Levittown's place in American cultural history is assured in part by
the way each part of it was constructed: the site, the neighborhoods,
the community, but most of all the individual houses.
Usually when we talk of the Levittown house, we think of the Cape Cod, that first incarnation of Levitt's building strategy. This boxlike structure is shown here in the Levitt Company's watercolor-wash rendering:
At first, this drawing would seem quite similar to the actual house,
shown immediately above, complete with nuclear family. But look more
carefully: the rendering has a house that is wider, longer, deeper,
lower to the ground. It's less boxlike, more integral to its historical
precedents in colonial New England, and it nestles more appropriately
to its surroundings. By contrast, the actual house seems more like a
lunchbox and less like a cottage. And look at the surroundings:
Levitt's artist has included a copse of tall trees behind, and they
shade the house, which seems to nestle comfortably back into them. Of
course this wasn't what the Levittown house could look like in its
first years-- the trees in the photograph are scraggly, new, awkward.
They're even smaller than the garbage can-- certainly they're less
substantial.
But many of the most important symbolic features in the idealized rendering have passed into the real thing: the split-rail fence to the right, for one. What purpose could such a fence have, except a symbolic one? And the chimney, located not at the side but in the middle of the house, where-- in the real Cape Cod colonial-- it would naturally have served to heat two rooms below and the loft above. Levitt was attentive to historical precedent. He knew what it meant and he believed his clients did too; they were all fellow pupils in the American schools where the noble Pilgrims and the hardy New England colonials were the basic fare of national mythology.
In plan, the house was extremely simple:
The basic orientation of the house was a combination of historical
precedent, social engineering, and sheer financial pragmatism. Putting
the bathroom directly behind the kitchen on one side meant all the
major plumbing, including the critical waste stack, could serve double
duty. It also meant that the bathroom went in an inconvenient
location-- far from the master bedroom, and difficult to access from
the living room, too. The logical place to put it would have been in
between the two bedrooms, but that would have required double plumbing,
reorientation of closets and rooms, and a host of other difficulties.
Besides, the house was so small that a few steps didn't really matter,
did they? The result, however, was to engender a more open, informal
social life within the family, with decreased privacy and increased
contact in the most intimate of moments.
At the same time, one of the largest decisions concerned how to set the
rooms, the entrances, and the house more generally in relation to front
yard and street, and back yard and play area. In this, Levitt seems to
have gone back to an urban model: the kitchen and living room looked
out on the street, where mother could watch children playing whether
she was doing housework or relaxing in the living room. But underlying
this was the assumption that the street was the center, the
playground, the focus. In the back yard and common areas, the children
could not be easily seen, unless one went into the bedroom and looked
out through the window.
The Levitt model was, finally, a compromise between extreme economy and the promise of an appropriate living space for an American family. Small at first, it could expand with time-- upward, first, then outward. Though the views Levitt's organization promoted showed a two-story structure, in fact only the downstairs was finished: a tiny, two-bedroom detached dwelling on a concrete slab, with stairs to an unfinished "expansion attic" which could, Levitt's salespeople promised, be converted with ease into a third and perhaps even a fourth bedroom, under the eaves.
The primary feature of this early Levittown house was its low, low
cost-- under $8,000 to purchase. With FHA-VA housing loans available,
this meant home ownership with no down payment, or a tiny one, and a
relatively low monthly mortgage "nut."
Levitt was able to offer these houses so cheaply because he was
applying construction methods perfected in the deployment of prefab
housing in the armed services during World War II. Bill Levitt had
served as a Seabee during the war, and he learned the techniques of
rapid construction using standardized parts, tightly controlled
suppliers of goods and services, and a workforce with highly
specialized skills. Like the Army's builders, like the Seabees, Levitt
took the mass-production assembly line and converted it so that workers
moved from site to site doing their specific targeted tasks. Life,
Newsweek, Time, and many other magazines delighted in
the story of the painter whose sole job was to paint the window sills
of each house; but the example was an apt one, for by moving crews of
workers sequentially from house to house, Levitt avoided the necessity
of craft workers, unions, and the rest. In addition, his program could
tolerate high labor turnover, a dreaded feature of the new prosperity
after the end of the war. If one worker left, another could be quickly
hired and trained as a replacement.
The assembly-line process wasn't all Levitt adapted from wartime
industrial production methods. He considered procurement as important
as deployment-- he sought with marked success to create a vertical
monopoly, in which his firm and its subsidiaries owned every feasible
link in the production chain, from lumberyards to appliance
wholesalers. This relieved him from the difficulties of strikes, supply
bottlenecks, and the like, or at least made them less unpredictable.
But it also made the Levittown houses strikingly uniform in everything
from roof shingles to oil burners. The Levittown house was
straightforward: workers laid out the forms for the slab; plumbers laid
in hot-water pipes that would serve to heat the floors; the concrete
"slab" was poured around these pipes; outer and inner frames for walls,
made of 2x4s nailed together, were raised and attached to the slab;
wallboard went inside, shingling outside, roofing shingles on top;
windows went in; hardware and detailing, then the paint went on.
Though every pundit complained, explained or celebrated the cookie-cutter uniformity of Levittown, in actuality Bill Levitt and his partners went to some effort from the very first to make that less true. The Levitt capes were not identical; changes in color of roof, of outside walls, had something to do with it. More importantly, after 1949, Levitt's Cape had a colleague-- the Ranch:
This was a radical innovation that reflected the new conditions of
postwar suburban family life. Now the picture windows that were
featured in the ranch house (and we see them here in the Tekula's
house, facing the "patio") linked indoor living with outdoor, and made
the backyard an extension of the house. After a transitional period,
Levitt had come up with the embodiment of suburban living ideals: the
house closed itself off from the street, and turned instead back toward
the family "garden" and, beyond it, the commons. This was a vision of a
house that could be appropriate to the conditions of suburban life, in
which work (in the city) was sequestered from life, leisure,
nurturance, in the home. It reflected and reinflected long-held
American theories about the ideal house-- from Andrew Jackson Downing's
rural cottages to the utopian modernist cluster-dwellings applied by
the Tennessee Valley Authority during the Depression, and by Skidmore,
Owings, Merrill in the design and construction of the first, planned
atomic community at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
But the goal wasn't simply to link house to community and family to
neighborhood. It was also to make more possible, more efficient, this good
life of postwar prosperity. With the picture window and the
transformed living spaces that resulted, the Levittown house finally
gained a sense of light and air to expand its cramped, 800-square-foot
floorplan, thanks to these large-scale Thermopane wonders (Charles
Tekula would recall the number of times he or his sister broke those
panes!):
This meant that parents could supervise their children from the living
room-- they could be inside, at leisure or at housework, while their
children could roam the immediate backyard or the larger common area
that spilled off the backs of each house in the street plan:
The new Levittown "ranch" soon mutated into submodels, with varying
entrances, alignments, rooflines, and the like. The 1951 ranch, for
example, looked like this:
Schools, on the other hand, weren't the responsibility of Levitt. He
and the company made a point of keeping Levittown an unincorporated
community that splayed into other formal towns, leaving them to
accommodate the rushing onslaught of new pupils. The result was chaotic
for many years, as property tax receipts lagged behind student
enrollments, and schools bulged while the school districts sought bond
funding for construction and then competed with every other baby-boom
community for the limited number of school architects, school
construction specialists, school desks, books and all the other
essentials.
By the late '50s, however, when Rusty Arnesen and his Cub Scout pack
put together their demonstration for the Long Island Jamboree, there
was no question that Levittown was a community, comprised of
neighborhoods, with schools and children at their center.
Proudly, and a bit awkwardly, too, Arnesen's pack members stand behind
their achievement: a description of their neighborhood, made as a scale
model from interchangeable parts assembled rapidly and then
"customized" by each "owner" to conform to his own house, or that of
his neighbor. That the conception of a neighborhood had a school at its
center was natural; so also was it natural that the institution of a
Cub Scout pack, with its den and den mother, would have come into being
to imbed in weekly social life the boundaries that separated this
part of Levittown from that one.
Fifty years after its inception, Levittown has become a symbol of the
strengths and weaknesses of the postwar American model of community
that found its strongest representation and its most passionate
defenders in the suburbs. While critics decried its raw look, its lack
of organic natural features, its near-identical houses, its class
homogeneity, its early racial covenants, residents have with equal
fervor declared that many these were features of the postwar moment.
Housing rapidly built to satisfy a desperate demand; housing cheap
enough for newly returning GIs, whether plumbers or doctors; houses
that were small enough to be convenient and easily maintained, large
and expandable enough to accommodate growth in family and in wealth;
houses that drew the family into a common area (often around the
built-in TV); a community that embodied the child-centered and
optimistic values of the postwar booms: that, say residents, was
Levittown.
To look at Levittown today, as a driver of its streets and walker of
its sidewalks, is to see a very different community than the one first
described by enthusiasts and detractors. Here Levittown has all of the
complexity of age: trees, lawns, some overgrown and some manicured to
perfection, houses a bit run-down and houses nearly palatial. No longer
a one-class community of small homes, it is a multi-class, multi-ethnic
community with, only here and there, the original houses to bear
witness to what it once was.
See images of Levittown's transformation
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