Betty Spector, who had lived in an interracial neighborhood in Washington Heights, N. Sometimes your hands are tied, and you hope you can get in and change the world a little bit. Burnett eventually moved his family to the Suffolk County suburbs and became a police officer and small businessman. Like many black professionals, he chose a racially mixed community, Ronek Park, in Amityville, which was advertised especially to people who had been turned away from Levittown.
Still, for Burnett, the sting of the blow stayed with him. Gaines, a former Tuskeegee Airman, actually worked on Levitt homes one summer after the war. Unhappy neighbors offered more money to keep Gaines out, but the transaction went through. A busy young doctor, Gaines found Levittown more a place to sleep than anything else, although two of his children were born there. By he had moved his family to Rockville Centre, a higher echelon economically than Levittown. Like many other Levittown residents who were moving to more affluent parts of Long Island, the Gaineses were trading up.
Plainview, Huntington and other places along the new Long Island Expressway grew exponentially. You will search in vain for that original, untouched Levitt house.
The Levittown dream still exists but in much altered form. Skyrocketing real estate prices and some of the highest property taxes in the nation have pushed many out. By the basic Levitt home was valued at more than twice its original purchase price, and improved houses had almost tripled in value.
Then came the go-go real estate climate of the past two decades. Dorothy and Fred Johs, residents since September , often marvel at the changes. Over the years, the couple has seen most of their old friends and neighbors move away. Levittown Movers started its business in the s, trucking young couples and their possessions to the suburbs. Still, on its 60th anniversary, Levittown holds a place on the national stage.
The story is familiar and understandably nostalgic: Few early residents remain; all are getting on in years. Being American, after all, many of them set about customising their freshly built homes, whether of the standard utilitarian Cape Cod design or the newer models Colonial, Rancher and Country Clubber that followed. The early 60s. We were all going the same direction … Thanks to Big Bill Levitt we all had a chance. You talk about dreams.
Hell, we had ours. We had ours like nobody before or since ever had theirs. We were cowboys out there. Within a few years, the Levitts had transformed the former farmland into a suburban community housing thousands of men—many of whom were veterans returned from World War II—and their families. The Levitts would go on to create two other communities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and the legacy of the first Levittown has become a legend in the history of the American suburbs.
But underneath the uniform houses lining the curved, meticulously gardened roads of Levittown lies a much more turbulent story. Although s suburbia conjures visions of traditional family life, idyllic domesticity, and stability, the story of the suburbanization of America is also one of exclusion, segregation, and persecution.
Levittown itself arguably embodied the best and worst of the postwar American story; it was a result of the entrepreneurship and ingenuity that has come to define the American spirit, but it also participated in the violent prejudice that has also been part of American history.
The suburbs, of course, were not born in the s. The appeal of living beyond the noise, pollution, overcrowding, and disease of the city, while still close enough to enjoy the benefits of its industrial and cultural vitality, is an idea that historians have traced back thousands of years to the very first civilizations. So much of the American story has involved, literally and ideologically, turning away from the crowded industry of the city to the romantic beauty of the frontier.
Thomas Jefferson, for example, dreamed of the U. Starting in the early nineteenth century, the advent of new forms of transportation such as trains and steamboats made commuting to urban centers more convenient. By the s, the first suburban boom was occurring with nearly , new homes a year springing up in new communities outside city lines.
How and why did suburbia become such an iconic and beloved part of American life? Some historians have postulated that after two world wars—both with staggering death tolls—followed by the uncertainty of the Cold War nuclear age, American families found stability and protection within the suburban home.
Advertisers for suburban developments emphasized the green, open spaces of the suburbs and hinted buyers would find a sense of peace and tranquility unattainable in city life.
In the years after World War II, however, not everyone could attain that promised tranquility. One problem was a severe housing shortage. A combination of unusually high birth rates which bred the baby boomer generation and plummeting construction left many families struggling to find any suitable shelters, sometimes living in boxcars, chicken coops, and large iceboxes.
The Levitts certainly did not invent the business of building suburbs, but in many ways, they perfected it. Abraham, a horticultural enthusiast, was heavily involved in the landscaping and gardening of the community. Alfred, the quieter of the two sons, experimented with progressive ways of designing and constructing homes while his brother Bill marketed and sold them with vigor. Construction workers were trained to do one step at each house which were spaced 60 feet apart instead of building each house up from scratch individually.
The houses were simple, unpretentious, and most importantly to its inhabitants, affordable to both the white and blue-collar worker. And the Levitts took more than the homes themselves into consideration—they designed community streets along curvilinear patterns to create a graceful, un-urban grid like feel, and directed cars going through the development to the outside of the community so Levittown would not be disturbed by noisy traffic.
Even the maintenance of houses and yards were meticulously governed; buyers agreed to a laundry list of rules that, for example, prohibited residents from hanging laundry to dry outside their homes.
Despite such meticulous community planning, all was not serene in Levittown. Bill Levitt only sold houses to white buyers, excluding African Americans from buying houses in his communities even after. By , the 70, people who lived in Levittown constituted the largest community in the United States with no black residents.
Activist groups across the U. In , the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NAACP sued federal mortgage agencies which had helped future homeowners finance the purchase of homes in the community, basing the suit on the denial of six black veterans from purchasing homes. Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who had successfully argued Brown v.
Board of Education , represented the plaintiffs, but a Philadelphia court dismissed the suit after ruling that the federal agencies were not responsible for preventing housing discrimination. Though the Levitts made it an unofficial policy not to sell homes to minorities, they could not legally prevent an existing homeowner from reselling their home to black buyers. In , William and Daisy Myers, a black couple with young children, bought a house in Levittown, Pennsylvania from the former owners.
The Myers family faced endless harassment as well as implicit and explicit threats of violence from other residents in the community, with little help from the local police to keep the mobs of angry racists from congregating outside their home day and night. Through perseverance and courage, however, Myers outlasted their harassers and eventually succeeded in filing criminal charges against the worst members of the mob.
The specter of communism was also heavily implicated in the Myers struggle, as members of both sides of the conflict hurled charges of socialism at their opponents. Indeed, the very charters of Levittown and suburbs across America were closely intertwined with the preservation of the capitalist American way in the face of growing Soviet international influence. Though the government attempted to address the severe housing shortage by launching some public housing programs, those programs were viciously vilified by right-wing politicians as a form of socialism.
The Levitts and McCarthy joined forces in promoting Levittown as a more American, capitalist alternative to public housing solutions. McCarthy posed with washing machines to be placed in Levittown homes and praised Levittown as a model of the American way. The construction and growth of Levittown was a godsend for many houseless families, but it was also a battleground for divisive conceptions of race and political differences in the United States.
Sadly, the experiences of the Myers in Levittown were not unique but were echoed in houses, apartments, and streets across the nation. How was segregation still such a real, persevering and violent part of communities long after residential segregation laws had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in ?
The HOLC later implemented a system of rating neighborhoods with letter grades to help more systematically discern property values. Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. The rating system eventually contributed to reinforcing segregation as real estate agents and landlords steered white buyers to white communities and African Americans to poorer developments.
The system also enforced the perception that the entry of racial minorities into a community resulted in a drop in property values. Not all communities replicated the racial tensions of Levittown, however. In , President John F. Kennedy issued an Executive Order prohibiting racial discrimination in any housing developments built or bought with the assistance of the federal government. Though the move was an important step in preventing federal agencies from enabling the racial policies of communities like Levittown, the house-by-house, street-by-street battle for integration of suburban communities and city blocks would last much longer.
The uniform houses and immaculate lawns of the Levittown version of Suburbia made an indelible impression in the American mind, and an image of the winding roads of Levittown still conjures associations of a peaceful, wholesome Leave it To Beaver -type existence.
But the legacy of the suburbs that Levittown embodied was not simple, as shown by the struggle of the Myers. Others attacked suburban communities not just for their segregationism, but for a uniformity of spirit some saw as worth struggling against. The song has been covered by countless other folk singers since, including Pete Seeger:.
The suburbs have clearly come to symbolize more than just collections of white picket-fenced houses outside a city. The story of Levittown captures both the hopeful and darker sides of the rise of the American suburbs. My parents moved into Levittown, NY, after the war.
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