by Eric Rutkow
The balloon frame heralded the end of full-timber framing, but it had little impact on the countless other roles that wood played in home construction. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of the techniques that initially worked in New England continued unabated across America. Cedar shingles remained common for roofs and external siding. Lath continued to serve as the base against which plaster was applied. Floors, ceilings, and walls were all frequently paneled with wood. And, unsurprisingly, the furniture that filled these homes almost universally came from the trees that filled the nation’s many forests.
By the middle of the twentieth century, however, circumstances began to change. Technological advances and lower manufacturing costs led to a host of new construction materials. Wooden shingles faced competition from facsimiles made of asbestos. The lath-and-plaster method of wall construction began to give way to Sheetrock, a type of paneling that sandwiched gypsum between sheets of heavy paper and that could be directly hammered against wooden studs. Hardwood flooring gained new rivals from asphalt tiling and linoleum. And clapboard competed with aluminum siding. There was an endless array of options: Kimsul insulation, Armstrong’s monowall, Kentile asphalt tiles, Congowall, and countless others. These brand-new, brand-named materials began to appear in magazine and newspaper advertisements, which loudly proclaimed their superiority to wooden alternatives. A 1950 ad for Beauty Bonded Formica, a new, resilient, plastic-based compound, provocatively inquired: “Who spanks the children at your house? The hair brush, razor strap, and switch don’t get much of a work-out in homes that have formica surfaces. Formica [unlike wood] shrugs off fruit acids, alcohol, boiling water—and even the most elaborate childish messes.” Nonetheless, the wooden aesthetic remained so ingrained in American culture that many of these products consciously imitated the lumber they sought to replace—that same 1950 formica ad continued, “Formica’s beautiful color patterns and rich wood grains never need painting or refinishing.”
The midcentury challenges to raw lumber came not only from these new materials but, in equal measure, from the wood-products industry itself. New ways to manipulate wood were constantly arising, fueled through the research and innovation of several groups: the Forest Products Laboratory; private inventors; and large timber companies, like Weyerhaeuser, which continually sought out methods to minimize wooden waste and expand the reach of their market share.
The most important structural wood product—at least in terms of postwar sales—was plywood, which was produced by taking thin sheets of wooden veneer, most frequently from Douglas fir trees, and gluing them against one another such that the direction of the grain alternated in each layer. This manufacturing process made plywood resistant to splitting regardless of where pressure was applied; as a result, it was stronger pound for pound than steel. First invented in 1905, it became practicable for widespread use in the 1930s, following the discovery of waterproof casein-based glues that created a bond as strong as the wood itself. There was seemingly no construction task that plywood couldn’t handle. One advertisement proclaimed, “Ask your architect or builder about plywood’s advantages for every building and remodeling job . . . for sheathing, subflooring, interior paneling, cabinets, built-ins. And remember! Your local retail lumber dealer has fir plywood for all purposes—INTERIOR for all inside applications, waterproof EXTERIOR for outside and marine uses. See him today!”
While plywood was the most widely used manufactured wood product, it was among the least complex. By midcentury, the timber products industry was producing an ever-growing range of composite materials. New production techniques took unsalable bits of lumber—like slabs and edgings—or small-diameter trees and ground them down into particles, flakes, fibers, or pulp, which were then pressed together or mixed with other materials to create new wonder products like particleboard, fiberboard, and hardboard. These, too, competed for the loyalty of consumers and builders through advertising: “Yes, these days home buyers are watching the way a house is built. They want to know if the builder is using these new materials—the kind that make a better house and save money, too—materials like Armstrong’s Temlok Sheathing. . . . It’s made of strong wood fibers, formed into big boards that are tough and durable. . . . Its light weight, toughness, and large size make it possible to sheath most houses in one day, with almost no waste.”
This, then, was the state of home construction at the time the Levitt family determined to embark on their plans for mass fabrication. Homebuilders faced a remarkable array of options. Design styles spanned a broad range, shaped by regional preferences and personal taste. And lumber, while still preeminent for framing, was quickly being replaced by building materials that were largely unheard of a generation before, many of which had been developed by the lumber industry itself.
WHEN ALFRED LEVITT began to sketch out potential designs for a mass-produced Long Island home in the mid-1940s, he aimed for simplicity, utility, and a certain degree of instinctual Americanness. The home’s overall shape would be modeled after the simple New England saltbox, a design older than the nation itself. The building’s footprint would be twenty-five by thirty feet, barely larger than the cross-section of a mature giant sequoia. There would be four rooms in total: two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room that could double as a dining area—in addition, stairs would lead to an unfinished attic. Alfred’s plans also incorporated many of the lessons that his family had learned in Norfolk. Foundations, for instance, would be poured-concrete slabs, which increased production speed and eliminated the need for basements.
For structure, the Levitts stayed loyal to the balloon frame. This wasn’t inevitable, however. In an age of new materials, some builders experimented with such alternatives as steel, plastic, and fully prefabricated frames. Sometimes this led to outlandish outcomes, like one builder’s proposal for a geodesic dome to be constructed from tetrahedrons of “three-way laminated fiber-glass plastic.” But these alternatives did not interest William Levitt, who was far less concerned with conceptual innovation than with economical production. As he explained to a reporter, “A steel frame makes it last as long as the Empire State Building, if that’s what you want, but the housewife never sees it—what does she care?”
Although Levitt chose to use traditional balloon framing, he nonetheless introduced several key innovations to the business of constructing homes from wood. Before him, builders had purchased wood from timber companies or relied on contractors to supply them. But Levitt, with an eye to profit margins and the opportunities that economies of scale offered, determined that it would be preferable to control the entire process, from tree to two-by-four. Much like Frederick Weyerhaeuser, who had revolutionized the lumber industry almost a century earlier by purchasing timberlands directly, Levitt bought his own forest in California and constructed a mill to handle the processing. This gave him control over the entire fabrication process, allowing the standardization of each step along the way. As he noted, “Freight cars loaded with lumber went directly into a cutting yard where one man with a power saw cut parts for ten houses in one day. These were bundled into packages, each one containing all the lumber parts for one house, and picked up by fork-lift trucks for reloading and delivery by truck to the house lot.”
Beyond the frame, the Levitt home would feature an array of new materials, some wood-based, others not. The initial models used five-sixteenths-inch plywood for external sheathing, upon which was mounted either wood or asbestos shingles. The roofs were covered with asphalt shingles atop asphalt-saturated felt. Interior walls were faced with half-inch gypsum drywall, while the floors were laid with asphalt tiles that sat upon a waterproof emulsion (and beneath this were copper coils that provided radiant heating). Everything was selected to maximize consumer satisfaction, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency. According to Levitt, they “calculated the shape and size and quantity of materials needed for the construction of that house, down to the last two pounds of four-penny finishing nails.”
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p; The Levitts paid equal attention to the construction process. It was boiled down to twenty-six major steps, which could be completed with a team of semiskilled, nonunion laborers in several hours start to finish. The short-story writer W. D. Wetherell described the scene in his award-winning 1985 piece The Man Who Loved Levittown: “But here’s what happens. A truck comes along, stops in front of the house, half a dozen men pile out . . . in fifteen minutes they’ve put in a bathroom. Pop! Off they go to the next house, just in time, too, because here comes another truck with the kitchen. Pop! In goes the kitchen. They move on one house, here comes the electricians. Pop! Pop! Pop! The house goes up.”
The finished product carried an initial price tag of $7,990, a remarkable achievement considering that many builders claimed that it was impossible to erect single-family homes for less than $10,000. And with the generous financing provided through the various federal initiatives, veterans could purchase a Levitt home for zero money down and only $56 per month—the national government’s efforts to subsidize postwar housing actually made it more cost-effective to purchase a new Levitt home than to rent many of the apartments in New York City. Once Levitt houses went on the market (first as rental units only but soon exclusively for purchase), veterans—who were the only people that the Levitts initially targeted—lined up to capitalize on the opportunity to finally have a home that they could call their own.
The first residents arrived on October 1, 1947, and the landscape that greeted them was unlike almost anything seen in America up to that time. Row after row of houses, indistinguishable but for their color and the placement of certain windows, stretching out into the distance. Surrounding them was an ocean of grass, trimmed precisely to three inches. And equally striking was the complete absence of mature trees. This, as much as any other factor, symbolized the break between Levittown and the planned garden communities that predated the war. One journalist described the new subdivision as “a horizon broken only by telegraph poles.”
This was not to say that planted trees were unimportant in Levittown. Abraham, the patriarch, had insisted that trees form an integral part of the new venture. William described his father as “a modern Johnny Appleseed.” If this claim was overstated, it was not necessarily misplaced, for Abraham did demand that each home have an apple tree on its lawn, along with several others. “In developing the landscaping plans,” the eldest Levitt explained in 1950, “deciduous trees, as well as evergreens and well-known species of flowering shrubs, had to be included. But, in addition, at least four fruit trees—apple, pear, peach, and cherry—were included in the landscaping for each house. . . . I know that in a few years Levittown, with its 40,000 trees in flower, will be a veritable fairyland.”
Abraham’s fairyland vision, however, had the consequence of turning planted trees into a mass-produced commodity, just like the homes that they surrounded. Whereas earlier landscape architects, like Andrew Jackson Downing or Olmsted, had thought carefully about the ways that individual trees might complement a particular backdrop, Abraham sought a degree of uniformity that was hitherto unknown in America. As one sociologist argued, the senior Levitt was “the man chiefly responsible [for inventing] the mass produced landscape to go along with its ready-built housing.”
Nonetheless, the mass-produced nature of the new environs did little to discourage the new residents, whose numbers grew from an initial three hundred families up to a final, almost incomprehensible, total of seventeen thousand. Levittown was suddenly a small city, but one where everyone had more in common than not. As a New York Times reporter explained in 1952, “Nobody keeps up with the Joneses because they almost all have the same income (about $4,000 average). Nobody talks about the war much, because they’ve all been in it. And most of the men have the same Long Island Rail Road commuting problem—which many have solved by car pools. All this helps cement neighbors into friends.” And as friends, these early residents strove to build a community, forming clubs, sharing tools, and scrupulously following the elaborate and sometimes doctrinaire rules of the Levittown Homeowner’s Guide: “No fabricated fences . . . will be permitted”; “Mow your lawn and remove weeds at least once a week.” The term “Levittowner” became one that these first-generation residents embraced with affection.
The planned community’s success transformed William Levitt into a national celebrity and a household name (a term that seemed particularly appropriate). In the summer of 1950, Time magazine placed him on its cover and ran an accompanying story that bordered on hagiography. “[T]he leader of the U.S. housing revolution,” read the article, “is a cocky, rambunctious hustler with brown hair, cow-sad eyes, a hoarse voice (from smoking three packs of cigarettes a day), and a liking for hyperbole that causes him to describe his height (5 ft. 8 in.) as ‘nearly six feet’ and his company as the ‘General Motors of the housing industry.’ His supreme self-confidence—his competitors call it arrogance—is solidly based on the fact that he is the most potent single modernizing influence in a largely antiquated industry.”
And Levitt’s influence could be seen across the nation. As the Time article noted, the Levitt “methods of mass production are being copied by many of the merchant builders in the U.S., who are putting up four of every five houses built today.” By 1955, large-scale subdivisions accounted for more than 75 percent of all new residential construction near urban areas. As a result of this, in less than a decade, the nature of American homes changed forever. They were suddenly available for purchase to all but the poorest in society. At the same time, regional variation began to disappear: The communities of small, hastily built houses looked roughly similar, whether one was in Long Island or Los Angeles.
Life in the new suburbia was about more than just owning a home. It was also about being a consumer. A generation raised during the Depression suddenly found themselves living in an age of remarkable prosperity, where many had disposable income. Suburbanites reveled in their newfound ability to purchase modern comforts. The signs of good living in the subdivisions included a car in the garage, a television in the living room, and a full range of appliances in the kitchen.
Levitt, who seemed to possess a preternatural understanding of consumer tastes, made sure that many of these conveniences came preinstalled in his new homes. The living rooms included a built-in Admiral television set. The kitchens contained a refrigerator, stove, and, most important, a fancy Bendix-brand washing machine. About the only feature that didn’t smack of modernity was a two-way fireplace, which was technically unnecessary since the floors already contained state-of-the-art radiant heating. But the fireplace provided a touch of nostalgia for America’s past, a time when the hearth had been the center of the home. According to Levitt, “It was difficult to say whether the washing machine or the two-way fireplace did more to endear the house to the buyers’ hearts.”
The new consumer goods displaced many of the traditional roles that wood had played within the home. Gone were the wooden icebox, the wooden washboard, the wood-burning stove. Modernity meant steel, plastic, glass, and synthetics. Nonetheless, the demand for consumer goods also facilitated the introduction of scores of novel tree-based products, just as had been the case with housing materials. By the 1950s, Americans (even if they likely didn’t realize it) were surrounded on all sides by products that originated in the nation’s forests.
Perhaps the best example of this was the ascendance of disposable paper products. Wood pulp had been used for newspapers since the 1870s, but it took much longer for technology and consumer demand to exploit pulp’s full range of possibilities. The pioneer in this field was the Kimberly-Clark Corporation of Wisconsin. Founded in 1872, it began to market disposable paper products in the aftermath of World War I, following its invention of a feminine sanitary napkin known as Kotex. Though this product, according to company chairman John R. Kimberly, was initially “the target of taboos that bordered on the mystical,” its eventual acceptance “led to a generation of constant expansion, a growth so compulsive that
. . . the company’s work force actually expanded during the Depression.” Kimberly-Clark’s next revolutionary innovation was the Kleenex tissue, introduced during the 1930s. By the postwar period the company had an entire line of products that quickly became indispensable to daily life. As Kimberly noted in 1964, “Consider for the moment the everyday paper products that were, by and large, almost unknown a generation or so ago: paper plates, cups, facial tissues, towels, napkins, place mats, aprons, even throwaway paper diapers.” But even this list failed to capture the full range of paper uses in the postwar period. Eggs now came in paper containers, milk was sold in paper cartons, and the countless new appliances arrived inside cardboard boxes. Whereas annual per-capita paper consumption in 1920 had been 145 pounds, by the 1960s it had more than tripled and was the highest in the world.
But disposable paper products were far from the only part of domestic life that tree products had infiltrated by midcentury. In 1942, the Forest Service, seeking to illustrate this point, produced a short film, The Tree in a Test Tube, that featured Laurel and Hardy, the famed comic duo. They appeared at the film’s outset looking bewildered in reaction to the offscreen narrator’s prompt: “Wood, got any?” The narrator continued, “Like most guys you don’t realize how many articles made of wood products you carry around.” Over the next four minutes, the two baffled comedians proceeded to empty an entire suitcase and trenchcoat’s worth of materials, each of which relied on trees. There were plastic-framed glasses, a plastic fountain pen, a plastic cigarette container, a plastic-cased penknife, and a plastic-handled razor; as the narrator noted, “About sixty percent of plastic is wood flour. Powdered wood, my friends.” There was a billfold, a hat, and a toilet case, all of which contained imitation leather that had been made with cellulose acetate, another wood derivative. At one point, Hardy cagily extracted a pair of pantyhose from Laurel’s wallet, to which the narrator replied, “Oh, sure, your wife’s, of course; anyway, they’re rayon, another wood product.” After all of the comedians’ pockets and suitcase compartments had been accounted for, the narrator quipped, “It’s a good thing these lads didn’t come around here with a trunk; we’d be here for days.”
