In the annals of American home building and suburb shaping, no one left a bigger footprint than William J. Levitt, who died last month at 86.
He was the man most closely associated with the proliferation of inexpensive, look-alike houses that began to dot the American countryside after World War II and make the American Dream a reality for a whole generation.
He’s also been tagged by some as progenitor of the Uglification of America, a builder who took pride in the fact that he cared little for design or aesthetics.
A simple goal
His only goal was to build as many affordable houses as quickly and as cheaply as possible.
One of his early projects, the giant Island Trees subdivision 20 miles from Manhattan, eventually was renamed after its founder. Levittown became synonymous with suburban expansion and homogeneity.
“If the first great business figure of the American Century was Henry Ford, the second, arguably, was William J. Levitt,” David J. Halberstam wrote in “The Fifties,” his latest tome.
What Levitt did was study the assembly line innovations of Ford and apply them in reverse to the housing industry.
Like Ford, no one had ever done it quite that way before, and Levitt made a vast fortune-a fortune he was later to lose in a series of botched deals when the market changed and he did not. It was no wonder many considered his creations to be the Model T of houses.
Leap to big time
Before the Long Island developer started building row upon row of cheap houses, builders were small-time. If a contractor put up a dozen houses a year, it was a big deal.
Levitt’s scheme allowed his workers to build dozens of houses a day.
In the Detroit assembly line, cars moved while workers stayed at their stations.
“In the case of our houses,” Levitt said in 1989, “it was the workers who moved, doing the same jobs at different locations. To the best of my knowledge no one had ever done that before.”
The construction site became the factory, as trucks came and dropped off various materials and pre-fabricated components in neat piles 60 feet apart.
Levitt & Sons, which he ran with his father and brother, broke the production line into 27 distinct steps, hiring roofers, electricians, dry wallers and masons at a time when America was short of skilled laborers.
Low prices, high sales
With these new techniques and by placing the houses directly on concrete slabs, without basements, the Levitts were able to sell their first 800-square-foot Cape Cod models for as little as $7,990; they built and sold nearly 17,000 in four years.
The drab houses had 4 1/2, with kitchens in the back so moms could watch the kids play in the tiny backyards.
Restrictive rules allowed owners very little leeway as far as personalizing the outside of their new homes. Fences and clotheslines were allowed only with close supervision from the Levitts.
A company mower even cut homeowners’ grass in the early years and sent them a bill.
Owners desperate to express some individuality took to painting their houses with garish colors so they’d stand out.
Reflecting the times
Politically, some have characterized Levitt as a dinosaur, but it’s probably more accurate to say he was a reflection of his times.
“No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist,” he once was quoted. “He has too much to do.”
Covenants that went along with the little-money-down deals barred African-Americans and other nonwhites, long after states and the Congress began to pass open housing laws.
“We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem,” he once said, “but we cannot combine the two.”
Ample criticism
His solution to the housing problem made several hundred thousand people happy, but the critics never seemed to warm to Levitt or his projects.
Lewis Mumford, the most esteemed urban critic of the 20th Century, was practically rabid on the subject of Levittown:
“A multitude of uniform unidentifiable houses lined up inflexibly at uniform distances on uniform roads in a treeless command waste, inhabited by people of the same class, of the same incomes, of the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless, prefabricated foods from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold manufactured in the same central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.”
By the 1970s, Levitt built and sold more than 125,000 houses, Mumford’s broadside notwithstanding.
End of the dream
But the builder’s karma may have caught up with him in a string of failed business deals around the world that cost him his fortune.
Still, as his obituary in Long Island’s Newsday said:
“Few could have touched so many lives in a lifetime as Levitt. He built not only Levittown. Not only Long Island. But, as those who knew him and live their lives amid his dream . . . he pioneered the suburbia that became the blueprint for modern-day America.”
