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

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, 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 . 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 , 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

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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 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). The exterior, with its house, was an area dedicated to communi- low-slung appearance, carport, high-silled ty uses: a park, a recreation center, a swim- bedroom windows, and large areas of glass ming pool, or a school. There were no was distinctly untraditional. So was the commercial buildings. Instead of local vil- wall material, eight-foot-tall striated lage centers, as in the Long Island develop- sheets of asbestos cement, called ment, the Levitts built a mile-long com- Colorbestos and developed especially for mercial strip along the highway. “Thanks the Levitts by the Johns-Manville Corp. to the number of appliances in our house, Alfred designed an open plan with two the girls have three hours to kill every after- bedrooms and a third “study-bedroom” noon,” said Alfred. “They want to find that was separated from the living space some excitement and they prefer to do by a basswood screen that slid on a metal even their grocery shopping in the main track. The three-way fireplace was visible retail district.” Of course, the “girls” would from the kitchen, the dining area, and the drive to the supermarket; all the houses living room. The layout was unusual, had two-car carports. The automobile- since the kitchen faced the street. This centered plan was Alfred Levitt’s homage saved money on water and sewer connec- to Wright’s Broadacre City. tions, but it also oriented the living room Driving along Levittown’s winding to the garden, in true Usonian fashion. streets today, it’s hard to distinguish the Each house included such newfangled original architectural features of Alfred conveniences as a kitchen exhaust fan, pre- Levitt’s houses, since they are swathed in assembled metal kitchen cabinets, recessed garages, annexes, and extensions that lighting, and built-in closet shelving. The have been added during the last 50 years. kitchen came equipped with a G.E. refrig- The 60-foot trees, planted by the Levitts, erator and stove and a Bendix washing and the variety of individual gardens machine. It also contained the heating fur-

REVIEW 77 Figure 1: The Levittowner Figure 2: The Country Clubber

nace, which was built especially for the Works, the largest integrated steel facility Levitts and was small enough to fit under ever built in the United States. When the the counter; its top doubled as a hot plate. model homes were unveiled, even though For more affluent buyers, Alfred it was mid-winter, 50,000 visitors showed designed the “Country Clubber,” an up the first week. Sales were so strong that enlarged version of the “Levittowner,” by the time production started in the with a finished attic containing a second spring, homes were being built at the rate bathroom and space for two bedrooms of 150 a week. At the urging of the local (see Figure 2). The ground floor had two government officials, the Levitts offered a bedrooms and a multi-purpose “garden two-bedroom rental unit for $65 a month. room,” which could be used as a study or Since the monthly mortgage payment on a a bedroom. The kitchen included not only Levittowner was $60, there were few tak- a washer and drier, but also a dishwasher. ers, and the so-called “Budgeteer” was Photographs show the model home fur- soon discontinued. nished with Danish modern furniture, Lewis Mumford contemptuously light, glass-topped coffee tables, and straw referred to the Levitts’ developments as floor-mats. The modernistic effect is “instant slums,” but there is nothing slum- enhanced by an 18-foot-long, floor-to- like about Levittown, Pa. today—nor has ceiling glass wall overlooking the garden. there ever been. The houses are well-main- At $15,500 for 2,000 square feet and tained and the gardens carefully tended. $9,990 for 1,000 square feet, the According to the local real estate listings, “Country Clubber” and the “Levittowner” an expanded “Levittowner” (the name is were even better deals than the original still used) sells for about $200,000, and a “Cape Cod.” The buyers were chiefly “Country Clubber” goes for $375,000. workers at U.S. Steel’s nearby new Fairless Levittown has prospered. There appears to

78 ZELL/LURIE REAL ESTATE CENTER be no homeowners’ association, for there BUILDING LEVITTOWN TODAY are recreational vehicles parked in the driveways, a lively profusion of lawn orna- Could the “Levittowner” be built today? ments, and plenty of garden sheds and Of course, very few new houses today are above-ground pools. This has remained a only 1,000 square feet; in fact, according middle-class community, which would to the National Association of Home probably have pleased Alfred Levitt. Builders (NAHB), in 2003 only 5 percent When Levittown was being built, House of new houses were smaller than 1,200 + Home magazine praised the “progressive” square feet. The 2003 median size for a designs, because “in the years ahead Levitt new house was 2,137 square feet, which is houses will be less out of date than old-fash- approximately the size of the upscale ioned houses built at the same time.” In “Country Clubber.” In 1951, the price of fact, the houses were severely modified over a “Country Clubber” in today’s dollars was the years. Asbestos was covered with vinyl $100,000. According to the NAHB, the siding and brick, windows sprouted shut- median price of a new house in 2004 was ters, large areas of Thermopane were more than twice as much: $221,000. replaced by traditional bay windows, car- What accounts for the difference? Not the ports were enclosed, and some of the ranch cost of house construction, which has held houses grew a second floor. The truth is that remarkably steady. The construction cost most of Alfred’s Usonian features fell prey to of the Levittown houses is estimated to changing fashions. have been about $40 per square foot (in Yet one should not underestimate the today’s dollars). A national production importance of Levittown. It introduced builder today builds for $40 to $50 per the American public to modern produc- square foot and produces what is, inciden- tion building, and demonstrated how tally, a higher quality house that is less standardization, mass-production, and standardized, better insulated, and air- technical innovation could be successfully conditioned. used to produce houses for a large market. What is chiefly responsible for the It showed that working Americans were higher cost of housing is the increased cost attracted to suburban living no less than of land. In 1951, an improved Levittown their wealthier counterparts. Finally, it lot cost about $10,000 (in today’s dollars). showed how entrepreneurial efforts could A comparable lot in a northeastern exurb create cheap, quick, lasting, and flexible today can easily cost six to eight times as housing that could not have been provid- much. In addition, since developers are ed by government efforts. expected to pay for infrastructure, this

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extra price, too, is passed on to the buyer. It is not surprising that with such expen- sive lots, home builders are building larger and more lavishly appointed houses. A $100,000 “affordable” house is well within the capacity of today’s highly effi- cient home building industry (see “The Grow Home,” WRER Spring 2000). The continued desirability of Levittown hous- es, as mirrored by their high prices, sug- gests that American living patterns have not changed radically since 1951. An unpretentious, practical house is still, for many, a desirable commodity. The chief obstacle is anti-growth zoning (often mas- querading as environmental protection) that in many parts of the country has man- dated larger lots and larger houses, and cre- ated expensive bureaucratic delays and uncertainties. The effect has been to slow the supply of permitted land to a trickle, driving up the prices of lots—and new homes. Even the ingenious Alfred Levitt could not have got around that.

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