Levittown: The "First Suburb," But Not the "Birthplace of the Suburbs"

Levittown certainly is not the "birthplace of the suburbs" and I don't think this fact in any respect diminishes its historic significance.

Pierpont's development of Brooklyn Heights in the 1810s and 20s, with its one-family houses and ferry access to lower Manhattan was clearly a suburb, as was Alexander Stewart's Garden City which began in 1869, propelled by the Long Island Rail Road. (Examples are also available around 19th Century London and Paris).

One, too, need only look at a map or aerial photograph of places like Hicksville in the 1930s to see rows of one-family homes east of Bethpage Road to note the suburbs existing bumper-to-bumper with potato farms. The 1935 Green Acres Development in Island Trees, which consisted of a dozen homes along Wolcott, Sherwood, Loring, and North Bellmore was a suburban development that was originally planned to extend eastward to Division Avenue and northward to where Old Farm Road is today.    

Three things, however, make the Levitt Development unique and highly significant: scale, technique, and socioeconomic tableau. Before 1947, nothing like a housing development comprised of thousands of houses had ever been attempted. If Brooklyn Heights was like the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk and Garden City was like Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic, than Levittown was like the Apollo landing on the Moon.

Levitt & Sons did not simply "build the same house thousands of times over" as one wag put it, but established revolutionary mass-production and civil-engineering techniques that have spread throughout the globe in the last decades of the 20th Century - albeit modified to local circumstances. Before Levitt & Sons, the suburbs had been the abode of the wealthy and upper middle class; a place just outside the hustle and bustle of the city for the affluent. This phenomenon has roots that extend back to some of the larger cities of the Roman Empire.

Levittown, by contrast, established the suburbs as the natural habitat for working and middle class families and was created at a time when revolutionary innovations in transportation and communications intermingled with the concurrent rise of popular culture. This technologic and cultural confluence is what defines "suburbia" as opposed to "the suburbs".   

The settlement pattern of "the suburbs" and the cultural tableau of "suburbia" is likely to continue in the world well beyond the centennial of Levittown in 2047, even if its expansive period in Western industrialized nations has clearly been over since 1980. And in this respect,by the 100th anniversary of Levittown's founding, there will be hundreds of millions of people throughout the globe who can say that much about their way of life is due to the legacy of William J. Levitt and his family.  

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