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Philly Burbs “Levittown: A Suburb at 60”
LEVITTOWN — BBC World News will air a special 30-minute documentary about Levittown and the changes the community has experienced since it was founded 60 years ago.
BBC Website – “Levittown: A Suburb at 60”
Levittown Pennsylvania – a model community that has symbolised the American dream, is now 60 years old. The BBC has returned to the suburbs to see if the dream still thrives.
1951: American dream houses, all in a row
William Levitt had already established himself as America’s biggest housebuilder in 1951 when he looked upon a green expanse of woods and spinach farms in bucolic Bucks County, Pa., and dreamed of instant suburbia. Here, a ranch house. There, a Cape Cod. As far as his mind’s eye could see, a sprawl of boxlike, two-bedroom houses — a city named Levittown.
Pieces of the American Dream were a hot commodity in post-World War II America, and nobody could sell them like Levitt. When he marketed his mass-produced homes in beautiful color brochures, thousands of young families wanted to buy.
They came to escape crowded cities like Trenton, eight miles northeast, or Philadelphia, 20 miles south. They came to own their own home, cook with their own appliances, mow their own lawn. They had GI loans in hand, babies on the way, and a `50s brand of pioneering spirit.
“Bill Levitt didn’t just build a community here — he built a world,” said Hal Lefcourt, an Army veteran who left Hamilton Township 47 years ago to move into his Levitt house — and still lives in Levittown today.
“We were young, all of us who moved to Levittown, and we thought Bill Levitt was the greatest man in the world. Imagine it — $10 deposit, $90 at settlement, and you had a house of your own!” Levittown was a fresh marvel of modern planning to a Northeast corridor bursting at its seams in the early 1950s.
The young men of Lefcourt’s generation had grown up amid Great Depression hardship and gone overseas to win the most awful war in history. They came back in 1945, entitled to housing loans and college educations under the GI Bill of Rights. Yet when they went shopping for a home, there seemed to be no sellers.
“I can’t solve the housing and the racial problem all at once”
The early Levittowns also had an ugly secret: no black families allowed. “As a Jew, I have no room in my mind or heart for racial prejudice,” Levitt insisted in 1954. “But, by various means, I have come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 to 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. That is their attitude, not ours.”
One black couple, Bill and Daisy Meyers, was daring enough to buy a Levittown, Pa. house in 1957. They were met by rock-throwers, bomb threats and mobs screaming racist taunts at them. It seemed like the bland facade of middle-class conformity was peeling away — to reveal hatred and fear underneath.
The Levittown “whites-only” policy eventually yielded to political pressure and lawsuits. Levittown, Pa. now has a mere fraction of blacks — just 1.5 percent — but Willingboro is split almost evenly between black and white. In a twist on `50s policy, real-estate agents now tout Willingboro’s peaceful diversity as an attractive reason to move.
Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb
- Bill Levitt on building the American Dream (1972)
- Kennedy campaigns in Levittown (1960)
- Change Makes a Call on Levittown (2008)
- The Keystone State helped Barack Obama win re-election in 2012
