Inside, the original Levittown home was relatively uninspired. At the front, the living room to the left and the kitchen to the right of the front door each had windows that looked out onto the street-- logical enough if the principal playground for children was the street, rather than the open backyard area. The Levitts were smart in this regard; many of the renters and purchasers of Levittown houses came from urban neighborhoods, where children played on sidewalk and street, under the watchful eye of mothers, fathers, aunts and neighbors who clustered on the stoop, socializing, or leaned out the windows. For the first few years, Levittowners used the streets as play areas, in part because the side yards were small and the back yards muddy, the new grass at best tender and tentative. The shrubs and trees, too, were fragile, easily damaged by child's play.
So the Levitts put a window from the kitchen, and one from the living room, to provide a vantage point for mothers (and father, on weekends) to police the kids. A side door in the kitchen was the principal means of entering and leaving for the family. The front door opened, rather awkwardly, toward the living room rather than the kitchen, and visitors looked directly up the "stairs to nowhere." The floors were covered in asphalt tiling, the walls a mix of drywall and wood paneling. The kitchen's built-ins backed up against a plumbing wall shared with the single bathroom. The master bedroom was adequate, the second bedroom small-- especially for young families with two children bunking together.
Naturally enough, then, one of the first orders of business was to finish the "unfinished" attic. Levitt himself encouraged the process; he even proposed that renters were welcome to finish out the attics (at their own expense, of course). He arranged for classes to be taught in the community centers at night and on weekends so new owners could learn the rudiments. The barn-raising quality of the language surrounding these home improvements was palpable and calculated. It was also prophetic.
For Levittowners banded together to work on each others cars or share the babysitting responsibilities, and they banded together to build out their homes.
The gender-based allocation of labor was clear from the start, and it reflected the fundamental change in American life that had come with the end of World War II. Campaigns by government agencies, ad campaigns by everyone from percale sheet manufacturers to Cannon bath towels emphasized that women would soon be able to give up their necessary but unnatural wartime working lives and enter a new era of home supervision and home economy.
Decorating became, almost overnight, one of the places where this cultural campaign to reorient women from workplace to home found its most alluring imagery. Between Rosie the Riveter and the Cold War housewife lay a transitional ground that ad campaigns exploited: women painted the rooms; they moved the furniture; they refinished the chairs and tables; they hung the pictures-- often doing all this in spattered blue jeans or khakis. While some ads proposed young couples continuing their courtship into marriage with the shared work of redecorating, even there the woman supervised.
And so it was with Levittown. In 1949, McCall's moved its "How I Keep House" series to Levittown, and the focus was all on Mrs. Helen Eckhoff, who was praised by the editors for her efficient and attractive use of the small space of the Cape Cod model. By then, however, Levitt had shifted his own sensibilities. As the housing shortage eased, and as more money came into the hands of potential buyers, architect Alfred Levitt began to modify his design, to incorporate some of the design and lifestyle features he'd admired in Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian houses. Alfred opened up the plan, moving the living room so that it looked out on the backyard area, and moving the kitchen in front of it, so it looked out at the street (enabling mothers to continue policing the street play of their children). The stairs were still at the center of the house, but they now separated living room and master bedroom, providing more privacy for couples. Between the living room and the kitchen, Alfred replaced a traditional wall with a brick partition wall through which was pierced the double-sided fireplace. On either side of the brick were openings-- one about as wide as a door, the other about double that width. Neither had doors. And, of course, into the stairway, he embedded the Admiral television.
Apparently Bill Levitt had noticed the McCall's article, and two years later-- when he developed an enlarged ranch, with carport and other features, at a heftier $9,000. price-point-- he offered a home decorating contest to the first 500 homeowners buying the new model, with a significant set of cash prizes, ranging from $500 grand prize to multiple $50 "honorable mentions." To encourage maximum publicity, he hired "name" designers from Manhattan to trek out to Levittown, look over all the entries, and determine the winners.
Life magazine bit: the editors did a feature, called "Same Rooms, Varied Decor," and sent a team out to Levittown on multiple excursions. The article, complete with color pictures of the first, second and third prize winners' living rooms, ran in the January 14, 1952 issue of the magazine.
Looking at the pictures is revealing: of the houses themselves, of the ways their owners conceived of them, of the taste in decorating in that era (after all, professional Manhattan interior decorators were the judges!), and of the ways lives might be lived in the Levittown house.
Mrs. Mel Gervey had chosen a modernist style, bleaching the paneling, and interrupting the walkway to the kitchen (and the bathroom!) with a screen and potted plant. Photographs walked up the stairway. The decorators awarded first to this one, said Life,. because the "furniture is all in proper scale for the house," praising as well the lightness of the color scheme and the way the screen, "used to conceal an extra entrance to the kitchen and bedrooms, makes the room seem less a passageway." They were apparently not bothered by the number of decorative knick-knacks; all three of the rooms were aswim in decorative touches. Nor did anyone note that the prize-winner had removed the built-in tv from the wall, where it should have gleamed directly between Mrs. Gervey and the lamp to her right.
Interestingly enough, the Gerveys had no tv at all, at least in the living room, where it would almost certainly have had to be, given the size of consoles. A view of the other side of the living room showed more clearly the interplay of the black tiling with the off-white rug.
Perhaps what attracted the judges most was the relative consistency of taste Mrs. Gervey showed. The hanging lamp, the expressive driftwood sculpture on the corner table, and the minimalist sectional couch all played well with the Levitt's generally modernist bent in those last Ranch models.
Second prize, awarded to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Field, received praise for "excellent taste in using traditional furnishings and suitable accessories." There the basic thrown-in tv remained in its contractor-designated place. The consistency of a Swiss-German-Austrian motif, carried through to the slipcovers and the matching curtain over the picture window, may seem fusty to later eyes, but it was a mark of taste at the time.
Mrs. Field posed with her young son. Mrs. Gervey posed with a cigarette. Third-place winners Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Hagan, whose "courageous blend of colors and complete individuality" impressed the judges, weren't anywhere to be seen. In their place, Life's photographer managed to slip a copy of a recent Life into the magazine rack and thus the picture.
One mark of their certainty that they'd remain in this house: they painted the paneling, and the brick as well. This was truly a "courageous" act, for while it distinguished the house from all others, it also significantly limited the likelihood of quick resale. The Hagans had also already "moved up" to a larger television, with something approaching hi-fi sound. It was impressive enough that the photographer turned it on and set the lighting so that its ghostly image of a man in front of a curtain could, barely, be seen.
The Hagans didn't make it onto the final, black-and-white, spread; in their place was a picture of first runners-up the Robert G. Fowlers. They deserved the attention; they had moved quickly to convert the carport into living space.
What all four of the winning entries pointed up was the contest between personal and familial privacy, and the communal nature of the urban design. By the time the Levitt firm began this final phase, they had begun to heed Alfred Levitt not only within the house but in the urban-- suburban-- design of the community. They were much more aggressive about breaking up the grid, increasing the number of cul-de-sacs and curving the streets more extremely. This made for much more interesting backyard areas, appropriate to the huge picture window that separated the living room from the patio in these Ranch models. And while the Levitts may have relented a bit on the enforcement of covenants concerning fences and shrubs, still in these new neighborhoods there were clear sightlines from living room to living room across the back yards. All of the contestants had been quick to run floor-to-ceiling drapes or curtains across these windows, so that they could open the house in daylight, enclose it at night. No doubt the issue of winter warmth also motivated the decision. On very cold nights, all that glass refrigerated the living rooms, and the radiant heat in the floor, comfortable enough for barefoot or stocking-foot living, couldn't match the radiant cold from that expanse.
There was one other reason for curtaining off that picture window. In the Ranch houses, the built-in television sat at right angles to that light source, rendering daytime tv watching almost impossible without some means of blocking the reflections and dimming the room. Already by 1952, Levittown was immersed in television opportunities-- it was well within the New York metropolitan transmission area, affording three, four or five channels of programming. Already television producers and programmers were designing the day around at-home women and after-school children.