Word: levittown
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...however much it may have been a triumph of free enterprise, Levittown depended on massive government assistance. The Federal Housing Administration guaranteed the loans that banks made to builders. Then the Veterans Administration gave buyers low-interest mortgages to purchase those houses...
...loved each other. They were also a cocoon of misfits who drove each other crazy. Father Abe was a onetime Brooklyn lawyer and would-be philosopher. Bill recalled that Abe liked to give the impression that he knew the distance in light-years to every star. Abe eventually became Levittown's unofficial landscape theorist. He could face a reporter with a fistful of dahlias and tell him, with a straight face: "Every man has a right to flowers!" Brother Alfred designed the houses and grumbled about how credit always went to Bill, the idea man, organizer and salesman...
...larger culture, Levitt's achievement was contested ground. Levittown entered 20th century folklore as the place where democratic equality edged into an unnerving conformity. By stamping whole townships onto old farmland, Levitt brought the machine into the garden in a very literal way. Unlike the automobile or the radio, the home was an ancient possession, a thing too intimate to be mass-produced without offending notions of Yankee individuality that were already under intense pressure from modernity. And as Levittown matured, suburbia itself began to look like humanity at room temperature, a place where the true countryside was denatured, while...
Within that context, Levittown became the anti-Williamsburg: Not a re-creation of some idealized past but a living glimpse of the ticky-tacky future. The social critic Lewis Mumford called it "a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible." Levittown was also tainted at birth by the offhand racism of midcentury America. Though Levittown is racially mixed today, for years Levitt's sales contracts barred resale to African Americans. He once offered to build a separate development for blacks but refused to integrate his white Levitt developments. "We can solve a housing problem...
Long before his death in 1994, Bill Levitt fully understood that it was Levittown, a working stiff's utopia, that had been his great and intricate achievement. Levittown isn't a visionary product of high design. No major architect went near the place. It was what you get when a canny businessman sees a massive public appetite and applies capital and logistics in a timely fashion...