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Plan for 1947 Cape Cod house
Levittown's primary appeal was modest, affordable housing. Its first model, an 800-square-foot, four-anda-half-room Cape Cod-style house, sold for $7,500 and
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William Levitt, A man with a vision
The town was originally built for returning soldiers of WWII.
Levittown: The Ideal American Suburb
The Cape Cod house was the first incarnation of Levitt's building strategy.
Levittown is the model on which scores of post World War II suburban communities were based - a place that started out as an experiment in low-cost, mass-produced housing and became, perhaps, the most famous suburban development in the world.
The building firm Levitt and Sons, headed byWilliam Levitt, built four planned communities called "Levittown" (in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Puerto Rico), but Levittown, New York was the first and most famous.Abraham Levitt was a real estate lawyer by trade, but also dabbled in real estate investment, purchasing land and selling it off to developers in the late 1920s. When the onset of the 1930's Great Depression caused the developer of a Rockville Centre property to default on his payments, the senior Levitt was forced to complete the development himself to protect his investment. Having no previous experience with construction, he called on his two sons, in college at the time, for help. Together, Levitt & Sons labored to learn everything there was to know about construction techniques, and together, they completed the project.
Levitt built his homes on potato farms in an area previously known as Island Trees.The story of Levittown begins with the story of the Hempstead Plains, sixty thousand acres of flat, treeless grasslands that was once considered the largest prairie in the eastern United States. It was here, in 1644, that a group of English colonists established Hempstead, the first permanent settlement in what later became Nassau County.
Levittown , uninc. residential city ( 6 sq mi/15.5 sq km; 1990 pop. 53,286), Nassau co., SE N.Y., on L.I.; 40°43'N 73°30'W. It was originally developed by Levitt and Sons, Inc. a as mass-produced area of private, low-cost housing, and became the propotoype for many postwar housing developments throughout the country. Founded 1947.
16 million GI's were returning from either Europe, the Pacific, or from military bases in the United States. Many were planning to get married and raise families. But these former soldiers were running into trouble in their search to find suitable shelter for their new families. The war had created a shortage of construction materials and the housing industry had fallen off rapidly. At the end of 1945, the US was in dire need of about five million houses, as ex-GIs and their families were living with their parents or in rented attics, basements, or unheated summer bungalows. Some even lived in barns, trolley cars, and tool sheds.
The young men of war generation had grown up amid Great Depression hardship and gone overseas to win the most awful war in history. They came back in 1945, entitled to housing loans and college educations under the GI Bill of Rights. Yet when they went shopping for a home, there seemed to be no sellers.
The housing shortage - On the morning of March 7, 1949, builder William J. Levitt opened a sales office for a new development of inexpensive single-family omes in a potato field in the center of Long Island's Nassau County. In bitter cold weather, more than a thousand young couples crowded outside the sales office, waiting for a chance to buy a four-room 25 by 32-foot house for $6,999, government financed, no money down. Some had camped out in tents for as long as four days
Pieces of the American Dream were a hot commodity in post-World War II America, and nobody could sell them like Levitt. When he marketed his mass-produced homes in beautiful color brochures, thousands of young families wanted to buy.
As the first community of its kind, Levittown, New York, located 25 miles east of Manhattan on Long Island, heralded the postwar arrival of suburban America with its hundreds of acres of mass-produced housing.
Starting in 1947, Levitt and Sons began the construction of some 17,447 houses, ending in 1951. The company moved on to build the second Levittown outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Levitt & Sons modeled the construction of the homes after Henry Ford's assembly line construction of cars. The houses were built by teams of workers who moved from lot to lot, performing the same task over and over as trucks drove through the area dropping off supplies. In 1948 William Levitt boasted that, at peak capacity, his firm could complete one house every fifteen minutes.
The original capes where purchased for just under $8,000. 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." $100 down was all that was needed.
To build houses rapidly and inexpensively, Levitt used the methods made famous by Henry Ford: the production line. Levitt broke down the construction of a home into 26 separate steps. Teams of construction workers leveled the land, paved streets, poured concrete slabs, planted trees every 28 feet, and installed plumbing and electrical wiring. A hundred houses were built at a time. Construction was governed by clockwork. By 8 a.m., trucks unloaded prefabricated siding at each house site; at 9:30 a.m. toilets arrived; at 10 a.m., kinks, buts and Sheetrock were delivered; at 11 a.m. flooring followed. To speed construction and trim costs, painters used spray guns instead of brushes and carpenters used power saws. Interior partitions, roof trusses, and door and window units were cut to the required shape before they left the factory.
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This box like structure
Levittown's primary appeal was modest, affordable housing. Its first model, an 800-square-foot, four-anda-half-room Cape Cod-style house, sold for $7,500 and
Putting the bathroom directly behind the kitchen on one side meant all the major plumbing, including the critical waste stack, could serve double duty.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,
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.
Mother could watch children playing whether she was doing coo kitchen or relaxing in the living room. This floor plan created the street as the center, the playground, the focus point. 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 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.
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.
In order to give young couples a chance to buy an affordable house, Levitt cut costs by eliminating basements and giving all houses in his development the same floor plan. Interior and exterior painting were limited to a single two-tone color scheme
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:
Levittown was built because of the careful planning of William Levitt, who set out not just to dump a bunch of houses on a street.
It was a community. A place where children played. Levittown's was built playgrounds, pools and ball fields. It was a place where parents volunteer. Their was community spirit at PTA meetings, ball fields, and school events. It is a place where everyone cared.
Built by William Levitt using the most novel and up-to-date of building methods, Levittown (originally Island Trees) capitalized on the housing crunch of the immediate postwar years, offering affordable housing to returning GIs and their families, in the form of small, detached, single-family houses equidistant from New York City and the burgeoning defense industrial plants on Long Island.
Despite its overwhelming popularity among home owners, Levittown was vilified by social critics and urban planners. Architectural critic Lewis Mumford declared it to be "mechanically well done" but "socially backward." Others criticized the shoddy practices of unscrupulous builders and lamented the new suburbs' lack of architectural and social diversity. Whereas Catholics, Jews, and other ethnic minorities were overrepresented, African Americans were all but excluded. In both New York and Pennsylvania, Levitt refused to sell to blacks. Levittown, Pennsylvania, integrated in 1957 only after state intervention.
By the 1960s Levittown had come to symbolize the cultural divide that separated the war generation from their baby boom children. For many young people, Levittown became a symbol of social conformity, middle-class inertia, and soulless consumerism, a sentiment expressed in such folk-music anthems as Pete Seeger's "Little Boxes" in 1963. For his part, William Levitt defended his communities and their role in extending home ownership to millions of Americans. "We give them something better and something they can pay for."
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The War Generation: They had the experience of the Great Depression as their childhood teacher. In their youth and early adulthood they defended our country and won World War II, or stayed behind to work in the shipyards, or supported the war effort in other ways. And after the war, they set on a course that would change and shape American life and its economy for the next 50 years and beyond.
Baby Boomer Generation is the generation from 1946 - 1964. For a certain segment of free-spirited boomers, their most famous crossroad was the corner of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco. It was the energy behind flower power. The home of sex, drugs and rock and roll. The Grateful Dead lived here and in 1967 it gave birth to the hippie in what became known as "the summer of love." WOODSTOCK
Baby Boomers were (and in many cases still are) the hippies, Flower Children, the 'dreamers' that believed in peace, love, rock & roll - tune in - turn on. Baby Boomers took to the streets to protest everything from civil rights, to animal rights, to foreign wars. We promoted free love, burned bras, staged sit-ins/love-ins and tried to legalize… legalize (pause... remembers) oh, yeah— pot. We flashed peace signs, grew our hair long, burned our bras, ahhh... memories. We followed Timothy Leary, thought eight track players were cool <sigh>, listened to the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Janis, The Grateful Dead (oh... so many more). Ya we’ve raised quite a bit of hell during our half-century or so. You name it, we’ve done it, drank it, smoked it... Our history lives in our music, books, movies, television shows, and clothing.
Generation X was born between 1965 and 1980: The media stereotype is white, middle-class kids who grew up in suburbia, went to college and are searching for a career, but end up working at The Gap. In reality, a generation is more than a demographic unit, but because television and the media love to group people in target markets, Generation X often appears to be only white middle-class twentysomethings. In reality, Xers are one of the most diverse generations in America's history.
Generation Y: Born during a baby bulge that demographers locate between 1979 and 1994, they are as young as five and as old as 20, with the largest slice still a decade away from adolescence. And at 60 million strong, more than three times the size of Generation X, they're the biggest thing to hit the American scene since the 72 million baby boomers. Still too young to have forged a name for themselves, they go by a host of taglines.
FACTS about 2006's decade
Little Boxes (Malvina Reynolds)
E A E Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky, E B7 E B7 Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same. E There's a green one, and a pink one, A E And a blue one, and a yellow one, E B7 And they're all made out of ticky-tacky, E B7 E And they all look just the same. E A E And the people in the houses all went to the university, E B7 E B7 Where they were put in boxes and they came out all the same. E And there's doctors, and there's lawyers, A E And there's business executives, E B7 And they're all made out of ticky-tacky, E B7 E And they all look just the same. E A E And they all play on the golf course and drink their martini dry, E B7 E B7 And they all have pretty children and the children go to school, E And the children go to summer camp, A E And then to the university, E B7 Where they all are put in boxes, E B7 E And they come out all the same. E And the boys go into business, A E And they marry and raise a family, E B7 In boxes made of ticky-tacky, E B7 E And they all look just the same.
Music the Baby Boomers Have Taken to Heart Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by The Platters Save the Last Dance for Me by The Drifters Duke of Earl by Gene Chandler I Want to Hold Your Hand by The Beatles You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' by The Righteous Brothers The Sounds of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel Aquarius by The Fifth Dimension American Pie by Don McLean
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We are indeed the people our parents warned us against! Our generation, the Boomers, we have been through a lot. They were the best of times. They were the worst of times. We are now approaching the summer of our years. Part of that stage of life is reflecting on what we have done and what we will do with tommorrow. We are growing older, but are younger then that now. |
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Beautifully decorated, two bedroom, two bath, third-floor Condo. This unit is located at Ocean Pointe Suite and is perfect for anyone who dives, loves to boat, or wants to fish. This cozy unit is warm and inviting for those looking for a relaxing vacation or a getaway. | |||||
Amenities: Phone, Air Conditioning, Cable TVS, VCR, Stereo, CD Player, Full Kitchen, Microwave, Dishwasher, Refrigerator, Ice Maker, Cooking Utensils provided, Linens provided, Washer, Dryer, Hot Tub, pool, BBQ grill
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