Growing Up Levittown: In a Time of Conformity, Controversy and Cultural Crisis

GROWING UP LEVITTOWN

In a Time of Conformity, Controversy and Cultural Crisis

By Steve Bergsman

Published by Dancing Traveller Media

Copyright 2011 Steve Bergsman

Smashwords Edition

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to someone else.

www.DancingTravellerMedia.ca

Dedication

TO MY FAMILY: FATHER, GILBERT; MOTHER, BEATRICE; AND SISTER, BARBARA.

LEVITTOWN PIONEERS

Special Shout-Out

To everyone I went to school with at Island Trees High School and other friends, associates and classmates. Wasn’t that a time!!

Dear friends of childhood, classmates, thank you,

scant hundred of you, for providing a

sufficiency of human types: beauty,

bully, hanger-on, natural,

twin, and fatso—all a writer needs,

all there in Shillington, its trolley cars

and little factories, cornfields and trees,

leaf fires, snowflakes, pumpkins, and valentines.

To think of you brings tears less caustic

Than those the thought of death brings. Perhaps

we meet our heaven at the start and not

at the end of life. Even then were tears

and fear and struggle, but the town itself

draped in plain glory the passing days.

From the poem, Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth

John Updike

The New Yorker, March 16, 2009

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: BECAUSE IT WAS NEEDED

Chapter 2: THE OLD COUNTRY RELATIONS

Chapter 3: FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Chapter 4: FRIENDSHIPS AND CONFORMITY

Chapter 5: FIRE AND RAIN

Chapter 6: MEAN STREETS

Chapter 7: SUBURBAN LITERATURE: Part 1: The Rise of the Journalist

Chapter 7: SUBURBAN LITERATURE: Part 2: Mythology Takes Hold In Popular Culture

Chapter 7: SUBURBAN LITERATURE: Part 3: Back to Levittown

Chapter 8: MUSIC APPRECIATION: LEVITTOWN, NEVER DOWN

Chapter 9: MOVING ON

CHAPTER ONE

BECAUSE IT WAS NEEDED

The laziness of certain writers can quickly be deduced by the number of clichés steamrolled into their prose, which is why it’s difficult to find any discussion of Levittown, New York, without at least one nod to the phrase, little boxes, little boxes. That is just too, too easy and too, too wrong. I can usually overlook a verbal jab or two, but that particular one always used in reference to Levittown really annoys me. In fact, I take it downright personal.

The words come from the song Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds, and historically the phrasings are often associated with Levittown, which is considered the first modern suburb. The developer, William Levitt, incorporated development techniques pioneered in such industries as automobile manufacturing to mass produce thousands of homes as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Levitt broke ground on his project on July 1, 1947, and went on to build more than 17,000 homes on a tract of former potato fields in central Nassau County, Long Island, located just east of New York City. The original houses looked alike, as did all cars coming off the same assembly line, and architecture, social, and culture critics lambasted what they saw as the sterilization of American residential communities. Levittown, and by extension other suburbs, became the bête noire of culture in America.

All that was bad about America—conformity, mediocrity, alienation, boredom, artistic sterility, anti-intellectualism, and soullessness—in the post-World War II years seemed to arise from Levittown and its spawn. From a 1950s–1960s perspective, if the country was going to hell, then Levittown was leading the way.

Oh, how folkies and post-folkies loved to sing Malvina Reynolds’ lyrics:

"And the children go to summer camp and then to the university

Where they are put in boxes and they come out all the same."1

Little Boxes was written in 1962, one year after the publication of Richard Yates’ searing portrait of family life in the suburbs, Revolutionary Road.

". . . eventually it leads on up and around to a perfectly dreadful new development called Revolutionary Hill Estates—great hulking split levels, all in the most nauseous pastels. . ."—Mrs. Givings, Revolutionary Road2

The mythology of the suburban lifestyle has remained so persistently negative because of the critical smear perpetrated by postwar books, plays and songs about life beyond urban boundaries that there still seems to be an inherent truth to it all.

In 1999, author Stewart Nan wrote a column in the Boston Review entitled, The Lost World of Richard Yates: How the Great Writer of the Age of Anxiety Disappeared From Print.

Nan makes note that Yates’ first novel, Revolutionary Road, was an instant success, a finalist for the National Book Award alongside Catch-22 and The Moviegoer, and equally deserving.

He writes:

"Revolutionary Road has little good to say about American institutions, a common enough sentiment for the time. More interesting are its two heroes. In the beginning Frank and April Wheeler gain our sympathy, since we all know how stultifyingly dull the suburbs are . . ."

Oh really, is that something we ALL really know?

It’s surprising how everyone got it wrong in the 1950s and 1960s, but misguided intellectuals still believed the suburbia-as-Hades mythology in the 1990s—if not today.

Not only wasn’t Levittown dull, stultifying, or soulless, for a small community, population in 2000 at 53,000, but a surprising amount of creative people passed part of their lives here, from songwriter Ellie Greenwich to singer Eddie Money; from Zippy the Pinhead cartoonist Bill Griffith to children’s book illustrator Jon Buller; from radio host John Gambling to TV political commentator Bill O’Reilly; from Maureen Tucker and Sterling Morrison of Andy Warhol’s favorite band, the Velvet Underground, to Billy Joel (he lived in a Levitt home but it was sited over the town line in Hicksville); and, of course, me, journalist and author of this book.

The striking note of the names I listed above was that during the time period when Levittown was most derided as a bottomless pit of Eisenhower conformity and vapidity, it was nurturing creative talent far and above much of the rest of the population. Here as I pass my sixtieth birthday, I still wonder where we went wrong.

Malvina Reynolds’ song has always been misinterpreted. Although we sing it in our heads as if we swallowed an iPod with a stuck download, the endless refrain we burble out loud isn’t correct. The phrase little boxes, little boxes is actually a contraction of the first two lines:

"Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky

"Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same."3

The song was written some 15 years after the advent of Levittown and actually refers to Daly City in Northern California. Nevertheless, in 1963, Pete Seeger adopted the tune and it quickly became the anthem for all who abhorred Levittown and the advent of the suburb.

I have to admit I always liked the tune, but in retrospect the message bothers me. The phrase tickytacky (ticky tacky or ticky-tacky) is repeated, and I was surprised to learn that the Oxford English Dictionary attributes the term’s origin to the song. So kudos to Reynolds for creating a useful expression, which has come to mean shoddy, as in second-rate materials used in the building of standardized housing.

Fortunately for those people, such as myself, who actually lived in Levittown, William Levitt didn’t use ticky-tacky materials. He built basic, sturdy homes that, as it turned out, could be easily remodeled, expanded, and redesigned according to the whim, or creativity, of the current occupant. Levitt certainly substituted cheaper materials and changed common design patterns to make the building of the homes quicker, but many of those methodologies and materials are now the standards of American home building. Just a few examples:

A) Levittown homes had no basements and were constructed on concrete slabs, which back then meant changing the local building code. Most homes, even today, are built on concrete slabs.

B) Radiant heating coils were built into the concrete.

C) All the plumbing was copper—although it was very expensive at the time.

D) Modern appliances came with the home.

E) Sheetrock was used instead of plaster because it was not only inexpensive, but could be installed by unskilled workers. For the last 50 years, sheetrock has been the bedrock of home building.

My biggest grump about the song Little Boxes comes in the key interior lyrics:

And there’s doctors and there’s lawyers and business executives

And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same.4

That’s the stereotype conceived for places like Levittown. It was architecturally so monotonous that children growing up would all end up to be alike. One interpretation of the meaning behind the 1956 science-fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers was that it was a warning against the conformity that Don Siegel, the director, saw spreading through 1950s United States as a result of growing postwar materialism.

An oft-quoted line linking suburbs and the Invasion of the Body Snatchers comes from a revisionist theme introduced by writer Ron Rosenbaum, who penned in a magazine article that the original version of the movie was about the horror of being in the ‘burbs, specifically about neighbors whose lives had so lost their individual distinctiveness they could be taken over by alien vegetable pods—AND NO ONE WOULD KNOW THE DIFFERENCE!5

However, the original sin of Levittown criticism came from the fertile mind of cultural nabob, Lewis Mumford, who after a decade of criticizing suburban development, finally summed up the subject in this scabrous sentence:

"A multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances on uniform roads, in a treeless common waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same incomes, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated food, from the same freezers, forming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold manufactured in the same central metropolis."6

Mumford wrote those words in 1961. I was 12 years old at the time, and in Levittown, landscaping had already grown in and many homes remodeled. To me, every home appeared unique. My friend’s families were different; we drove different cars; our parents had different jobs; we ate different foods.

The food issue surfaced most dramatically one day when I was invited to eat lunch at my friend Tom T.’s home right about my eleventh or twelfth year. His family was ethnic Italian and one afternoon after a morning of play, his mother whipped up a lunch meal of spaghetti noodles (now called pasta, but who knew the word back then) covered in butter and cheese. I couldn’t eat it. The look of the butter melting over the noodles, the redolence of the cheeses appalled my senses. Up until that point in my young life, my entire experience with Italian food, other than pizza, was spaghetti, which was only to be covered by tomato sauce.

Now, my mother wasn’t a great cook. Dinner most every night consisted of a meat dish, potatoes, and canned vegetables, all of which was followed by a dessert of canned fruit. However, she was a good baker and would make such delicacies as hamantaschen. These dessert treats usually held sweet prune fillings that came from a spread called lekvar. Sometimes as a real treat for me, she would cook up a bowl of egg noodles and put the lekvar over it, which I just loved. The dish didn’t seem weird, because my mom also used to make a wonderful noodle koogle (kugel), sweetened by fruits and fruit juice.

So there I was at my friend’s house, staring down at my pasta, which I couldn’t eat. My friend’s mother realized something was wrong and asked how I usually ate spaghetti, other than with tomato sauce. The only thing I could think of was the noodles and the lekvar, but somehow my mumbling response was muddled and my friend’s mother gave me a fresh plate of pasta and grape jelly to put over it. With everyone in my friend’s family staring at me, I felt boxed in. Reluctantly, I put the jelly on the pasta and ate it, thus becoming an instant urban legend: the crazed child who put jam on his spaghetti, thus offending every Italian on Long Island.

My family moved to Levittown in 1954, the year I started kindergarten. I stayed through my public school years, graduating from Island Trees High School in 1967. Obviously, there were some young folk who moved to the suburbs in the late 1940s, but for the most part, my youth entirely bridged that first generation of émigré families who moved to Levittown out of New York City and its environs.

In those years, Levittown was essentially a blue-collar suburb. There were few doctors, few attorneys, and few business mavens. We had policemen, salesmen, construction workers, county bureaucrats, and small business owners aplenty. Of the World War II generation of veterans and their wives who lived in Levittown, there were few university graduates.

My sister was sitting in her high school history class one day when the teacher, while discussing the economic ranges of U.S. citizenry, told the students most Levittowners, including everyone in the class, should consider themselves lower middle class.

By our standards today, the original Levittown homes were cheap; they could be bought for less than $8,000. Since the Bergsman family was not the original owner of the home at 22 Carpenter Lane, we paid more for our house—I seem to recall the purchase price was around $12,000 to $13,000. It still sounds cheap, but one pervasive concern during my adolescent years was the lack of money. I’m sure we were no different than most other families in Levittown; this was a town where there were no apparent signs or signals of extravagance. Even when I was in high school, there were few kids who had a car. My family only had one automobile.

Costs and expenses were always an issue at my house, as it was with my neighbors, who were my relatives—my Uncle Leo, Aunt Therese (called Tootsie), and cousins Fern, Tina, and Maury—all older than me. My father and uncle had good jobs working at Sperry Rand Corp, one of the defense contractors on Long Island. My father, who later moved to Florida to work for the Navy in ordnance, probably had what was deemed a solid job at Sperry. He was a technician, which was a couple of regards above the people working in direct manufacturing. In those years, he never wore a white shirt and tie. Even with an enviable position at a major corporation, we never seemed to get out from under the weight of living expenses.

One summer, to make extra money, my father and uncle started a window-cleaning service. My father also fixed televisions and other electronic gadgets on the side. He did all his own repairs on our home and car. Going out to eat was a rare event. When I was in junior high school and decided to buy lunch at the school cafeteria instead of bringing a sandwich in a paper bag—which even then was considered very nerdy—it was a major battle with my father.

Next door, my aunt went to work at Sears as a bookkeeper. At that time, it was still rare that a wife/mother had a full-time job. When I was in my final years of elementary school, around fifth or sixth grade, my family—my dad Gilbert, my mother Beatrice (known as Bea), my sister Barbara, and I gathered for a rare family meeting. My sister and I were solemnly informed that my mother would be going to work because the family needed the extra money. There was such an overhanging dread about the message one would have thought a death occurred in the family.

Guessing that I was old enough to take care of myself after school and because the added income would be of considerable help, my mother took a job as a salesperson at a local department store, Gertz, located at the Mid-Island Shopping Center (now the Broadway Mall) in Hicksville. Actually, this turned out wonderfully for my mother, who I believe loved the job. She made lifelong friends there although her tenure was only six years. As for me, I couldn’t believe how lucky I was: my mother had gotten a job in the toy department of the store, and every year after Christmas, she would purchase the display products at a fraction of cost. So every Chanukah, I would get some fantastic gift that never in my dreams did I think I would ever own.

The one gift I vividly recall was a huge chemistry set; science was very big in the 1950s and 1960s—after all, we had to stay ahead of the Russians. It came in a large wooden box painted red that opened to reveal little slots each with a bottle of a mineral or chemical. The idea was to perform basic experiments, which were listed on the instruction booklet. The chemistry set was a popular gift at the time and the one my mother brought home for me was the biggest I’d ever seen.

So much for extravagance.

Most of my friends seemed to belong to the same financial strata as me, although a few lived in homes that were by the early 1960s fairly beaten up; the bushes and lawns had gone wild, the paint on the outdoor walls was worn away by the weather, and the interiors were a smorgasbord of discordant, deteriorating furniture. I never thought of these friends as different from me. I just assumed their parents weren’t like my parents, specifically like my mother, who always kept a perfect house. And I never thought of these friends as poorer than me, because I, myself, never had any extra money. When I got older and had to keep a wallet, to have a dollar in it was something of a miracle.

As I got to be a high school teenager, I started becoming more aware of economic differences. The father of one of my oldest friends, Tom T., who I had known since first grade, was an attorney, who either worked for a small law firm on Long Island or was a sole practitioner. About the only way one could tell that Tom T.’s family might have had more earning power was to visit his house.

The original 1947 homes were Cape Cod in design. The size totaled 750 square feet and sat on one-seventh of an acre, about 60 feet wide. Although all the literature says there were no basements, I had some friends that lived near Geneva N. Gallow and Farmedge Elementary schools that were Cape Cod homes with basements (probably not Levitt built). The shape was rectangular with a roof slanted at the front and back. Windows were to the left and right of the front door and then two windows on each side.

My home and Tom T.’s were ranch style, and the original ranch houses as offered for sale by Levitt opened to a small, square entryway that protected the kitchen, which was also the dining room. A two-sided fireplace then separated that kitchen/dining area from the living room.

The living room measured 12 feet by 19 feet, and the back outside wall consisted of 16 feet of double-glazed Thermopane windows—another innovation by Levitt. The concept was to make the room look larger. As a child, during the winter, the morning sun would shine directly into the house through these windows and I would lay on the floor in the light reading the Sunday New York Times sports section and really feeling the warmth of that sun.

In the middle of the house could be found the stairway to the second floor with a closet underneath and then two bedrooms beyond. In a nod to Frank Lloyd Wright modernism, a portal was cut in the wall below the stairs in the shape of a television screen. Obviously, the architect expected the family that owned the home to insert the television into the portal and not have it exposed as if it was a piece of furniture. The portal concept didn’t work, but it was an extraordinarily intuitive idea, as the television set became a major, revolutionary new addition to the family home.

The major problem with the portal was that it was designed for an original generation television set, which had a relatively small screen. Televisions grew bigger and more complex. In the 1950s, the console appeared, which was a large, stand-alone piece of furniture that included the television and another feature, such as the hi-fi (early stereo). The television became so important that in my house, it was placed in a separate room. The spare bedroom on the first floor became the television room.

In original Levitt homes, the second floor was left unfinished. When we moved into our house in 1954, that floor was already built out with two bedrooms separated by a small hallway and a workroom, the latter of which was appropriated by my father. It’s where he fixed televisions and radios and stored family goods. The little workroom was actually a cool place, filled with tools and testing equipment and boxes of vacuum tubes, plus, of course, cartons of old family stuff.

On the second floor, my sister took the rectangular room and I had the L-shaped room that wrapped around part of the hallway and dad’s workroom. My parents had the master bedroom, which was at the back of the house on the first floor and the smaller extra room downstairs became, as noted, the television room (so much for the concept of the family gathering in the living room to watch television). We only had the one bathroom in the house and it was located on the first floor between the kitchen and the television room, across from the closet under the stairs.

I didn’t have any friends who lived in the original Cape Cod design homes, but looking at the floorplates of that product, I could see that Levitt made substantial improvements in the second Cape Cod effort. First off, when you walked through the front door of the newer Cape Cod models, which was at the center of the house, you could go straight up the stairs, turn right into the kitchen or left into the living room. At the back of the house were the two bedrooms. The bathroom was situated beyond the kitchen wall and before one of the bedrooms.

In the ranch-style home, the entryway was at the front corner of the house and people entered first into the dining room-kitchen area. By moving the entryway from middle to the side, it actually made the homes seem bigger because of the extended movement into the rest of the house.

The genius of Levitt and the dagger in the heart of those who assumed all homes in Levittown were punishingly similar was that they were constructed for customization. Take the second floor as an example. At Tom T.’s house, the layout was similar to mine, but at my cousin’s house next door, where we had a workroom, they had a bathroom. Other folks created more space by building dormers or squaring up the roof.

These weren’t big homes, so after the second floor was built out, the next place to grab space was to take out the entryway and give more square footage to the kitchen. This was usually done in conjunction with the second most standard customization, the building of a one-car garage (all that could fit on the lot) as original Levitt homes didn’t include a garage.

When the garage (oversized, for 1.5 cars) was added to my house, it was at the side of the home where my room was situated. After it was completed, I could open the single window in my room and slide out onto the roof of the garage. This was a fairly common design. In fact, my cousin Maury next door slept in a similar L-shaped room with his window also serving as entrance to the garage roof. Much to our parents’ collective consternation, we would spend a lot of time on those roofs.

In later years, long after I left Long Island, a standard customization was to rebuild the garage area as living space, thus putting the cars back on the street or on the driveway. Others built up the space above the garage to create more rooms on the second level.

Today, some Levittown homes have expanded to 1,500–2,000 square feet of living space.

An aerial photo of Levittown in 1947 shows similar homes laid out on flat land, with sparse to no vegetation, but ready for sale. However, when my family moved to Levittown in 1954, trees (including a willow and two fruit trees in the backyard), bushes, and lawns were all in place and some homes had already been customized. For the whole time I lived in Levittown, from my fifth year through my sixteenth, I never got a sense that all homes looked alike. To me, each one was an individual property with different vegetation, fencing, color schemes, garage/no garage, or second-story build-outs. I was never oppressed by sameness. Every friend’s house was landscaped different from mine. No house I entered—and I entered many because I had a lot of friends over the years—looked the same as mine.

In 1983, Ron Rosenbaum wrote a column in Esquire magazine entitled, The House That Levitt Built, in which he noted at the time:

"But to drive through the place today is to experience a strange and unexpected transformation. None of the houses looks like any other house. Nor like any of the blank faces in the aerial photographs. Almost every single one of them has been added on to, extended, built out, remodeled to the max. The roofs have developed so many dormers it seems like they've grown dormers on dormers. Fronts have sprouted pergolas and porches, roof lines have been raised, pitched, expanded, corniced, and cupolaed. Sides have been carported, breezewayed, broken out, recovered in redwood, sided in cedar shake, disguised