around…bang the walls. And they all told us, ‘In ten years they’re going to go through this place with a bulldozer and knock it down, it’s going to be a slum.’ ”

Competing builders made the same criticisms. Fortune reported Levittown’s critics proclaiming their doubts over “rotten masonry, green lumber, inferior workmanship.”

The houses, however, were well made, a fact that longtime residents continue to point to with pride. George Merritt, a U.S. Navy veteran who moved into the community in 1955, was impressed with his original house even as he added on to it. The Levittown carpenters “did a job, man, I’m telling you,” he said. From copper coil radiant heating to brass-zinc covered nails, the builder didn’t scrimp—at least not on materials. Merritt was astonished when he pulled the doorway out of his kitchen: “That door must have had 40 nails in it! When I finally got it ripped off it said on the back ‘Treated with Woodlife.’ I didn’t even know they made that then, but he [William Levitt] really…did a good job. Unbelievable.” As with many other residents, Merritt’s considerable sweat equity improved his home over the years, starting with a front bay window.

Levitt & Sons was in its 18th year of business when it started the neighborhood of Island Trees, renamed Levittown in 1948. Abraham Levitt, a real estate lawyer, had founded the company in 1929 and appointed his son William as president, and son Alfred as vice president, chief architect and planner. In 1941 the family had won a wartime contract with the navy to build 2,350 homes in Norfolk, Va. To meet the deadlines, the Levitts divided the building process into 27 separate steps—a mass production technique that would serve the company for years to come.

In Levittown, as in Norfolk, work crews were dedicated to specific tasks—plumbing, electrical wiring and roofing—that streamlined construction and kept costs down. Nonunion workers were employed as “unskilled” laborers, not craftsman. They made their money through piecework, not the hourly rate that unionized construction workers were accustomed to getting in the nearby city. A roofing crew, for example, made $60 per finished roof, usually split three ways. “It was a well-oiled machine and you could make more money that way,” remembers Edward Konop, a construction superintendent for the Levitts from 1947 to 1954.

To evade one of the more difficult demands of the Town of Hempstead’s zoning laws—that all homes have basements—William Levitt engineered a community meeting in front of the town board, and several hundred people showed up. One resident stood up and shouted: “You want basements? I’m living in a basement. It’s my mother-in-law’s.” The code was rescinded, and the company had its easier-to-build slab foundation Cape Cod homes. At the top of its game, Levitt & Sons was capable of building one house every 16 minutes. That became part of the sales pitch.

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