How Levitt & Sons Expanded Levittown

Seen from the air, the Levitt development by the end of 1948 was a roughly horseshoe or U-shaped patch with the Jerusalem Avenue/Hempstead Turnpike intersection forming a cross-hair in the open center.

As Christmas approached, there were 6,000 Cape Cod homes. The area between North Jerusalem and Orchid roads, which had been open fields and potato farms ten years earlier (and home to less than four hundred people), now had some 20,000 residents.

Nineteen forty-nine was a significant milestone in the future shape of our community. The Housing and Rental Act of 1949, following in the footsteps of the Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944 (the GI Bill), offered sweeping opportunities for housing and had made the idea of building homes for sale rather than rental extremely attractive to Levitt & Sons. Over the next three years, Levitt & Sons would fill in the empty space within the "U" and beyond with 11,447 Ranch-style houses in five architectural styles containing additional features not found in the Cape Cods.    

The demand for these houses was overwhelming. The Levitt & Sons office in Manhasset was inundated with long lines of veterans and their families - some sleeping on the grass overnight awaiting their turn. With characteristic organizational genius, the builder set to work establishing multiple sites for potential customers to visit and coordinated careful schedules to distribute the crowds and expedite their purchases more efficiently.

On Wolcott Road, near the original supply depot whence arrived construction materials that went into the first houses, the Levitt organization created a sales office furnished with refreshments and a few bowling lanes to keep families entertained and thus formed the nucleus of what, under the auspices of the Mormando family, became the North Levittown Lanes. The location was chosen because of its proximity to the intersection of Wantagh Parkway and Hempstead Turnpike and because it was an important base-of-operations as much of the lumber arrived here via freight train on a Garden City-to-Island Trees section of the old Stewart Line of the LIRR temporary reopened.

A more ideal location was on the Turnpike proper so on April 23, 1950, Levitt & Sons opened a glass-enclosed sales office between Center Lane and the current Veterans Memorial Park in front of the Levittown Public Library. Two model Ranch houses furnished by Macy's Department Store were erected on the site to allow homebuyers a preview of Levittown life.    

By the summer of 1950, the Levitt & Sons sales offices and exhibit homes in Levittown, Manhasset, and Roslyn were hives of activity. With a salesman, contract closer and stenographer, a veteran and his wife could go from prospective buyer to Levittown homeowner in three minutes. Indeed, according to William Levitt, at the height of the demand, Levitt & Sons once processed 1,100 contracts in five hours - a rate of 3.6 per minute!    

By October of 1951, three years after the first residents moved into Levittown, all of our community's 17,447 mass-produced homes and their accompanying landscaping and side streets had been created. As Levitt & Sons were putting the finishing touches on the village greens and Levittown Hall, and tying things up with such outfits as Berger Tilles Construction - who'd been subcontracted to build shopping centers - they began drawing up their plans for a massive development in Pennsylvania.   

Want to learn more about the history of Levittown and the surrounding communities? Visit levittownhistoricalsociety.org