The Social Web: Community and Levittown in the First Decade
Artifacts from Carl A. (Rusty) Arnesen
Rusty Arnesen grew up in the Levittown of the '50s and early '60s; his stories reflect the next stage in community-building after the earliest frontier days of the '40s and early '50s, described so well by the Tekula family images and memories. In Arnesen's pictures, the houses show some wear and, outside, trees have grown full size and grass has had time not only to set down roots but to develop that particular combination of hardiness and bare patches that makes a true suburban lawn.
So also with the institutions, informal and formal, that cemented Levittown's place as a baby-boom community devoted to the nuclear family and the raising of children. Arnesen's is a story of Cub Scouts and block parties, of all-day neighborhood barbeques and Halloween pageants, and then, in the early '60s, of teen dances and teen "nightclubs," designed to extend the combination of childhood freedom and adult supervision into the turbulent years of adolescence.
Arnesen's family lived at 14 Swallow Lane; his father was a disabled veteran of World War II, confined to bed and wheelchair. This didn't limit his involvement in the community; on the contrary, it seems to have fostered an extended network of clubs and activities that reached from the neighborhood outward to the larger Levittown community. Carl, Senior, was involved in veterans' organizations that provided him with companionship and his family with advocates and friends. He was also an organizer and adult supervisor of children's activities, from overseeing daily play to serving as Commissioner of a Cub Scout troop with his wife as Den Mother. Arnesen, Senior, and fellow disabled veteran John Cochrane had founded the Northside Five Baseball League, where, in 1954, 120 children played in the open common areas behind the Arnesen home; by 1958, it had become the Levittown Athletic Club, with boys' and girls' leagues, membership cards and uniform patches.
For Rusty, the result was a world of safety and adventure, an idyllic suburban childhood in a child-centered community.
"Levittown was a very children- and youth-friendly environment when I grew up there in the fifties and sixties," reports Rusty Arnesen. "There were always kids on my own street to play pick-up games and sports with. Stick ball and touch football in the street and baseball or basketball in the school yard were sports where you could find enough kids from your street or, if need be, the next, to form teams. We also played 'kick the can,' tag, 'rang a leario,' 'capture the flag,' hide and go seek, and 'Johnny on the pony.'"
At the most local and informal level was Rusty's neighborhood gang- children from the surrounding homes. While the parents knit their social web, the children did the same. "There were many activities centered around our "block" or immediate neighborhood in Levittown," notes Arnesen, wryly noting the difficulty of demarcating sections of a town built not on the block-and grid system of the city and the older suburbs, but the new model of curvilinear streets, cul-de-sacs, and open, unfenced backyards that melted into one another, forming wide swatches of open ground behind the houses. "We played in the street, around our houses and through the neighbors' backyards, with little complaint from the neighbors. In the summer we played past dark or until our parents made us come in."
The clusters of houses provided the basis for children's playgroups, and these often provided the basis for adults to form their own informal associations. "Block parties were common," recalls Rusty Arnesen; "all of the neighbors on a street would get together and set up tables and chairs, often blocking off part of the street. The parties were pot luck and often lasted most of a day and into the night."
Between the casual but tight knitting of these groups and the more formal institutions the lines were blurred and fluid. Arnesen recalls one of these events: "On my street the kids even put together a variety show to raise money for handicapped children. We kids came up with the idea of giving a show on our own, but our concept of the type of show and the acts we could perform were somewhat unrealistic- we wanted to put on a circus." Parents stepped in to guide and advise; one family "directed the show and set up a stage and chairs in their backyard for our theater." As had been the case from the first, the backyards blurred the line between private and public space, and the local show, which netted just over $11, ended up performed in the Laurel Lane school for the handicapped classes. The show went public on the pages of the Levittown Tribune:
One of the great worries of the baby-boom years of the late '50s and early '60s was a phenomenon known as "juvenile delinquency." The freedom of baby-boom childhood in suburbs like Levittown seemed also a danger as those children became teen-agers and adolescent individuation, rebellion, and social insecurities replaced the easier terrain of elementary school. Because Levittown was something close to an instant suburb, and because its residents moved into the community shortly after the end of World War II, there were few of the institutions and folkways that made those transitions from childhood to adulthood less wrenching for parents and children alike. Levittown's worries about juvenile delinquency and "jd's" were amplified versions of a national obsession with the moral fabric of baby-boom children.
Levittowners responded with an array of organizations and activities for teenagers, meant to channel, harness, and render harmless the dangers of adolescence. "In addition to the community pools, parks, village greens, bowling alleys, skating rink, ice cream parlors and movies," Arnesen recollects, "we had many other activities available to us. We had dances at all of the schools, both high schools and grammar schools, public dances at the Levittown Community Church and Levittown Hall. In the summer, there were square dance lessons and dances held in the Levittown Shopping Center parking lot and a large fireworks display every fourth of July. There was a carnival held every summer, with cakewalks, games and other contests held in the parking lot of Northside School. The recreation director of Northside kept the Gym open during the summer for a number of activities and games for kids. The classrooms were also open, with adults teaching crafts and art." Residents of many other booming suburbs in Cold War America- from Guilford, Connecticut, to Skokie, Illinois, to Daly City, California- will recollect similar rituals of restrained passage. What was perhaps different in Levittown was the intensity, borne in part out of the critical mass of suddenly maturing adolescents, and in part out of the lack of longer-lived, multigenerational traditions that Levittowners like the Tekulas and the Arnesens had left behind when they moved from the older communities in Queens and the Bronx and even the farmtowns of Long Island and New Jersey.
Rusty Arnesen still has the membership card to a "Teen Age Nite Club" that was a peculiar feature of Levittown's adolescence. "In addition to dances, movies and more standard activities for teenagers," Arnesen reports, "'teenage nightclubs' were popular for a while in the sixties. I sang in a couple of bands that played at these, in the mid-sixties. They charged a membership fee and, I think, an additional admission charge. They also served pizza, other snacks and soft drinks, and the club was fairly popular for a while."
Arnesen's was The Swaray, a clever respelling of the more formal French-and-debutante term, soiree. Hip spelling ("nite club") and the promise of exclusivity ("Private Member" reads the heading on Arnesen's card) made the club a status symbol, and a mirror of adult recreation, too. But this was not an unrestrained world of the sort promised in the rock-and-roll songs of the time. The rules on the back of the Swaray's membership card ensured that:
"I have often speculated on why there seemed to be such a sense of community in Levittown," writes Carl "Rusty" Arnesen. He believes some of that communitarianism resulted from experiences of Levittowners who themselves grew up in urban neighborhoods with homogenous ethnic neighborhoods, "each with a strong sense of community" already built in. Levittowners brought these images of tightly-knit neighborhoods and communities to a new landscape in which, "instead of choosing their neighbors or moving to an existing ethnic neighborhood, they were generally given the next new house as it was completed. Although their neighbors were of different backgrounds, the sense of community was ingrained, and continued," in this raw transplanted instant suburb.
Arnesen's recollections provide us with telling evidence of the ways the physical landscape and the social landscape intersected in Levittown. Perhaps the most striking of his treasures is a photograph of Cub Scout Pack 323 at the Long Island Cub Scout Jamboree. Under the watchful eye of Scout Master Carl Arnesen, Senior, the boys built a scale-model replica of their neighborhood. "My father planned our entry for the exposition so that it was easy for each scout to construct his individual part of it. He obtained the blueprints for Northside School and made a scale model, in sections, so that we could fit the sections together. He also laid out the plans for each model of Levitt home on two flat pieces of cardboard, one for the walls and one for the roof. Each scout was able to pick out his own model of home, fold both parts of the house along the dotted lines and paste the roof to the bottom part. The scout then had a scale model of his own home." Together, the scouts colored in their houses, added "trees and bushes of green sponge and twigs, and mounted each on green cardboard to simulate grass. After the exposition, each scout could keep the scale model of his own home."
Stiff before the camera (Rusty Arnesen is all the way to the left), the children of Levittown appear here as both the products and the producers of their community, assembled out of prefabricated stock, rapidly and efficiently, laid out with the institution of the school and the rearing of children at the symbolic center of their demonstration project: what better metaphor might we have for the significance of Levittown?