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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