Levittown: Transformations of the Postwar Suburb

Levittown's conversion from a raw homogeneous subdivision into a complexly heterogeneous cultural environment is the subject of research and writing I've done but not yet published. In the early 1990s, I photographed a number of the houses in an attempt to show some of the ways in which this change manifested itself visually.

Levittown House Original Model,Without Additions, Converted to Use as Real Estate Office, 1990

It is rare today to see even a relatively pristine, unmodified original Levittown house, particularly one of the Cape Cods that formed the first generation of housing. Partly this is the result of the less-than stellar quality of building materials available immediately after the war, which required-- enabled, really-- renovation, renewal, and transformation. But many other factors fed this rage to transform: larger families requiring larger living quarters; increases in income, wealth, consumer cash; the more general urges of Americans after the war to trade up in cars and houses alike, combined with a stubborn yearning to render individuality, to stake one's territory.

Bill Levitt encouraged this trend, and so did the institutions that he brought in or that came in to replace him as he extricated himself from the day-to-day life of his village: high schools with their night and weekend classes, community colleges, fix-up contractors and add-a-room specialists.

This particular house seems at first to have stayed relatively pure, and it would seem that the reasons are all around it: the neighborhood in which it once had its life has been steadily encroached by traffic, road expansions, and commercial activity until all else has left it behind and it sits, almost forlorn, at the frontier-line between home life and the grimy life of commerce.

And the houses behind it would seem to support this interpretation. We see them, also barely modified, minimally expanded, a bit dowdy, behind the parking spaces for the Vigilant Real Estate Company. But they cue us into some anomalies. The Vigilant house isn't pristine: it's had the original first-stroy windows knocked out, replaced by commercial plate-glass display windows on the street and parking sides. A new front door has been added on, and the side door is completely gone.

Perhaps, in fact, it isn't in its original location. Perhaps it has been moved here, to serve as a living advertisement to what's within-- the promise of affordable housing that you can buy, with little or no money down, right here and right now. In this regard, it's been turned into a billboard of sorts-- it's what the architectural theorists Venturi, Scott-Brown and Izenour once described as the duck-- the building that looks like what's within: a duck where roast duck is sold. Or perhaps it has just become a symbol, the result of more than a half-century of social, cultural and economic forces at work on its small, vulnerable frame.

Levittown Original Model Converted by Multiple Additions, 1990

The standard additions are all here. Start at the sidewalk: the small spindly saplings of 1948 have grown to full-size trees. The lawns underneath them, once raw dirt, grew lush and then, as the trees dwarfed them and stole their sunlight and ground nutrients and water so that the lawns shrank and grew weedy and patched. But not this one. Someone has worked, hard and steadily, all year round, to make sure the lawn remains viable, rich, the envy of neighbors.

The shrubs have grown up and the house has begun to look a bit like the home of a hermit; certainly from this angle it doesn't have the fabled communal spirit of Levittown mythology. The additions are also at first a bit odd: two dormers have been added to the expansion attic, easily doubling its original size. There's an oddity there, too: the second-story window, once put into place in razor-edge symmetry, was removed, its opening covered, and then the window was replaced, off to one side. Behind that gesture is a wealth of information: most notably, the logic of getting that attic to service not one but two bedrooms, so that the windows couldn't go in the middle, where the separating wall was to be located. On the other side, we may assume, the side window has also been moved, but to the other side, so that each of the new bedrooms had its own window.

After that, the addition on the first floor rear nestles under the white wings of the dormers like a small child under her mother's raincoat.

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Original Model, Converted to Colonial Revival, Levittown, 1990

By necessity, Levittown houses mutated away from their rigorously Puritan roots in the tiny fishing dwellings of New England Congregationalists along the coastlines of Massachusetts Bay, Long Island Sound, and the Atlantic. This one has simply grown to the scale of its larger antecedents, the colonial New England farmhouses built to accommodate larger and more prosperous families in similar geographical surroundings and with similar Puritan distrust of gimcrackery and opulence.

Conversion to Dutch Colonial, Levittown, 1990

Straying westward from New England, this Levittown house modulated into a New York farmhouse, with its Dutch variants. Of course that's not the immediate source of this renovator's architectural plan: that came from the suburban reiterations of the original farmhouse; the Dutch Colonial was all the rage in the later '50s, when this modification was doubtless done.

Later, "Modernized" Model, Levittown, 1990

This was Levitt's more up-to-date model, the so-called "ranch", drawn from the craze for California style living in the years immediately following the war. This one has changed remarkably little-- but this seems to be a result of the decision of its owners to put their money elsewhere-- outdoors, into the swimming pool or tennis court that's behind and to the left, in the expanded backyard.

Parkway, Levittown, 1990

To look at the original common spaces, particularly the streetscape details of 1948 or so,

one might not realize just how generous with public or common land was the original plan. Levitt's original open spaces looked raw and nasty. Now they are grassy, gardened, municipally maintained spaces, with hydrants and, next to them, the warning: don't you dare let your dog do that!

Levittown Real Estate Sign, 1990

Levittown house as icon.

Levittown Yard 1, 1990

After the house, the yard; a place to declare one's creativity, studiousness, commitment, fastidiousness.

Levittown Yard 2, 1990

Return to Levittown

Send comments, suggestions, or proposals for materials to be included in the Levittown Documentary Project to pbhales@uic.edu