factory, they established their own construction supply company to avoid middlemen, and they acquired a fleet of cement trucks and grading equipment. Instead of the product moving along a production line, however, the Levitt house stood stationary while men, material, and equipment moved around it. At its peak of efficiency the Levitt organization could complete a house every 15 minutes. Although these were not prefabricated houses, all the materials, including the preassembled plumbing systems and precut lumber, were delivered to the site ready for construction. Twenty-seven steps were required to build a Levittown house, and each work crew had its specialized task. One man did nothing but move from house to house bolting washing machines to the floor. William Levitt liked to say his business was the General Motors of the housing industry. Indeed, the automobile seems to have inspired many of Levitt’s practices. He even produced new house models each year, and a few Levittown families would actually buy updated versions, just as they bought Detroit’s latest products.

The first style, a four-and-a-half room bungalow with steeply pitched roof, offered five slight variations in the placement of doors and windows. The result, according to a 1947 Architectural Forum, was “completely conventional, highly standardized and aptly described in the public’s favorite adjective, ‘cute.’” A couple of years later, the same publication moderated its tone of easy scorn to pronounce the style “a much better-than-average version of that darling of the depression decade—builder’s Cape Cod.”

Levittown houses were not what the popular 1960s song called “little boxes made of ticky-tacky.” They were exceptionally well-built, the product of some of the most innovative methods and materials in the industry. Taking a page from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian houses, Levittown homes stood on concrete slab foundations (they had no basements), in which copper coils provided radiant heating. The Tolleys were among the first customers for the 1949 ranch-style houses that replaced the earlier Cape Cod design. The ranches featured Thermopane glass picture windows, fireplaces opening into two rooms, and carports instead of garages. In addition, they had built-in closets and bookcases and swinging shelf units that acted as walls to open up or close the space between kitchen, living room, and entry passage. At twenty-five by thirty-two feet the new houses were two feet longer than the earlier models, and they offered as standard features built-in appliances that were only just coming into general use; many houses contained Bendix washing machines and Admiral television sets. The fixed price of $7990 allowed the Levitts to advertise “the housing buy of the century.” It was probably true. Levitt and his sons seemed to be practically giving homes away. Thousands of families bought into new Levittowns in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, Michigan, and even Paris and Puerto Rico. The techniques that the Levitts initiated have been copied by home builders throughout the country ever since.

Despite its immediate success, from the earliest days Levittown also

stood as a metaphor for all the possible failings of postwar America. The architectural critic Lewis Mumford is said to have declared the tract an “instant slum” when he first saw it, and he certainly was aiming at Levittown when he condemned the postwar American suburb for its “multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless pre-fabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to the same common mold.” Some of the early rules, requiring owners to mow their lawns every week, forbidding fences, or banning the hanging out of laundry on weekends, did indeed speak of the kind of regimentation Mumford snobbishly abhorred.

Today’s visitor to the original Long Island Levittown might be surprised by many of those early criticisms. Now almost 50 years old, most of the houses have been so extensively remodeled that it is often difficult to distinguish the basic Cape Cod or ranch inside its Tudor half-timbering or postmodern, classical eclecticism. Greenery and shade trees have enveloped the bare landscape of the 1950s and Japanese sand gardens, Renaissance topiary, and electrically generated brooks and waterfalls decorate many of Levittown’s standard sixty-by-one-hundred-foot plots. The place now seems not the model of mass conformity but a monument to American individualism.

Probably, Levittown never was the drab and monotonous place its critics imagined. For many early residents, it allowed cultural diversity to flourish. Pre-war inner-city neighborhoods often had ethnic divisions unknown in Levittown. Louis and Marylin Cuviello, who bought a onebathroom house in 1949 and reared eleven children there, found themselves moving in a wider world than the one they had known in the city. She was a German-American married to an Italian-American, and in their Levittown neighborhood most of the householders were Jewish. During their first years there the Cuviellos took classes in Judaism at the local synagogue, and they often celebrated both Passover and Christmas with their neighbors.

But this American idyll was not for everyone. In 1949, after Gene Burnett, like his fellow veteran Jim Tolley, saw advertisements for Levittown in several New York papers, he drove to Long Island with his fiancée. The Levittown salesman he met refused to give him an application form. “It’s not me,” the agent said. “The builders have not at this time decided to sell to Negroes.” This pattern of racial exclusion was set in 1947, when rental contracts prohibited “the premises to be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race.” In 1992, Gene Burnett, now a retired sergeant in the Suffolk County, Long Island, Police Department, told a reporter, “I’ll never forget the ride back to East Harlem.”