Levittown History as Long Island History

The suburban Long Island that was launched with the building of Levittown has been treated by students of Long Island history with a certain ambivalence. Writers such as Alonzo Gibbs, Robert Cushman Murphy and Jacqueline Overton treated everything that happened here after World War II as something of an epilogue whilst, in a rather curious juxtaposition, Lynne Matarrese's The History of Levittown, New York looked upon the years between the Jerusalem Purchase of 1664 and the construction of the last Levitt & Sons house as an extended prologue dubbed "pre-Levittown". And many books about Levittown, or giving extensive mention to Levittown - books by authors such as Barbara Kelly and Kenneth Jackson - emphasize the community within the context of the postwar suburban development of America rather than as another chapter in Long Island's history.

Each of these author's works are lovingly written, richly detailed, and thoroughly researched and are amongst my favorites. However, it's one thing to use this angle for a book, article or research paper and another to formulate one's entire perspective in this context. It'd be like a pair of blind men who can only see whilst, respectively, peering through a telescope or microscope. One sees distant planets. One sees microbes. Neither sees the room in which he is seated.    

Has the suburban building boom in general, and the development of Levittown in particular, created such a profound alteration of the landscape and socioeconomic setting that there's no continuity between what was here ten years before World War II and ten years after? Certainly vintage photographs would suggest this.

Hanging up in the Levittown Museum, for example, are two aerial photographs of Levittown: one taken in July of 1947 and the other taken of the same area in May of 1949. It's nearly a caterpillar-to-butterfly metamorphosis. Yet, I've always been a big believer in the Continuity Theory of History: that, for instance, elements of feudalism existed in Late Antiquity; that the seeds of the Italian Renaissance were planted in medieval culture; that even revolutions in science and technology, innovative as they may be, have their antecedents, precursors, and harbingers. Indeed, as Billy Joel once pointed out, the basic features of contemporary popular music can be found in classical music. We can thusly ask what of the Jerusalem/Island Trees area determined the future shape of Levittown.     

The creation of a rail depot in 1837, at what is now Hicksville; the opening of the Stewart Line in 1871; the creation of land-holding companies in the 1890's; and the arrival of the Wantagh Parkway in 1936 all had a profound impact on the community we know and the strategies Levitt & Sons employed in overseeing its suburban development are a direct result of previous land-use patterns. Pre-Levittown roads, farm boundaries, and transport conduits are among the reasons our neighborhoods have "the look" that they do.

The Continuity Theory of History, applied to Levittown, establishes it within the context of a larger Long Island chronicle. It has another significance as well: most of the people living here were born after 1970 and many are from away. With no living memory or direct family connection to the suburban pioneers of the 1950s, the German potato farmers of the 1850s, or the Quaker families of the 1750s, they are more likely to see the building of Levittown as one of many events that have occurred here on the old Hempstead Plains and that will occur in the future.    

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