THERE ARE STORIES that are true, and stories we want to believe. One day not long ago, a group of people discovered that one of their favorite stories might not be so true after all. It happened one bright morning in Stony Brook, New York, a rolling, wooded town on the North Shore of Long Island. The sky was swimming-pool blue, the lawns, AstroTurf green. Inside an old red carriage house on a hilltop, a few dozen locals chose to spend this gorgeous day indoors for a conference entitled “Suburbia at Sixty.”
On a small stage, a young professor pointed his remote-control clicker at a projector screen behind him and said they were going to play a game. He would show them four slides and they would tell him which one didn’t belong with the rest. The attendees adjusted their glasses and inched forward in their seats.
Click. The first slide showed a black-and-white aerial view of a cookie-cutter suburb with winding streets of identical houses in perfect lines. Click. The second, also black-and-white, captured a happy nuclear family from the 1950s standing in front of a boxy house. Click. The third slide triggered chuckles of recognition from the crowd; it was a promotional photo of the Cleaver family from the popular 1950s sitcom Leave It to Beaver. The final click brought up the last shot: a color picture of a McMansion, one of those sprawling new suburban castles taking over the land.
“It’s that one!” an older woman shouted from her seat.
“The McMansion,” concurred another.
The professor brandished his clicker. “Actually, I was thinking of this one,” he said, in a tone that suggested he was sorry to disappoint them. Then he booted up the picture of the Cleavers again. “This one sticks out because it’s an image of make-believe.”
But given the topic of the day’s conference, the audience couldn’t help but blur the line. The conference title “Suburbia at Sixty” was both a misnomer and bit of good old American mythmaking. In fact, the suburbs are way older than sixty years and began far from these shores. Historian Kenneth Jackson traced the dream back to the days of Babylon B.C. Clay tablets found in Iraq show a letter to the king of Persia from 539 B.C. in which the writer effuses about his new home outside town. “Our property seems to me the most beautiful in the world,” he wrote. “It is so close to Babylon that we enjoy all the advantages of the city, and yet when we come home we are away from all the noise and dust.”
But for most Americans, including those gathered here, the fairy tale begins thirty miles down the road. It’s the story of the model town that sprouted up from the potato fields when the nation’s greatest heroes, the veterans returning from World War II, desperately needed homes. It’s the legend of Levittown, the community often called the “original suburb,” and that’s what the neighbors had come to celebrate this day.
Across the road at the small, one-story Long Island Museum, the story unfolded in three rooms of newsreels, artifacts, and black-and-white photos. And as the visitors noted, it had much to say about their modern world. It started with a people in crisis. Despite the booming postwar economy, there weren’t enough affordable homes to go around. Young veterans and their families were forced to sleep in trolley cars in Chicago and surplus bins in North Dakota. In Omaha, someone took out an ad: “Big Ice Box, 7 × 17 feet, could be fixed to live in.” An editorial cartoon on one wall of the museum showed a family looking up longingly at a home on a puffy cloud. “How can we expect to sell democracy in Europe,” read a quote by Harry Truman, “until we prove that . . . we can provide decent homes for our people?”
But thanks to one entrepreneurial family, the American Dream of a good home in a good town would soon come true. Down the hall at the museum hung a life-size photo of these men, the Levitts: two dapper young brothers, William and Alfred, and their diminutive father, Abe. In contemporary terms, they had the kinetic chemistry and renegade brash of a Silicon Valley start-up. Abe, a self-made immigrant and passionate horticulturalist, provided the springboard and the grass seed. Alfred, a self-taught architect (and sci-fi geek), designed the homes. And Bill, a Barnumesque promoter and marketing whiz, built the business and sold the dream.
Though there had been suburbs before theirs, the Levitts delivered something new: an inexpensive home with state-of-the-art gadgets in a seemingly perfect storybook town. With the federal government’s subsidies for vets, the Levitts applied the innovations of mass production to building their houses. They didn’t invent their product, but they mastered something dazzling: how to swiftly make and sell it. As the veterans watched in wonder, the Levitts churned out inexpensive Cape Cod houses by the dozens with assembly-line precision. Levittowns in Pennsylvania and New Jersey later followed.
And the builders were heroes. Bill Levitt, the front man, was a national icon and titan on the scale of Henry Ford and Walt Disney. Time magazine put him on the cover and ordained Levittown “as much an achievement of its cultural moment as Venice or Jerusalem.” The opening of Levittown triggered the greatest migration in modern American history. During the 1950s, twenty million Americans would move to suburbs, the largest movement since the westward expansion of the 1880s. As the rest of the exhibit showed—from the I Love Lucy film clips on the vintage TV to the faded Levittown Boosters Little League uniform tacked on the wall—Levittown would become synonymous not just with the prosperity and hope of the 1950s, but the enduring vision of the suburbs that would draw families for decades.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the Long Island conference took place, suburbia remained a national obsession. Two thirds of Americans lived in the suburbs. Over thirteen million new homes, including many in cookie-cutter suburban and McMansion developments, had been built in the last decade alone. Over seven million were tucked away behind walls and pristine lawns of gated communities. Suburbia shaped our culture, landscape, and industry, from the fast food we ate on the way to and from work, to the shows we watched when we got home.
Why the fascination? From war to global warming, Americans felt increasingly under siege. As threats rose, a house in the suburbs represented the ultimate in security and community, a picture-perfect plan in a world that seems increasingly without one. Just as in the 1940s, parents still wanted good schools for the kids, friendly neighbors, immaculate lawns. And they were working harder, commuting longer, and striving higher to have it all.
But, as the “Suburbia at Sixty” conference got under way, the attendees learned that their dream could be over. With oil prices and global warming on the rise, speaker Ted Steinberg, a Pulitzer-nominated historian, said the story of suburbs may be ending. “Is the idea of suburbia an ecologically sustainable one over the long term?” he asked the crowd. “Will there be a symposium like this two generations from now? Or, as some people argue, have we reached as the end of suburbia? Is it possible this high-energy lifestyle—the automobile lifestyle—will disappear in some ways, and we’ll have maybe a string of ghost towns? I think that’s the central issue of our time.”
As the end of this story loomed, it called the beginning into question. The answer could be found by digging—with new light—into the past. Because while the dream of Levittown had embedded itself into the popular culture and imagination, a darker, but no less American, story lurked inside. And it was nowhere to be found on the walls of the museum this day.
America’s model town was built not just on hope, but on fear. In part, it was meant to ward off the widespread terror of a foreign threat: Communism. “No man who owns his own home and lot can be a Communist,” Bill Levitt once said, “he has too much to do.” And “the most perfectly planned community in America,” as Levitt described it, was also built to keep out African-Americans. Levitt excluded African-Americans for decades after the reme Court ruled it unconstitutional to do so. It wasn’t the first suburb to do this and it wouldn’t be the last. But it epitomizes how systematically people can be shut out of a dream—and yet how heroically they can take it back.
This is the story that unfolded one unseasonably hot summer in 1957 on Deepgreen Lane, a quiet street in Levittown, Pennsylvania. There, a white, Jewish, Communist family named the Wechslers secretly arranged for an African-American family, the Myerses, to buy the little pink house next door. What followed was an explosive summer of violence that would transform their lives, and the nation. It would lead to the downfall of a titan and the integration of the most famous suburb in the world. It’s a story of hope and fear, invention and rebellion, and the power that comes when ordinary people take an extraordinary stand. And, unlike the legend, this was real.
This is the story of Levittown.