Word: levitts
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Future Slums? The most frequent criticism of Levittown, and of other projects like it, is that it is the "slum of the future." Says Bill Levitt: "Nonsense." Many city planners agree with him, because they approve of Levittown's uncluttered plan and its plentiful recreational facilities. Nevertheless, in helping to solve the housing problem, Levittown has created other problems: new schools, hospitals, and sewage facilities will soon be needed; its transportation is woefully inadequate, even by Long Island standards...
...outweighed by the advantages. Said ex-G.I. Wilbur Schaetzl, who lived with his wife and a relative in a one-room apartment before he moved to Levittown: "That was so awful I'd rather not talk about it. Getting into this house was like being emancipated." Bill Levitt puts it in his own brash way: "In Levittown 99% of the people pray...
...Money Itch. William Jaird Levitt never planned to be a builder; he just drifted into it. Born in Brooklyn in 1907, he grew up in an argumentative family, and in that atmosphere his self-confidence waxed mightily. His father, Abraham, was a lawyer who used to spend summer nights lecturing to Bill and his younger brother Alfred on everything from art to the Dodgers. Bill, the family extravert, liked the baseball lectures; Alfred, shy and retiring, preferred those...
...they laid long, roadlike strips of concrete for foundations, then erected walls and roofs over them to form 1,600 squat houses that were little more than shacks. The development was a flop and about 230 of the units are now empty. More successful were 757 houses the Levitts built in Norfolk for the Navy. This success convinced them that low-priced houses could be profitably mass-produced. But the idea was temporarily shelved in 1943, when Bill Levitt joined the Seabees as a lieutenant...
...Levitt & Sons built about 1,000 houses in 1946 while quietly picking up property for their Levittown project. Before the war, the land cost only $300 an acre; now it has soared to $3,600. "The potato farmers," says Bill Levitt, "got rich...