New Lands: Brian McCabe Visits Levittown, 1951-1952
Snapshots from Brian MeCabe's Collection
Snapshots and family photographs are rich resources for recapturing the lost details of cultural history. Around the small details, the casual inclusions, what was left in and what was left out, an attentive viewer can discover hints, confirmations, and revelations about the nature of the past.
Brian McCabe's family never lived in Levittown, but his uncle Paul did. When Brian was about a year old, his cousin Florence was born in Levittown, and his family's visits began to include the ritual of picture-taking. Whether willingly or not, Brian and Florence found themselves immortalized, their arms around each other, or alone in the front, side or back yard, or in the company of their parents.
Family photographs like those Brian McCabe has lent to the site were important elements of the postwar American family. They described rituals, celebrated purchases and declared each stage in the rise of families, in income, status, substance.
McCabe's pictures are somewhat different, in that they show less about the families' relationships and a great deal more about Levittown itself, as a landscape but also as a site for memorialization. In picture after picture, Brian appears, or Florence, or Uncle Paul with one or both of them, set within the wide spaces of Levittown's front and back yards. The lots look large, the expanses between street and house look scruffy with their newish lawns not quite as well edged as they might be and marked as well by bare spots, young shrubs, and the tiny saplings and small evergreens that Levitt's organization put in over the first few years.
Take the question of the relentless uniformity of the houses. To look at these pictures is to see the commonality of the houses, but also their clever separateness- the ways the Levitt organization varied rooflines or window treatments, along with color and shrubbery, to make each house along the block different from its neighbors. In the one above, we can see the use of small pocket windows on the facade of the white house two away from Uncle Paul's, and from this angle the front yards look substantial.
In this view, Brian rides a hobby-horse along the sidewalk. Behind him are the houses on the other side of Uncle Paul's. One as the classic picture window for the living room; next to it is the model with the double windows, with shutters, symmetrically placed. One has shingles, the other asbestos siding or clapboards. These aren't insubstantial differences. Along with color and shrubbery, roofline differences and placement of the small picket fences, they combine to give real variety to the neighborhood. Brian's sidewalk curves, reminding us that these lots aren't on a grid, aren't uniform in size or shape, and so will have very different backyards as well.
Look at Uncle Paul's backyard.
He's bought a house close to a corner, and so he looks across an expanse of open grassy landscape, a common green, at the backs of houses that are slightly more than 90 degrees to his. Notice also that he and his neighbors have honored the covenant forbidding fences, and so the line that separates properties isn't clear. Uncle Paul has had to contend with the issue of little Florence's wanderlust, and the need to give her an outdoor playpen; he's made a small makeshift out of storebought garden fencing and stakes. She can play out there while her mother and father watch over her from the bedroom
Brian McCabe has himself pored over these pictures. Of this one, he writes: "This is me with Uncle Paul seated in the chair and Florence behind the fence in the rear of the house. I found this photo particularly interesting. If you examine it closely with a magnifier, you can clearly see a commercial building directly above my uncle's head between the houses in the background. I can read the word STORES on the building. It would appear that the end of my uncle's street intersected with a commercial street. Also note that the house on the right in the backgrount has a split roof line like a ranch, but has the rear elevation of a cape."
Brian's eyes might be better than ours, at web magnification, but you can still see the low flat-roofed building that's actually behind the street that intersects with Uncle Paul's- it's three or four lots away. In the closeup, too, you can see Uncle Paul's wisecracking smile as his tie blows around and his white shirt is opened at the collar. He likes it here.
One last thing. The big picture that opens this page: Brian writes : "This is me doing I have no idea what. Upon close examination of the photo, it appears that there are only two more houses in that direction before an intersecting street. It appears to be open land beyond...."
Brian's right. This must be the end of Levittown in 1951. The photographer's not used to the camera- we notice all through the series that he or she can't seem to get the horizon line straight- though the figures are aligned with the edges: in this picture, Brian is the anchor, the houses are homesteads at the edge of a new frontier, above which stretches the brilliant sublime whiteness of American sky.
If you have comments or suggestions, or if you would like to offer materials (always returned, always treated with respect) to extend this history, email me at pbhales@uic.edu