Still, on its 60th anniversary, Levittown holds a place on the national stage. In popular history books such as the late newsman Peter Jennings’ The Century, it shares the American postwar memory landscape with the Berlin Airlift, the Korean War and John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech. Television personality Bill O’Reilly frequently mentions his upbringing there to burnish his common-man image. The story is familiar and understandably nostalgic: Few early residents remain; all are getting on in years. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren now struggle to enter a very different housing market.

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And as early American postwar suburbs everywhere “grow to maturity,” it’s an episode worth remembering. Like the early residents still living there, the country has moved on, but the lessons—the importance of large-scale federal housing support, the painful, awful mistakes of racial exclusion and the fulfillment of a dream for working-class people—are still there for us, beneath all those new brick facades and layers of paint.

This article was written by Joshua Ruff and originally published in the December 2007 issue of American History Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to American History magazine today!

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