Levittown synonyms, Levittown pronunciation, Levittown translation, English dictionary definition of Levittown. “Nourished on national publicity,” the magazine reported, “the suburbanites pitched in.” Residents gleefully blocked off streets and raised the flash bulbs. Here, they began a project to make small and, affordable homes.

As one reporter put it, “They might not be considered the ‘dream homes’ soldiers thought about in the foxholes across the world a few years back,” but they were enough. Mark McGwire, "Big Mac," pro baseball player who broke Roger Maris' single-season home run record; admitted in 2010 to using performance-enhancing drugs throughout his career.
American real estate developer who created Levittown- the nation's first planned community (suburbia) Term. this is the town that, when sitting in someone's backyard with 50 of your closest friends, you all coninually complain about. 346278445 "White flight" Houses were mass produced by several workers daily, each house looking … Levittown, right from the start, was famous.

In 1951 Levittown was featured by Collier’s magazine in “the biggest flash photograph ever attempted.” The picture was snapped from the top of Levittown’s 200-foot water tower, using 1,500 flash bulbs. FREE study guides and infographics! Max Matsuura (Masato Matsuura), record producer, president of Avex Group, one of Japan's largest music labels. Housing starts were down during the Depression and World War II. “I think that William Levitt and Levittown had an opportunity to do something here. PERIOD 5 Global I at MacArthur. Stuck? “They get job offers, and the bottom line, when they do the math, is it’s cheaper to move out, even with no pay increase…to a bigger house,” he said. Skyrocketing real estate prices and some of the highest property taxes in the nation have pushed many out. “As a company our position is simply this: ‘We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem. Go ahead, flip the pages: the aerial photograph of a landscape of identical houses looking like a black-and-white checkerboard…down below, a young ex-GI and his family smile broadly in front of their new home, a Chevy sedan in their driveway…inside the front door, Tupperware parties and paint-by-number kits…out the back door, a new power mower, pitcher of lemonade and a smoky backyard barbecue. Levittown’s portrait may have been carefully staged, but it was in demand. But we cannot combine the two.’ ”. “If this isn’t the biggest, brightest, most ambitious birthday card ever presented to a four-year-old,” gushed Collier’s, “what is?”. Soon, urban growth spilled over into the suburbs. Jeff Reardon, pro baseball pitcher known as "The Terminator" for his intimidating pitching mound presence and 98 mph fastball. But also like most of the military, African Americans were unable to enter this melting pot. “It is a poor week when Levitt houses aren’t featured in at least one full-column story in the New York newspapers,” wrote a reporter in Fortune magazine in 1947. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 5,000 articles originally published in our various magazines.

Levitt plastered the newspapers with advertisements designed to attract one and all, especially young war veterans. Levittown, Long Island, the most famous American postwar suburban development, was a household name, the “Exhibit A” of suburbia. “They’d look around…bang the walls. When the last nail was driven in 1951, 17,447 houses stood in Levittown. And they all told us, ‘In ten years they’re going to go through this place with a bulldozer and knock it down, it’s going to be a slum.’ ”, Competing builders made the same criticisms. That became part of the sales pitch. An editorial in a local news-paper, the Island Trees Tribune, noted this as early as December 4, 1947: “It seems that the people of the surrounding areas were a bit afraid of what sort of people would move into [Levittown].”, Helen Hooper, 27 years old when she moved from Queens in 1949, remembered similar attitudes in long-settled nearby villages: “They resented it when they knew you came from Levittown.” She frequently felt icy, awkward stares: “When you went in there to shop, they kind of looked at you funny.” Even some of her own relatives felt she’d made a mistake. Overall, the community made the lives of many easier due to the cheap housing. In March 1949, Levitt & Sons began selling the houses upfront, and more than 1,000 couples arrived at the sales office. Houses, were mass produced by several workers daily, each house looking the same and set up the same.

The Veterans Administration and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) guaranteed builders that qualified veterans could buy housing for a fraction of rental costs. At least some of the incoming white residents were uncomfortable with the restrictions. Levitt & Sons was in its 18th year of business when it started the neighborhood of Island Trees, renamed Levittown in 1948. A house could be built in one day when effectively scheduled. To evade one of the more difficult demands of the Town of Hempstead’s zoning laws—that all homes have basements—William Levitt engineered a community meeting in front of the town board, and several hundred people showed up.

An unincorporated community of southeast New York on western Long Island. Randy Quaid, actor (The Last Detail; won Golden Globe for his portrayal of Pres. Betty Spector, who had lived in an interracial neighborhood in Washington Heights, N.Y., remembered thinking, “ ‘My God, I’ve moved to Bigot Town!’ ” Spector found the lack of diversity appalling, and she was hardly the only one.

To this day, Levittown’s black population remains below 1 percent, but the Gaines’ story also speaks to another trend. The GOP was surprised when Truman "slipped" away with the victory … The first homes were just 4 1/2 rooms: 2 bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, bathroom and an “expansion attic”—not much bigger than some of the city apartments the GIs were leaving behind. Robert Gould Shaw, commander of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment during America's Civil War. Writer Michael Pollan remembered that “by 1960, when my parents went house hunting…Levittown was passé, and the next new place—the un-Levittown—promised to be the Gates of Woodbury, where lots were generally a sprawling acre.” Like minor league ballplayers hitting the big time, some Levittown residents were jumping to the next level by the late 1950s, finding bigger homes in swankier new developments. PERIOD 2 AP US History at Division. When I finally got it ripped off it said on the back ‘Treated with Woodlife.’ I didn’t even know they made that then, but he [William Levitt] really…did a good job. Plainview, Huntington and other places along the new Long Island Expressway grew exponentially.

Levitt refused to sell Levittown homes to people of color, and the FHA, upon authorizing loans for the construction of Levittown, included racial covenants in each deed, making Levittown a segregated community.[1]. By the end of the 1940s, it was, very clear that there was a shortage of housing and that something needed to be done. Unhappy neighbors offered more money to keep Gaines out, but the transaction went through. Volunteers were not hard to find. Levittown is the name of seven large suburban housing developments created in the United States by William J. Levitt and his company Levitt & Sons. Production was modeled on assembly lines in 27 steps with construction workers trained to perform one step. Driving through Levittown today on its miracle mile Hempstead Turnpike, you’d be forgiven for missing history’s mark.

Betty Friedan: Definition. “It was such a different time,” said Fred. This enabled quick and economical production of similar or identical homes with rapid recovery of costs. Jimmy Carter, 39th president of the U.S. (1977-1981). “It was a well-oiled machine and you could make more money that way,” remembers Edward Konop, a construction superintendent for the Levitts from 1947 to 1954. Every Levittown rental lease and homeowner’s contract barred those that were “not member(s) of the Caucasian race.”, Levitt defended the housing restrictions long after the first residents moved into Levittown, stating that he was just following the social customs of the times. This large suburban area was created specifically to provide housing for a relatively low price and for specific people. By 1967 the basic Levitt home was valued at more than twice its original purchase price, and improved houses had almost tripled in value. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Levittown&oldid=980184012, History of veterans' affairs in the United States, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 25 September 2020, at 02:50. People wanted the full package—the affordable house, the new appliances, the suburban lifestyle—and they wanted it right away. PERIOD 8 Global I at MacArthur. Dorothy and Fred Johs, residents since September 1948, often marvel at the changes. Originally “we were all in the same boat, nobody had a lot of money,” said Dorothy, a nurse during World War II who had met her future husband while serving in Europe.

The story is familiar and understandably nostalgic: Few early residents remain; all are getting on in years. Levittown became a symbol of the movement to the suburbs in the years after WWII. A roofing crew, for example, made $60 per finished roof, usually split three ways. Some moved east to other Levitt developments in Suffolk County, the Strathmores of Stony Brook and Coram, by the mid-1960s. As the largest and most influential housing development of its time, it became a postwar poster child for everything right (affordability, better standard of living) and wrong (architectural monotony, poor planning, racism) with suburbia.