Levittown: Where Things Went Terribly Right

The student of Levittown history is armed with three reasons why the object of his study is so important and why it culminated in the creation of the Levittown Historical Society in 1988 and the Levittown Museum eleven years later.

The first point is self-evident: one would expect a Levittowner to be interested in the history of his community just like everyone else in the thousands of local historical societies that dot the land.

The second point is that our Levittown community here on Long Island constitutes a larger historical significance than the town itself in a way that say Hay Springs, Nebraska or Cheesequake, New Jersey don't. (With all due respect to those communities.)

Levittown's the quintessential example of, and blueprint for, the suburbanization of the industrialized world in the last half of the 20th Century. It is to suburbia what Jamestown and Plymouth was to the English settlement of the New World; what IBM is to the Cyber Age, or what the Model T Ford is to the automobile industry.    

There's a third and more significant reason to study Levittown history. It's almost a mantra that, as philosopher George Santayana put it, "those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them". Indeed, ever since he uttered those words, we have been subject to such an endless parade of cautionary tales and analysis of disasters that it's easy to forget that for all that's gone terribly wrong in the course of human events, a lot has also gone terribly right. Catastrophes have been averted and people hitherto disadvantaged have made great progress.

Success stories in history are far and few between and so, consequently, we probably need to study them with greater intensity and attention to detail than has been done in the past. For example, Singapore in the last quarter of the 20th Century went from an impoverished third world country to an ultra-modern, high-tech, mercantile city-state. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 successfully created a post-Napoleonic political and diplomatic order that gave Europe a century's respite from the kind of world wars that peppered the 18th and 20th centuries. The Cold War ended in the late 1980s and early 1990s with treaties, conferences, and a peaceful dismantling of the militarized Soviet police state rather than in World War III.    

Added to the success stories of history is Levittown. It was built during the most severe housing shortage in American history, introduced stability overnight into the lives of thousands of families, and coincided with the greatest expansion of its economy and middle class in history. The Levitt development established the mass-production and civil engineering techniques that would be emulated throughout the industrialized world.

It's true that Levittown, and the thousands of suburban communities like it around the planet, have light-years to travel before they reach the harmonious marriage of pastoral tranquility and urbanity that 19th Century prophets of suburbia like Ebenizer Howard and Alexander Stewart visualized. It's also true that the demography and socioeconomic dynamics of the 21st Century will call for suburban solutions radically dissimilar to those of the 1950s. This, however, in no way deducts from Levittown's status as a success story, from its place as the lodestar by which subsequent developmental patterns will navigate.   

People after V-J Day were not expecting success stories - the Allied victory in the War notwithstanding. Most believed the Great Depression would resume where it'd left off after Pearl Harbor. Visionaries like William J. Levitt realized that there could be another way. Credit him with having foreseen the needs of the 1950s and sixties, but don't allow critics to condemn him for failing to appreciate what people in the 2010s would require. Things could have gone awfully wrong here after the war but they didn't.    

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