Levittown Read online

  There would be a bookcase in the stairwell, a kitchen hutch, a metal linen closet with pink and gray wallpaper, venetian blinds. With Bill’s shrewd deal-making skills, they planned to fill each home with state-ofthe-art and name-brand accessories: stainless steel Tracy sinks, General Electric stove and refrigerator, a Bendix washing machine. Bill, as always, wrote up the ads like Barnum promoting the greatest show on earth. “Mrs. Kilroy Gets the Best,” he penned for an ad promoting the automatic washer included in the Levittown homes. One legendary adman balked at Levitt’s insistence upon doing his own ads, telling him he was violating every rule of the trade—but, he added, Levitt did write good copy. And the copy sold homes.

  With Abe at the helm, there would be plenty of fruit trees and shrubs outside. “Every man has a right to flowers!” Abe declared to one reporter. In all, despite the constraints, the Levitts didn’t view the homes as antiseptic 750-square-foot boxes. They were what some architects called “machines for the living,” made to be modified. Each home had a stairwell leading up to an unfinished attic that could be built out. With the living room and the kitchen in the front of the house, expanding the back would be an easy bump-out project. The house was a small postage stamp on a sixty-by-hundred-foot lot, with plenty of room to build.

  For Alfred, coming up with the finished product was an inspirational work-in-progress. “We don’t follow a recipe,” he said. “We build by taste, like a good cook.” Architecture critics would marvel at his unconventional approach. “Alfred [draws] on all sorts of muses,” wrote one, “from Wright to the sliding-glass windows at a White Castle hamburger stand (the spark for using double-glazed Thermopane) to the ancient Romans’ diversion of hot-water springs under stone floors (which inspired the radiant heat coils embedded in Levittown’s concrete slabs).” If Alfred didn’t like how a house was turning out, he would tear it down and start again; the model home went up and down thirty times, at a cost of $50,000, before completion.

  But it would take a machinelike process to build these machinelike homes. The production would be standardized to churn out homes like cars on an assembly line, except, in this case, the assembly line came to the product. The idea was to own and automate as much as possible, and they already had all the essentials in place. They owned a lumber mill in Blue Lake, California, that would provide the wood. The nails would come from their own factory; the cement, poured by their own mixers. To construct a home, different people with specialized skills would show up and do their task. “Teams of two or three men progressing from house to house, doing the same job on each, whether it be installing a door knob or planting a tree,” as one article hyped.

  And the Levitts would not be slowed down by the unions. Instead, they resolved to hire nonunion workers, whom they would pay not by the hour, but by completed projects. It was a key to what they viewed as their success in mass production: not creating a new technique, but refining one and making it more efficient. With money and patriotic zeal fueling him, Bill refused to let building codes stand in their way either. Part of Alfred’s plan was to jettison basements for concrete slabs as they’d used in Norfolk. The slabs would have copper tubing for radiant heating, just like ancient Rome, as Bill reminded the skeptics. But the history lesson didn’t play with the Hempstead Town Board; code required basements, period. Without approval, the Levitts couldn’t break ground. So Bill rolled up his sleeves, sat down at his desk, and prepared for the fight.

  He knew just whom he needed to help him: the veterans of World War II. He already had them on his side. Word had spread of the Levitts’ plan to take the vets out of the chicken coops and put them into homes. The goal, ultimately, was to sell the homes, but for now they would be available for rent at just $60 per month. They had no idea how many homes they’d fill. On May 7, 1947, they announced their intention to build two thousand rentals for veterans. For a change, they were thinking small. Half the homes were rented in two days; before long, 4,495 applicants had put down a $60 deposit for their slice of the American Dream. But it would mean nothing if the Levitts couldn’t get their slabs approved, Bill explained in an advertisement he wrote to appeal to the troops.

  “Be at the public hearing at the town hall in Hempstead on Tuesday, May 27th at 10:30 a.m. for the public hearing to determine whether these houses can be built as we have designed them,” Bill wrote. “The town board has called this public hearing, and unless you and your friends are there, it may not be approved. If you want modern, comfortable, beautiful housing at a rental within your reach, you must be there! We’re doing our part; you must do yours!”

  Bill awoke that morning not knowing who, if anyone, would show. But one by one the men came, then in droves, in defiance. The veterans were joined by their wives and babies, who jammed into the hall and fought for their homes. The Hempstead Board heard the outcry and overturned the building code. The basements were gone. Levitt had won and was bolstered by his power to defy the law. “Very quickly breaking all precedent, the building code was changed,” he said. “A small builder could not have brought that about.” The papers agreed. A photo spread of the hearing scene was captioned, “A Hero in the eyes of those who attended the hearing yesterday, William Levitt . . . is all but hidden, by people crowding to shake his hand.”

  It was time to build. But Bill wanted one last thing: to rename the town of Island Trees, where he was building his community, after his family. His father and brother, however, didn’t agree. In many loud arguments, they fought against the arrogant notion of anointing the land in their own honor. But Bill, argumentative and egotistical, won in the end, as always. When the local paper objected to the notion, Bill trumped them too—by buying the paper and becoming the publisher himself. “I wanted the new name as a kind of monument to my family,” he later explained. “And, by gosh, I wasn’t going to brook any interference.” Good-bye, Island Trees; hello, Levittown.

  The Levittown machine kicked into high gear in 1948. The home building was broken down into twenty-six assembly-line steps—from digging the footings through putting on shingles and exterior landscaping. Workers came and went like ants as newsreels filmed the progress. By July, Levitt & Sons had soared from making eighteen homes a day to thirty. It was postwar American innovation at its best.

  As the first tenants moved in, images of their joyous homecomings swept America. That Levittown was just a bunch of half-built homes on muddy fields made no difference. When the veteran carried his wife across the broken path into his new home, that was all that mattered. The neighbors swapped tools, helped each other outfit their homes, brought flowers and food. Door-to-door salesmen showed up with accessories to meet their needs. “Milk wagons raced each other to the occupied house while a truck advertising a diaper service roamed hopefully up and down the streets,” reported Newsday, the large newspaper servicing Long Island and Queens. Inside the homes, the new washing machines were happily spinning. The war after the war—the battle to house the troops—had been won.

  The media anointed Bill Levitt, the face of the company, as American royalty. Though the Levitts had not invented suburbia or mass production or a variety of other innovations, they had the knack and the timing to become the ones who personified these trends. Reporters from Time, Life, Fortune, Reader’s Digest, and Newsweek lined up to interview Bill Levitt—and that was all in just one week. LEVITT LICKS THE HOUSING SHORTAGE trumpeted one typical headline. AN ACCOMPLISHMENT OF HEROIC PROPORTIONS said another. Newsday declared it a “model community.” And what the media most admired was Bill Levitt’s Great American tenacity; he was a warrior of industry out to save the ordinary man. “Any other builder at any other time would not have had the organization,” Harper’s said, “could not have bypassed union restrictions, and could not have secured the financing. The Levitt story is a tale of how he was relieved of some of these obstacles, got around others, and ran into the remainder head foremost and knocked them down.”

  Bill Levitt had a way of making everyone play by his rules. And i
n his brave new town, there were plenty to go by. To live in Levittown, residents had to follow the list of rules spelled out in the lease. “Item 17: No fences, either fabricated or growing, upon any part of the premises . . . Item 21: No laundry poles or lines outside of the house, except that of a portable revolving laundry drier.”

  The most important rules were emphasized in all-capital letters. “THE TENANT AGREES NOT TO RUN OR PARK OR PERMIT TO BE RUN OR PARKED ANY MOTOR VEHICLES,” and “THE TENANT AGREES TO CUT OR CAUSE TO BE CUT THE LAWN AND REMOVE OR CAUSE TO BE REMOVED TALL GROWING WEEDS AT LEAST ONCE A WEEK BETWEEN APRIL FIFTEENTH AND NOVEMBER FIFTEENTH. UPON THE TENANT’S FAILURE THE LANDLORD MAY DO SO AND CHARGE THE COST THEREOF TO THE TENANT AS ADDITIONAL RENT.”

  The Levitts meant it, particularly Abe. The draconian horticulturalist would drive the muddy roads through the neighborhoods checking up on the quality of his nascent lawns and saplings. Residents joked that they knew he was coming when they saw a big black Cadillac slowly inching down the street without anyone, apparently, behind the wheel; that was Abe.

  When he wasn’t making the rounds, he took to admonishing the Levittowners in his column, “Chats on Gardening,” in the Levittown Tribune. “Cultivation, cultivation, cultivation!” he once fumed in his column. “. . . I notice in my inspections that even many of those gardeners who cultivate do so in an inadequate measure . . . I have said so many times that the use of a hose with metal nozzle attached should never be used in a garden that I believed the warning would spread and its use discontinued. But I see hundreds doing this very thing and then wondering why their trees and plants die.”

  He even took parents to task for letting their boys run wild over his precious lawns: “They ride roughshod through the group plantings in parks without thought of the destruction resulting there-from. Won’t you warn your boy . . . that his bicycle will be taken from him if he rides over or through plants . . . I raised two boys myself. And I have five grandchildren who, I wager to say, would not throw a piece of paper in any place but a waste basket. It is training, training, and more training that eventually succeeds in making good citizens.”

  Another capitalized item in the lease would be the most restrictive of all: “THE TENANT AGREES NOT TO PEMIT THE PREMISES TO BE USED OR OCCUPIED BY ANY PERSON OTHER THAN MEMBERS OF THE CAUCASIAN RACE.” This was part of the FHA standards that had regulated homogeneous communities for years. But, just as Levittown was gaining steam, it would come under attack. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that the clause was “unenforceable as law and contrary to public policy.” Bill gave a nod to the most powerful court in the land by later removing the language from the Levitts’ leases, but had no intention of changing their policy.

  “The policy that has prevailed in the past is exactly the same policy that prevails today,” Bill Levitt told the press after announcing the decision in 1949. “It is the same policy that all builders in this area have adopted and the elimination of the clause has changed absolutely nothing . . . Levittown has been and is now progressing as a private enterprise job, and it is entirely in the discretion and judgment of Levitt & Sons as to whom it will rent or sell.” Levittown would remain whites-only.

  As Levitt said, his was certainly not the only such town in America. But the price of fame was to single out Levittown as the most notable example. Outraged at Levitt’s practice, groups including the NAACP, the Civil Rights Congress, and the American Labor Party tried to get the FHA to pull out its mortgage loans from the community because “Levitt is using federal aid and assistance for unconstitutional purposes.”

  African-American veterans would show up, only to be steered away by Levitt’s salesmen. In December 1949, an African-American veteran named Eugene Burnett came to Levittown looking for a home. As he was touring the model house, he approached a salesman and said, “Pretty nice house. I’m interested. Would you give me an outline of the procedure, how do I apply? Do you have an application of some sort?” Burnett watched the salesman’s face turn solemn. “It’s not me,” the salesman explained, “but the owners of this development have not as yet decided whether or not they’re going to sell these homes to Negroes.”

  In another instance, the mother of a World War II veteran went to the Village Green Restaurant in Levittown, where sales agents were making deals for homes. Levitt’s attorney looked at her and said, “We will not sell to a Negro veteran.” As she was led outside, she found three other black veterans being denied admission to the restaurant at all. The mother and others held a sit-in at Levitt’s office, protesting the policy.

  Levitt met with the NAACP, but was ambivalent at best. “Give me a chance to get some people in here, because if I start out with black people, I won’t get any whites,” he explained. “If I get enough white people in here, then I sell to everybody, provided they’re acceptable.” For Bill, it was a necessary part of the plan—a way to insure his homes against what he feared would be, as he once said, their diminution in value. “We can solve the housing problem or we can solve the racial problem,” he said, “but we cannot combine the two.” And he had one word to describe those who questioned his ways: Communists. “Despite the skeptics and the professional critics and the Communists,” he said, “we believe in Levittown, in its honesty and goodness. What’s more, we believe most of the tenants feel as we do.”

  In living rooms across the community, concerned residents formed an activist group called the Committee to End Discrimination in Levittown with the purpose of integrating the town. Despite Levitt’s claims that bringing in blacks would trigger white flight, the group released a poll that found 61 percent of residents in Levittown favored allowing black families into the community. Regardless of such findings, an editorial in Newsday backed Levitt: “Organizations which appear to be either Communist-dominated or Communist-inspired have been attempting to raise a racial issue at Levittown. The issue did not exist until it was fostered by people not immediately affected by it. Their only real motive seems to be to set race against race, and if possible, to bog down the Levitt building program, which means homes for thousands of people.”

  Some Levittowners also openly equated the fight for civil rights with Communism. One morning, Yale graduate student John Liell, in town doing research for a dissertation on Levittown, approached an elderly woman to fill out a survey. She eyeballed him skeptically. Is this about “getting niggers into Levittown?” she asked. “Because I don’t want anything to do with that.” When he told her it wasn’t, she explained that “a lot of Communists” in town had that very mission in mind.

  An important player in Washington lent his support to Levitt too: Mc-Carthy. For the young senator fighting his early war against what he perceived to be the Communist breeding ground of public housing, Levittown was a model. As he presided over the U.S. Senate Joint Committee Study and Investigation of Housing in 1947 and 1948, he had a powerful partner in the brash Long Island builder, who came to testify on his behalf. “Mr. McCarthy is first a veteran,” Levitt quipped, “second a U.S. senator, third a very aggressive young man typical of the type of leadership that you might expect in Washington from now on, and fourth, he exhibits a passionate interest in housing that almost amounts to a phobia. Parenthetically, I might add, he is also a Republican.”

  Levitt gave McCarthy a personal tour of his model town, and McCarthy posed for photos in front of the washing machines that would be included in every home. The power play paid off. As a result of McCarthy’s housing bill, veterans could now get mortgages within their reach. And that was just the fuel the Levitts needed to execute the final stage of their plan: sales.

  The Levitts declared that their new ranch models would be available for sale to veterans for the low price of $7,990. Bill marketed it in promotions as “the most remarkable value the United States has seen” and hyped the cutting-edge gadgets and gear they were throwing in: Two-Way Log Burning Fireplace, Thermopane Insulated Glass, Tracy All-Steel Cabinets, and, most remarkable of all, that amazing new invention ev
eryone wanted, a television set, built right into the side of every stairwell.

  Vets didn’t just heed the call, they camped out. They lined up outside the Levitt sales office in lawn chairs and hammocks with tins of hot coffee, waiting for their turn to sign up the next morning. Outside the door, picketers from the NAACP protested the racial covenant, passing out literature and trying in vain for an hour to gain support. But the buyers were not dissuaded. “We’ve waited since the end of the war for something like this and now we’ve found it,” said one woman.

  Newspaper reporters crushed in to breathlessly report the phenomenon: “In a scene reminiscent of the storming of the gates of Versailles and the Yukon gold rush, almost a thousand veterans, wives and full retinues of kids besieged Levitt and Sons yesterday, clamoring for an audience—and a new house.” Even the sales process resembled an assembly line, with rows of salespeople taking checks and handing over keys like something out of a Charlie Chaplin movie. They boasted of selling 650 homes to 1500 buyers in just five hours. “It’s even bigger than we thought,” Bill Levitt declared.

  Business exploded. In 1949, Levitt & Sons built 4,604 homes, which they sold for $42,195,000. By November 1951, just four years after the first family moved into Levittown, the last of the 17,447 homes built on the former potato fields was occupied, and the total population had grown to nearly seventy thousand people. By 1952, the seven Village Greens around Levittown bustled with sixty-six stores—supermarkets, drugstores, barbershops, and dry cleaners. Residents filled the parks and walked to stores to get their goods. Levitt & Sons were building one out of every eight homes in the country. The dream of the model town was realized, and the fairy-tale story behind its creation was gaining traction all over the country.

  The Levitts were not just the nation’s biggest builders, but icons of optimism, titans on par with Walt Disney and Henry Ford—and better. “I’m not going out on a limb when I say that Levittown might very well be the model for housing projects all over the nation,” one Senate committee member said during a visit. “And the Lord God said to Abraham [Levitt], ‘Let there be homes! And there were,” one reporter wrote. “Only in America could a boy raised in the slums of New York—Abraham Levitt—with only a few years of elementary school learning, become the largest home builder in the world,” Levitt & Sons vice president Charles Biederman told the press.