Levittown Tutors

About Levittown

According to Levittown tutors, the town’s creator William J.Levitt is often credited with being the creator of the modern day suburb.

A relatively new development in the state of Pennsylvania the land that Levittown occupies was purchased in 1951. The designs for the type of houses that would be erected were finalized before then, as was the idea to build rows of identical houses quickly and inexpensively. Much like the fine-tuning in the automotive industry, which allowed cars to be mass-produced on an assembly line. Levitt and sons came up with a twenty-six-step process, which allowed the creation of homes one after the other. “Little boxes” were built one after another with each workman or team of workmen moving from one house to the next completing the same task on repeat. E.g. laying the foundation of the first house, then moving to the next plot and laying the foundation, while simultaneously a new team came in for the next step in the building process at the first house, which might be building the frame for example. Such was the volume and organization within his construction team; Levitt reached a point where his teams were finishing a complete home with full plumbing, electric and even installation of white goods on average every sixteen minutes.

Unlike other early housing developments, every aspect of living was taken into account during the construction of his homes. Attention was paid to the shape of the streets, the locations of parks and other municipal facilities. The roads here were designed to avoid unnecessary stress on residents, they had a curvature to them and he made sure to have no four-way intersections. Large plots were left empty within the community to allow for the building of local amenities such as churches, shopping centers, parks, and swimming pools.

For the first time to maintain a level of desirability in the community, rules were put into place for would be “Levittowners.” There was a great deal of interest in the new development and the fantastic amenities that living in Levittown would provide, and people liked the idea of maintaining the picture perfect neighborhood and investing in property there. So residents agreed on following certain rules, they included not hanging out laundry on Sundays, and not building new perimeter fencing. However over time the strictness of these rules was relaxed, and as properties became re-sold the next generation of owners had different and evolved wants and needs. According to Levittown tutors, Levittown became a textbook example of the northern states underlining racial inequality at that time. Levitt would not sell his homes to African Americans, and a portion of the Levittown community agreed with his sentiment. This was highlighted when a couple moving out of Levittown sold their home to William and Daisy Myers, the neighborhoods first African American couple, and the reaction of some within the neighborhood was to harass their new neighbors. Daisy Myers has had a book published about her experience at that time.