Word: levittown
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...home, the U.S. flexed its great muscles, put everyone to work, paid them more money, built them more and better houses, more and fancier cars (see BUSINESS IN 1952). Its enterprising suburb builders raised up almost overnight a new Levittown beside the Delaware River, bigger at birth than the pre-Revolutionary Pennsylvania cities of York and Lancaster. Its patient medical researchers found drugs that gave promise of conquering TB and polio. Its impatient newspaper readers doused themselves inside & out with another wonder drug, chlorophyll, and followed the Wars of the Roses-Eleanor and Billy...
When she photographed a Jewish giant at home with his parents or a Christmas tree in Levittown in fullest bleak regalia, Arbus was situated between complicity and awe, a place where irony is beside the point and mere compassion has been left behind for something like mordant communion. It all makes for some complicated feelings. There's not a false or sentimental image anywhere in this show, yet one of the final groupings of pictures, in which retarded children face the camera to throw us back at ourselves in difficult ways--can move you to places where tears...
Cohen cites a Life Magazine reporter who wrote about the Myers family, the first black family in a Levittown, Pa. neighborhood, as an example of the resistance to racial integration of consumption. The reporter captured a telling remark from a neighbor: “He’s probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my home...
Five years ago, Chuck Thompson and his wife Chris moved from the Philadelphia suburbs, where they had raised their three children, back into Chuck's parents' home in Levittown, Pa., to assume full-time care of Charles Sr., 76, and Ruth, 73. Charles' worsening dementia and Ruth's health problems meant that if the parents were to stay in the family home, someone would have to live with them. Chuck, 56, says that as the oldest of the Thompson offspring and with his kids grown, he most naturally got the job. Now he cooks the meals, maintains the house...
...Pauline Avenue, Columbus, Ohio. It was my folks' first house, purchased with a G.I. Bill down payment. It was 1956 and the baby boom had begun. Postwar demand - the Korean War, that is - was forcing contractors and developers to find newer, faster, and cheaper ways of building houses. Levittown was the prototype: huge clusters of small homes, quarter-acre plots and designs straight out of engineering catalogs...