Levittown was not just a large housing development, it was a planned community. “The veteran needed a roof over his head and instead of giving him just a roof we gave him certain amenities,” recalled William Levitt in a 1983 interview. “We divided [the community] into sections and we put down schools, swimming pools, and a village green and necessity shopping centers, athletic fields, Little League diamonds. We wanted community living.”11 Levittown was advertised as a Garden Community, which was an explicit reference to the earlier garden suburbs.12 As the city planner Alexander Garvin points out, it was a highly simplified version of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Riverside, with curving streets, many trees (planted by the developer), and houses set well back from the sidewalk on large lots.13 As in Riverside, front fences were prohibited, which left the lawns open, giving the impression of a continuous green landscape.
What set Levittown apart from previous residential developments was the number of houses, the speed with which they were built, and also their extreme architectural uniformity. Although buyers were offered relatively minor façade variations, as well as several colors, at any one time there was but a single basic house plan. This repetition reduced construction costs by enabling the work crews to repeat building operations efficiently and to use precut lumber and identical components.
Although low prices made the houses popular with buyers, Levittown had many critics. Modernist planners, influenced by European theories of urbanism, preached the virtues of multifamily housing. Architects, caught up in the International Style, were not impressed by Alfred’s adaptation of Wright. Proponents of factory prefabrication and intricate building systems ignored William’s organizational achievements; they couldn’t believe that something as simple as Levittown could represent the future. The new mass-produced suburbs were the subject of several critical books. David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, which was based on his study of a suburb in Chicago, both maintained that a low-density suburban environment made people isolated and unhappy, as well as more conformist. This theme was echoed in fifties novels such as Sloan Wilson’s best seller, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and John Keats’s satirical potboiler, The Crack in the Picture Window.
One sociologist questioned the popular wisdom. “I watched the growth of this mythology with misgivings,” wrote Herbert J. Gans, who had worked under Riesman as a student and taught at the University of Pennsylvania, “for my observations in various new suburbs persuaded me neither that there was much change in people when they moved to the suburbs nor that the change which took place could be traced to the new environment.”14 In 1958 Gans began a firsthand study to determine exactly how people were influenced by moving from cities to suburbs. He and his wife bought a brand-new four-bedroom Cape Cod model in Levittown, New Jersey. After two years, and a further period of observation, he published his now-classic study, The Levittowners.
Gans pointedly described the difference in values between the critics of suburbs, who were largely intellectuals and city dwellers, and the people who lived in Levittown, who were generally blue-collar workers and low-level administrators. “[City planners] argue for suburban row house and apartment construction because they believe that the single-family house wastes land, encourages urban sprawl, increases commuting, makes for a physically monotonous community, and discourages an urbane way of living,” he wrote. “Few actual or potential suburbanites share these attitudes, because they do not accept the business efficiency concept and the upper middle class, anti-suburban esthetic built into them.”15 Gans pointed out that, while the physical homogeneity of mass-produced housing came in for much criticism, upper-class nineteenth-century Georgian town houses (also built by developers) were likewise highly homogenous, and in any case, today nobody but the wealthy could afford custom-built houses.
Gans vigorously contested the view that the suburbs were imposed on unwilling consumers. “Levittown permits most of its residents to be what they want to be,” he wrote, “to center their lives around the home and the family, to share leisure hours, and to participate in organizations that provide sociability and the opportunity to be of service to others.”16 He conceded that low-density suburbs were far from perfect, especially for teenagers and elderly people, who generally did not own cars. “It is easy to propose community improvements and even utopian communities that will make Levittown seem obsolete,” he wrote. “Yet I should like to emphasize once more that whatever its imperfections, Levittown is a good place to live.”17
To see for myself, I visit a Levitt development in Bucks County, which is close to where I live. This was the second Levittown, started in 1951, just before Levittown, New Jersey. With more than seventeen thousand homes on six thousand acres, it was advertised as “The Best Planned Community in America.” Alfred Levitt divided the site into what he called master blocks, about a mile square, bounded by parkways with limited access. Inside each block, he laid out three or four neighborhoods of four hundred houses, separated by local streets and landscape features. At the center of each block, no more than a five-minute walk from any house, was an area dedicated to community uses: parks, recreation centers, swimming pools, or schools. There were no commercial buildings. Instead of local village centers, as in the Long Island development, the Levitts built a mile-long commercial strip along the highway. “Thanks to the number of appliances in our house, the girls have three hours to kill every afternoon,” said Alfred. “They want to find some excitement and they prefer to do even their grocery shopping in the main retail district.”18 Of course, the “girls” would drive to the supermarket; all the houses had two-car carports. The automobile-centered plan was Alfred Levitt’s version of Broadacre City.
Driving along Levittown’s winding streets today, it’s hard to distinguish the original architectural features of the houses, since they are swathed in garages, annexes, and extensions that have been added during the last fifty years. The trees, planted by the Levitts and now sixty feet tall, as well as the variety of individual gardens, likewise dispel any lingering impression of uniformity.
The Levitts were sensitive to criticisms of the standardized design of their houses, and for Levittown, Pennsylvania, Alfred created six different house models. The workhorse of the development was the Levittowner, which is his most Usonian design. It is what became popularly known as a ranch house. The Wrightian exterior, with its low-slung appearance, carport, high-silled bedroom windows, and large areas of glass, was distinctly untraditional. So was the wall material, eight-foot-tall striated sheets of asbestos cement, called Colorbestos and developed especially for the Levitts by the Johns Manville Corporation. Alfred designed an open plan with two bedrooms and a third so-called study-bedroom that was separated from the living space by a basswood screen that slid on a metal track. The three-way fireplace was visible from the kitchen, the dining area, and the living room. The layout was unusual, since the kitchen faced the street. This arrangement saved money on water and sewer connections, but it also oriented the living room to the garden, in true Usonian fashion. Each house included newfangled conveniences such as a kitchen exhaust fan, preassembled metal kitchen cabinets, recessed lighting, and built-in closet shelving. The kitchen came equipped with a GE refrigerator and stove, and a Bendix washing machine. It also contained the house’s heating furnace, which was designed and built especially for the Levitts by York-Shipley, a large boiler manufacturer. The furnace was small enough to fit under the counter, its top doubling as a hot plate.
At $9,990 for one thousand square feet, the Levittowner was an even better deal than the original Cape Cod. The buyers were chiefly workers at U.S. Steel’s mammoth plant, newly built nearby. When the model homes were unveiled, even though it was midwinter, fifty thousand visitors showed up the first week. Sales were so brisk that, by the time production started in the spring, houses were being built at the rate of 150 a week.19 At the urging of local government officials, the Levitts offered a two-bedroom rental unit for sixty-
five dollars a month. Since the monthly mortgage payment on a Levittowner was sixty dollars, there were few takers, and the so-called Budgeteer was soon discontinued.
Lewis Mumford contemptuously referred to the Levitts’ developments as “instant slums,” but there was nothing slumlike about Levittown, Pennsylvania, when it was built in 1951, nor is there today. The houses are well-maintained and the gardens carefully tended. According to the local real estate listings, an expanded Levittowner (the name is still used) sells for about $200,000. There are recreational vehicles parked in the driveways, a lively profusion of lawn ornaments, and many garden sheds and aboveground pools. This has remained a middle-class community, which would probably have pleased Alfred Levitt. “There’s no point in trying to do something,” he once said of his architectural work, “unless it can be handed out to the great masses of people as a cultural increase.”20*
When Levittown, Pennsylvania, was being built, House + Home magazine praised the “progressive” designs, because “in the years ahead Levitt houses will be less out of date than old-fashioned houses built at the same time.”21 In fact, the houses have been greatly modified over the years. Asbestos has been covered with vinyl siding and brick, windows have sprouted shutters, large areas of Thermopane have been replaced by traditional bay windows, carports have been enclosed, and some of the ranch houses have grown second floors. The truth is that most of Alfred’s Usonian features have fallen prey to changing fashions. Yet one should not underestimate the importance of Levittown. It introduced the American public to modern production building and proved that standardization, mass production, and technical innovation could be successfully used to produce houses for a large market, not by manufacturing houses in factories but by intense standardization of the product itself, and rationalization of operations on the building site. It also showed that middle-class Americans were attracted to home ownership and suburban living no less than were their wealthier counterparts. Finally, it demonstrated how entrepreneurial efforts could create cheap, quick, lasting, and flexible housing.
*After falling out with William in 1954, Alfred Levitt struck out on his own. He developed a thousand-unit apartment complex (today known as Le Havre) in Queens and a suburban subdivision in the Islip area, both innovative designs. He died in 1966, only fifty-four.
18
Builders
A national builder sells the same four-bedroom house for $300,000 in upstate New York, $450,000 in Chester County, Pennsylvania, more than $750,000 in Prince Georges County, Maryland, and almost $1 million in Loudoun County, Virginia.
Vince Graham is one of the most successful neotraditional developers in the country. I met him about twelve years ago, in Beaufort, South Carolina. My wife and I had decided to go there for spring break, largely on the strength of having seen The Big Chill, which was filmed in the Lowcountry coastal town. Beaufort was settled in 1710 and long functioned as a port, but it rose to prominence as a summer retreat for antebellum planters. They built charming houses with raised verandas and deeply overhanging roofs, set on meandering shaded streets that crisscrossed a small peninsula — Old Point — sticking out into the Beaufort River.
One afternoon, leafing through a local Chamber of Commerce brochure looking for a restaurant, I came upon a full-page advertisement for a real estate development. What caught my eye was the caption: THEY HAD IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME. The development was called, rather cheekily I thought, Newpoint. I was intrigued. According to the small map, it was on Lady’s Island, just across the river.
Newpoint turned out to be a small neotraditional subdivision with small lots and back lanes. With its huge old trees and narrow streets, it really did resemble Old Point. At one end, near the water’s edge, was a public park. The old-fashioned houses were an eclectic mixture of brick, wood siding, and stucco — an appealingly unpretentious neighborhood. After walking around, we stopped at the construction trailer that served as a sales office. That’s where I met Graham, a soft-spoken native Atlantan, who looked much younger than his twenty-nine years. Newpoint was his first real estate venture, he told me. It was a bootstrap operation. He got preliminary approval to build, presold a few lots to friends and relatives, and then used the money as down payment on the land. “At one point I had to add a check written on my credit card,” he told me. Yet after two years, only 30 of the 126 lots remained unsold, and he and his partner had almost finished paying off the land.
At the time of my visit to Beaufort, neotraditional development was in its infancy. As far as I knew, Newpoint was the first year-round neotraditional development to be a resounding success, although Graham seemed unaware of this distinction. I asked him how he had arrived at his concept. He told me that, as a freshly minted University of Virginia graduate in economics, he had come to the Lowcountry five years earlier to work as a project manager on a three-thousand-acre golf-course community on nearby Spring Island. He lived in Beaufort. Spring Island was to consist of single-family houses on extremely large plots, but Graham thought that a village type of development modeled on Old Point would make a good addition. His employers were not convinced. “That’s when I showed my proposal to Charles Fraser,” Graham told me.
Charles E. Fraser (who died in 2002) is a real estate legend. Hepioneered the concept of the resort community at Sea Pines Plantation on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where between 1956 and 1975 he built more than three thousand homes. He also exerted a significant influence on the real estate industry, since he not only popularized concepts such as modern deed covenants, architectural review boards, and environmental planning but also trained a generation of outstanding residential developers. When Graham knew him, Fraser was retired though still working as a consultant, and he took the younger man under his wing. “You need to check out a place called Seaside,” he told him.
Graham didn’t actually go to Seaside, but he did read about it. His approach at Newpoint was simplicity itself: he found a street in Old Point he liked, measured it, and had his planner duplicate the dimensions. His other models were Savannah and Charleston, both within an hour’s drive of Beaufort. He could not have chosen better, for these two cities are the Mecca and Medina of American Colonial urbanism. Savannah was laid out in 1733 by James Oglethorpe, as a repetitive system of regular squares and tree-lined avenues that produced the “supreme achievement of American gridiron planning,” according to Jaquelin Robertson.1 Charleston, older and with a more conventional plan, is characterized by exceptional architecture, both civic and domestic.
Graham first realized that he had done something special at Newpoint when Fraser showed up with a group of Walt Disney executives, including Peter Rummell, the head of Disney’s real estate development division. Rummell, also a Fraser protégé, was planning what would become the new town of Celebration. A year later, two busloads of Celebration builders, managers, and architects (including Robert A. M. Stern and Jaquelin Robertson) descended on Newpoint. “These people had come all that way to see a little project done by us country boys,” said Graham.
After completing Newpoint, Graham was ready to take on something bigger. He found a large parcel of land in Mount Pleasant, across the Cooper River from Charleston. After a contentious two-year struggle — not long by Pennsylvania standards but unusually protracted for South Carolina — to have the site rezoned for smaller lots and higher density, he finally got planning approval in 1997. I’On, named after the eighteenth-century owner of the plantation that originally occupied the site, is almost 250 acres divided into 750 home lots and includes two lakes, a small village center, a clubhouse, and shoreline walking trails. The development has been a great success. In 2000, Professional Builder magazine named it a Best Community; the following year the National Association of Home Builders gave I’On its Platinum Award for the best smart growth community in the nation, and the Congress for the New Urbanism awarded the development a Charter Award for outstanding urban design.
A large part of I’On’s success is attributable to
the high quality of its architecture. Graham doesn’t believe in complicated or restrictive design guidelines. “My emphasis is on enabling good design, rather than preventing bad design,” he says. He hired a local preservationist who was knowledgeable about the traditional architecture of Charleston. “I call him a design coordinator. His job is to work with homeowners and builders to ensure that the design of the houses reflects Lowcountry traditions,” he explains. Graham’s approach to builders is also unusual. The time-consuming experience of explaining his ideas to different builders at Newpoint had convinced him to try a different method. Before starting I’On, he surveyed several hundred small local builders and invited ten to participate in what he called the I’On Guild. Only guild members — there are now eighteen — can build at I’On. There is a formal investiture ceremony for new members, and Graham hosts workshops, dinners, and lectures — I once gave a talk to the guild — all with the goal of developing what he calls “a culture of the right way to do things.” “We build the public realm and the builders build the private realm,” Graham says. “We treat them as partners, and we make sure that when we make money, they make money.”
The builders at I’On are local custom builders, that is, individual contractors who build as few as one or two houses a year — or as many as thirty. Custom builders typically build either from architects’ designs or from their own plans, which they modify to suit a buyer’s requirements. Such modifications drive up the price, so custom builders produce only a tiny fraction of all houses built annually in the United States. The overwhelming majority are built by so-called production builders, who build several hundred houses a year and achieve economies of scale that enable them to sell at lower prices. They use stock plans and offer buyers a limited set of options, such as alternative façade treatments or a choice of interior finishes. Large production builders sometimes acquire raw land, but they also buy improved lots from developers. After I’On’s success, several production builders approached Graham, but he didn’t invite them to join the guild. “I find that custom builders are faster on their feet,” he says. “They can learn new ways of doing things. The production builders have a different mind-set. They tend to be more rigid, and while they offer a cheaper house, they can’t achieve the quality I’m looking for. And if I allowed production builders in, they would starve out the custom builders.”
Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town Page 16
