Levittown, the prototypical American suburb – a history of cities in 50 buildings, day 25. This postwar housing project’s mass-produced homes still stand as something more complicated than a monument to the glory – or bland conformity – of the American dream. Cities is supported by.
Levittown’s very existence, in fact, owes to a rare act of American socialism: the 1948 Housing Bill, which loosened billions of dollars in credit and gave every American the chance to get one of those five-percent-down, 30-year mortgages in the first place.
Named after the firm Levitt & Sons, Inc. founded by Abraham Levitt, the settlement was built for returning World War II veterans and is today considered one of the first mass-produced suburbs in the country.
Many of the original 1950s homes still remain, as well as its original nine community swimming pools, remnants of seven shopping strips, and active VFW and American Legion posts. Abraham Levitt and his two sons, William and Alfred, built four communities called “Levittowns” in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Puerto Rico.
One important aspect of the influential Levittowns were the houses: simple, cheap for buyers, and could be efficiently built. The Levitts mass-produced these homes in a way that would become fairly standard among large builders. The process involved manufacturing a number of the pieces off-site and having different crews tackle each home site at different…
Year-long 50th-birthday party for Levittown, NY, is winding down, but not everyone has been celebrating; Eugene Burnett, World War II veteran who was excluded from pioneering Long Island suburb ...
Early Families Moving Into Capes / Courtesy of the Levittown Public Library. Abraham Levitt and his two sons, William and Alfred, built four communities called “Levittowns” in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Puerto Rico.
Levittown brought about a new post-war culture emphasizing conformity and uniformity, with many women returning from their manufacturing jobs during the war to a more traditional motherly role.
Named after the firm Levitt & Sons, Inc. founded by Abraham Levitt, the settlement was built for returning World War II veterans and is today considered one of the first mass-produced suburbs in the country. Levittown brought about a new post-war culture emphasizing conformity and uniformity, with many women returning from their manufacturing jobs ...
By 1951, Levittown and the surrounding area included over 17,000 Levitt-designed homes, including the much newer “ranch house” design. At the time, the community seemed utopian, as people who were willing to sacrifice their lives for their country could live peacefully without financial burden.
Levittown in Nassau County is a rather quaint hamlet that was planned and constructed from 1947 to 1951. Named after the firm Levitt & Sons, Inc. founded by Abraham Levitt, the settlement was built for returning World War ...
The Controversial History of Levittown, America’s First Suburb. The idea of a safe middle-income suburb has become an increasingly politicized topic in America. In a recent incendiary Tweet, President Trump announced the rollback of an Obama-era program intended to combat racial segregation in suburban housing.
Shortly after opening, the Committee to End Discrimination in Levittown protested the restricted sale of Levittown homes. In 1948 , Shelley v. Kraemer struck down these racially restrictive housing covenants, as they violated the 14th Amendment, and the Levittown clause was eliminated.
Like so much else in 20th-century America, Levittown began as a shrewd business move. The homebuilding firm of Levitt and Sons had specialised in upper middle class dwellings on New York’s Long Island before the second world war, only to be curtailed by the conflict’s enormous consumption of construction resources.
But certain observers had grave reservations: Eric Larrabee in Harper’s magazine called “the little Levitt house American suburbia reduced to its logical absurdity”, and urban historian Lewis Mumford described the community they constituted as a “uniform environment from which escape is impossible”.
By 1950, 80% percent of Levittown’s male residents commuted to jobs in Manhattan. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
For decades, Levittown’s population was 100% white – at first because of covenants that restricted any minorities from buying in, and thus supposedly sending the surrounding home values into free-fall.
Levittown isn’t a single building but a development of more than 17,000 detached houses. The project – started in 1947 as America’s prototypical postwar planned community – has outlived its heartiest supporters and harshest detractors to stand today as something more complicated than a monument to the glory of the American dream, ...
Levitt, for his part, assured the McCarthyites that “no one who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do.” Though he built inexpensive, fully functioning houses and built them well – the vast majority of them still stand today – Levitt left more or less everything else involved in the creation of Levittown to its new suburban homesteaders. Being American, after all, many of them set about customising their freshly built homes, whether of the standard utilitarian Cape Cod design or the newer models (Colonial, Rancher and Country Clubber) that followed.
But then the founder’s son, William Levitt, came home from the navy with an idea: every young veteran returning to the United States would need a home. Couldn’t the mass-production strategies he’d learned putting up military housing give it to them?