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The Pioneering “Levittowner” The Pioneering “Levittowner” William and Alfred Levitt THE TERM “AMERICAN DREAM” acquired common currency revolutionized American in the 1930s, thanks to The Epic of America by James Truslow Adams. housing—and still “There is an ‘American dream’ of a better, richer and happier life for all citizens of have lessons to teach. every rank,” the Pulitzer–Prize-winning historian wrote. But for most people at that time, the dream of a better life did not include owning their own home. Rapid urbanization had had a severe impact on the tradition of living in your own house. By 1930, less than half of households were homeowners, and these lived chiefly in rural areas. Of the more than half of Americans who lived in WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI cities, a privileged few lived in garden REVIEW 73 suburbs, but the majority occupied rent- builders were the embodiment of Adam ed tenements and flats. Smith’s “Invisible Hand.” During the Depression, the homeown- ership rate dropped to less than 44 percent (much lower than high-homeownership THE FIRST LEVITTOWN countries such as the United States or the United Kingdom today, although slightly The prototype for postwar community higher than a low-homeownership coun- builders was Levitt & Sons. The firm built try such as Germany today). Then, thanks large planned communities—named largely to postwar prosperity and the inter- Levittowns—in New York, Pennsylvania, vention of the federal government, it and New Jersey. The first Levittown began rebounded. Hoover’s Federal Home Loan in 1947 as 2,000 rental houses on western Bank Act of 1932 and Roosevelt’s Federal Long Island, part of Truman’s Veterans’ Housing Administration stabilized the Emergency Housing Program. Demand mortgage market and provided insurance proved so strong, however, that the Levitts for home mortgages as well as for housing converted the rentals to ownership units, construction loans. Since building had acquired more land—ultimately 4,700 largely stopped during the Depression and acres—and in a mere five years built the war, the demand for housing was huge. 17,400 houses. The question was how to meet it. The initial selling price of a Levittown Many people thought they had the answer. house was remarkably low: $7,500 (or Old New Dealers promoted government- $48,000 in today’s dollars). Returning GIs built towns, but the bureaucracy was too could become homeowners with nothing slow in reacting to the accelerating down and monthly payments of only $65. demand. The followers of Le Corbusier, The Levitts achieved dramatic the visionary French architect, proposed economies—and a healthy profit of high-rise apartment towers. Buckminster $1,000 per house—largely by reorganizing Fuller unveiled the Dymaxion house, the construction process. which was to be manufactured in an air- The driving force behind the firm was craft factory and resembled a flying saucer. William Levitt, the elder of the two sons. The solution proved to be something He had served in the Seabees, building entirely different and unplanned: mass- barracks for enlisted men in Norfolk, produced suburbs built by private devel- Virginia, and he applied his wartime expe- opers or, as Marc Weiss calls them, “com- rience to the traditional world of wood- munity builders.” These community frame construction. Instead of building 74 ZELL/LURIE REAL ESTATE CENTER houses one at a time, he divided the con- sorts of houses he visualized for Broadacre struction process into 26 discrete steps, City. If he could not realize his urban each performed by a separate team of vision, he could at least show people what workers, equipped with such labor-saving a home in the City of Tomorrow would be devices as power tools and paint sprayers. like. Over the next two decades, he built “One team would lay the slabs, another more than a hundred Usonians across the would do the framing, another the roofing United States. and so on,” he later recalled. “What it “The house of moderate cost is not amounted to was a reversal of the Detroit only America’s major architectural prob- assembly line. There, the car moved while lem,” Wright proclaimed, “but the prob- the workers stayed at their stations. In the lem most difficult for the major archi- case of our houses, it was the workers who tects.” Of course, it wasn’t too difficult for moved, doing the same jobs at different him. To reduce cost, he invented a highly locations. To the best of my knowledge, no simplified and modular method of wood one had ever done that before.” To bypass construction. He eliminated the basement unions, Levitt hired the workers as sub- and the attic, and replaced the garage with contractors. To speed up the work, he paid a carport. He introduced a novel form of them not by the hour but according to the heating—under the floor. He made the number of houses completed, and traded kitchen a small work area, and combined bad-weather days for Saturdays, Sundays, the living and dining rooms into a single and holidays. Thanks to such tactics, space. He used polished concrete floors Levitt & Sons boasted that they were able and exposed wood walls and ceilings— to complete a house every eleven minutes. natural-looking as well as economical— William’s brother, Alfred, was responsi- and designed built-in furniture. Thanks to ble for design. A self-taught architect, in such innovations, he was able to build 1937, when he was 25, he took a leave houses—beautiful houses—for as little as from the family business and spent ten $5,500, at a time when his grand months on a building site in Great Neck, Fallingwater house cost $166,000. Long Island. The construction he followed Watching the Great Neck house, daily was of a relatively modest single- which was one of the first Usonians, being family house, but not just any house. The built had a great influence on the young architect was Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Alfred, who became an unlikely conduit house was one of his so-called Usonians. for disseminating Wright’s ideas into the Wright had coined the term the year American mainstream. His first Levittown before to describe his prototype for the house was a 750-square-foot cottage, with REVIEW 75 two bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom, pools, and a village green and necessity and a kitchen. The interior was small, but shopping centers, athletic fields, Little an unfinished attic had space for two extra League diamonds. We wanted community bedrooms, and the 60-foot by 100-foot lot living.” Levittown was advertised as a left plenty of room for future additions. “Garden Community,” which was an The model was called the “Cape Cod,” explicit reference to the earlier garden sub- which conjures up a traditional image (as urbs. As Alexander Garvin points out, it it was supposed to), but the design incor- was a highly simplified version of porated several Usonian features. Alfred Frederick Law Olmsted’s Riverside, with did not have a tree growing through the curving streets, lots of trees (planted by the ceiling of the dining room, as Wright did developer), and houses set well back from in the Great Neck house, but he did do the sidewalk on large lots. (Typical lots away with the basement and put radiant were 60 feet by 100 feet.) As in Riverside, heating in the floor. front fences were prohibited, which left The “Cape Cod” was only the begin- the lawns open, giving the impression of a ning. To attract buyers, the Levitts continuous green landscape. changed models every year, which gave What set Levittown apart from previ- Alfred the opportunity to introduce fur- ous residential developments was not only ther innovations. These included not the number of houses and the speed with only radiant heating but also open plans which they were built, but also their that combined kitchen, living, and dining extreme architectural uniformity. spaces, a central fireplace, a built-in tele- Although buyers were offered relatively vision, and a carport. Following Wright’s minor façade variations, as well as several example, he planned houses on a two- colors, at any one time there was a single foot module, and used modern materials basic house plan. This repetition reduced such as plywood instead of planks, and construction costs by enabling the work sheets of gypsum wallboard instead of crews to efficiently repeat identical build- hand-laid plaster. ing operations, and allowed the use of pre- Levittown was not only a housing cut lumber and identical components. development; it was a planned communi- ty. “The veteran needed a roof over his head and instead of giving him just a roof A PLANNED COMMUNITY we gave him certain amenities,” recalled William Levitt. “We divided it into sec- The second Levittown, in Bucks County, tions and we put down schools, swimming Pa., was begun in 1951. With 17,300 76 ZELL/LURIE REAL ESTATE CENTER homes on 6,000 acres, it was advertised as likewise dispel any lingering impression “The Best Planned Community in of uniformity. America.” Alfred divided the site into what The Levitts were sensitive to criticisms he called master blocks, about a mile that their developments were uniform, and square, bounded by parkways with limited for Levittown, Pa., Alfred designed six dif- access. Inside each block, he laid out three ferent house models. The workhorse of the or four “neighborhood units” of 400 hous- development was the “Levittowner,” es, separated by local streets and landscape which was his most Usonian design. It is features. At the center of each block, no what became popularly known as a ranch more than a five-minute walk from any house (see Figure 1).
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