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SUBURBIA

Coming Home

As World War II ended, more than ten million soldiers were discharged from the U.S. armed forces. Where were they going to live? The answer, it turned out, was suburbia—1950s style.

House Builder Levitt

There were suburbs in America before the 1950s, but these were nothing like Levittown and its imitators. On 3 July 1950 developer William J. Levitt appeared on the cover of Time magazine, standing in front of a row of identical boxlike houses on newly bulldozed land. The caption read: "HOUSE BUILDER LEVITT: For Sale: a new way of life." First on Long Island, then near Philadelphia, and finally in New Jersey, Levitt built his dream houses and in the process created the suburbia of the 1950s.

The Levitt Design

Levitt and his sons, who had built houses for the navy during World War II, brought mass-production techniques to house building. The Levittown houses, built on concrete slabs with no basements, were nearly identical in floor plan, although there were some slight variations in exteriors and color. The original designs had two bedrooms and one bathroom, and a family could expand the house by converting the attic or adding on. Lots were of uniform size (sixty by one hundred feet) with a tree planted every twenty-eight feet (two-and-a-half trees per home). In the beginning the Levitts included free televisions sets and a Bendix washing machine as incentives.

An Orderly Neighborhood

The early deeds to the Levitts' houses specified that no fences were to be built, lawns were to be mowed at least once a week in season, and laundry could be hung only on rotary racks, not on clotheslines, and never on weekends.

Record Growth

A 1949 housing act helped finance suburban projects, and the low Levittown prices helped even more. World War II veterans—anxious for clean, less expensive, safe places for their children—streamed out of the cities and queued up to buy the new tract housing. Soon scores of builders adopted the methods pioneered by Levitt.

Housing Boom

In 1950, 1.4 million new housing units were built, mostly in the suburbs. This rate continued throughout the 1950s, as an average of three thousand acres of farmland per day was bulldozed into tract housing. By 1952 Levittown's population (in Long Island) had jumped to ten thousand, and a second Levittown in Pennsylvania was built for seventeen thousand families.

No Architectural Distinction

In terms of style, the suburban tract housing followed none of the principles of Wright or Mies van der Rohe or any other of the famous architects of the 1950s, except for the occasional inclusion of multipurpose rooms. Indeed, the Federal Housing Authority "refused to finance developers whose designs they deemed too Modern-looking, assuming that it was a fad that sooner or later would pass."

Patterned Lives

Block after block of identical houses dotted suburbia. Children quickly memorized the exact route to their homes, lest they get hopelessly lost among the similar structures. Only the strange color combinations inside some of these homes gave them any individuality. Early American furniture was popular in suburbia, as were antiques. The houses had few interior walls, ostensibly to cut down building costs. But this also promoted the family "togetherness" that seemed so important in the 1950s.

The Community

Soon shopping centers were built, followed by schools, libraries, movie theaters, restaurants, and churches—all in the same boxlike version of modern architecture that developers liked and, apparently, so did consumers.

The Same People, Too

The 1950s suburban communities tended to attract similar people: young, white, middle-class, and newly married. Blacks, Jews, and Hispanics were not welcome; neither were singles, gays, the elderly, or unmarried people living together. Only the nuclear family was acceptable, with the young married couples usually between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. Most had at least one child. Incomes averaged between six thousand and seven thousand dollars.

Suburban Psychosis

Suburban life was orderly and convenient, but also unreal and sterile. It produced harried husbands, bored wives, and alienated children. Not surprisingly, the middle-class children who grew up in 1950s suburbia began the counterculture of the 1960s.