By the mid-'60s, Levittown had begun to age. Families that arrived in the first years of the community had reached their most productive years, and many had begun to move out rather than continue the cycle of renovation and expansion required to stay in the standard Levittown home. At the same time, new families seeking to own rather than rent began to look at Levittown as an affordable site for a starter home.
One of these was the family of Mony Rutsch. The Rutches had lived in New York City as a young family with three boys:
In April 1966 our son John joined the family and we knew we would have to move to the suburbs. When I first saw the house, I didn't want to get out of the car--it looked sad and tired. My husband Victor urged me to take a look. We don't have to buy it, he said: just look it over to have an idea.
I fell in love with the house on Cutter Lane. Inside it was roomy. Light came in freely from the glass window that spanned the back wall of the living room. The brick chimney, painted white, was the only separation between the kitchen and living room and opened to both sides. The black floor in the living room contrasted with the white tiles in the kitchen.The heat under the cement floors drove everybody barefooted.
My younger son, Max was born in Levittown in 1969.
The Rutsch's family album shows a life not dissimilar from that of the earlier families, the Tekulas and the Arnesens. Looking carefully, however, we can see some of the ways the house had been changed by its previous owners, and the ways it had aged, as well-- after all, even Mony's first impression was of a house that was "sad and tired." An early picture of John as an infant with his older brother, made in the winter of 1966, shows the evidence; at some point the previous owner had moved the kitchen alignment so that the stove and fridge were against the front wall, implying that the modular sink-and-stove combination had been abandoned:
But note that, even a short time after moving in, the Rutschs were using their fireplace. Mony recollected that the fireplace-chimney brickwork had been painted white-- a surefire means of making the small rooms seem larger, but a bear to keep clean of soot and smoke deposits.
A few years later, a snapshot proudly shows the remodeled kitchen, once again aligned to the original plan:
But note that the gleaming new appliances are set within a colonial-revival cupboard array.
This rearrangement was the culmination of a much grander plan on the Rutsch's part. The Ranch they'd purchased was one of the models with a single casement window in the kitchen. You can see it here, to the right of the carport, already converted by previous owners to a garage-- one of the most common early transformations undertaken by Levittowners:
The replacement of that window with a picture window entailed not just punching out a hole-- it was a curved window, and to add it required punching out that entire front fall, and adding a small roofline as well.
But the result, inside the house, was dramatic. Here is a snapshot of two of the boys after the work was done. On the left, you can see a trace of the fireplace and chimney; now the kitchen can accommodate a table and chairs, and it is once again full of light and air.
That knotty-pine in the kitchen made sense, too, as the open wall with the staircase (the one that should have held the built-in tv) was a dark-stained paneling as well, as we see in this picture of the boys on the stairs:
Over time, the Rutsch's photo-album became increasingly focused on the life outside, notably in the back yard. The boys grew up, and became teenagers-- in the '70s-- and their hair grew long and you can see them in their cutoff jeans. Here one of the boys is supervising the cookout with his grandfather:
Notice, though, that the socialism of children and dogs characteristic of the older Levittown, when Bill Levitt's restrictive covenants forbade fencing or hedges to separate the backyards, has gone by the way. Instead, a tall hedge and a continuation a new-style horse-fence serve to enforce the privacy of the family and the sense that their home extends from inside to outside.
In 1977, the family left Levittown, moving to rural Wisconsin.
Back to Levittown: A Cultural History