Levittown

by David Kushner

  The government created the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, including the GI Bill of Rights, in 1944 as a way of making those flowers bloom. The GI Bill offered veterans a real dream: a low-interest no-money-down mortgage. Affording a home was one thing; finding one to buy, however, was another. By the time the war ended in 1945, veterans found that coming back alive was one matter—coming back to a home, something else entirely. The country was in a housing crisis. It came after the perfect storm of the highest birth rate in twenty years along with a plunge in new home construction. Nineteen forty-five would be the sixteenth year in a row that new construction fell short of housing demand.

  As a result, vets and their clans had to shack up wherever, and however, they could. Six million moved in with family and friends. And they were the lucky ones. “Most veterans said they were doubling up with in-laws and . . . said they would take anything with four walls,” reported the New York Times. Literally. Trailers and trolley cars, iceboxes and grain bins, became makeshift homes. A half million families lived in Quonset huts. One senator, an amateur country singer, took the cause to the steps of the U.S. Capitol when, with his wife and kids, he sang, “Oh, give me a home near the Capitol dome, with a yard where the little children can play. Just one room or two, any old thing will do, oh, we cain’t find a plaace to stay.”

  While the picture of veterans living in chicken coops had become a national tragedy, a battle was waging over public versus private housing solutions—and the fear of Communism took center stage. In 1945, supporters of multifamily housing introduced the Taft-Ellender-Wagner housing bill as a means of jump-starting public housing projects. But their so-called “un-American” plot garnered high-profile opponents. One day in 1947, a gaggle of reporters trailed after a brisk junior senator through the Rego Park Veterans Housing Project in Queens, New York. It was “a deliberately created slum area, at federal expense,” said the thirty-eight-year-old junior senator from Wisconsin, “a breeding ground for Communists.” His name was Joseph McCarthy.

  Years before he was known on a national stage, McCarthy had glommed on to the issue of public housing as a way of kick-starting his political career. His platform: running hearings for the U.S. Senate Joint Committee Study and Investigation of Housing. Over five months from 1947 to 1948, 1,286 witnesses testified in thirty-three cities as a means, ostensibly, to figure out the roots of the housing problems. McCarthy made no bones about where he put his hopes: builders. “There are those who maintain that because private enterprise has not solved the entire problem, we should scrap private enterprise and socialize housing,” he said. “But it seems logical that instead of attempting to scrap private enterprise we should furnish the necessary aids to make it work.”

  That he hired a publicity firm that also backed the National Association of Home Builders, the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and the U.S. Savings and Loan League was not lost on his opponents. Planes dropped flyers over Lubbock, Texas, with the words “Do You Believe in Socialism? No! Is Public Housing Socialism? Yes!” Magazines and newsreels took up the cause and a target: unions. Painters and bricklayers were criticized for not working fast enough, and thwarting the path of progress. The hotbed of unions and activists was New York City. When Lew came back to city in 1945 after eighteen months on the front lines in Europe, he and Bea were ready to fight.

  Bea was sitting in the offices of the Bronx Tenants Council when a young African-American woman, Sophie Decatur, came through the door. Bea had joined the council as a way of dealing with landlord disputes, but Decatur’s story was hardly the usual. The young mother of two explained that she and her husband, a railroad porter, lived in Parkchester, a housing development in the Bronx owned by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Met Life was among those embroiled in the housing crisis and had been a McCarthyesque example of how private industry could step up to the plate. But Met Life’s plan was not all that it seemed.

  Decatur told Bea that her family was being evicted simply because they were black. Met Life had a policy of not selling or renting to African-Americans in New York. But because the Decaturs had been subletting their apartment from a white family, they had gone unnoticed—until now. And because of the color of their skin, this young mother and her children were being thrown out onto the street. Decatur wanted to know if Bea and the Bronx Tenants Council could do anything to help.

  Decatur had come to the right woman. After a lifetime of activism, Bea and Lew had stepped up in their causes since his return from the war. They were not teenagers fighting against higher lunchroom prices anymore, they were adults, and true believers in their fights. No cause was too big or too small. And despite now having two children, they were more committed than ever to changing the world, even if their safety in the rising tide of red-baiting was at stake.

  Before one rally, Lew put on his best suit, and Bea and the kids also dressed to the nines. They were going to be photographed and attacked, they knew, and they had to look good. Katy and Nick, their second child, who arrived in 1947, heard the crowd rallying for peace. They and the other kids started chanting for ice cream. Then the eggs started flying from the crowd, pelting their finest threads. Such events became a regular occurrence. While other kids were sitting on Santa’s lap, Katy and Nick were at a rally on the knee of activist Paul Robeson. In summers, Katy and Nick attended camps with other “red diaper babies.” At the end of the Korean War, the camp released symbolic pigeons in the mess hall.

  Peace was the topic at the kids’ schools too. One day, the children were told that they had to wear dog tags so that, if the school was bombed by the Russians, they could be identified. This terrified Katy so much that she refused to put them on. “Sorry,” she informed a school administrator, “I’m not wearing this dog tag because it means they’re going to bomb me.”

  The administrator looked condescendingly upon this plucky, curly-haired girl. “Take it home and show you mother,” he replied curtly.

  Katy arched a brow and said, “You don’t know my mother.” Sure enough, Bea marched into school, and after that, Katy never had to wear the dog tags again.

  The Wechslers’ associations and activities, however, came at a price. From as long as the kids could remember, strange men in dark suits would show up at their front door: the FBI. After enough visits, little Katy opened the door to a man in a suit and said matter-of-factly, “Oh, you want to see my daddy.” When Bea heard the commotion, she slammed the door in the guy’s face and told Katy she was never to speak with such men. Lew soon began losing jobs because of his political activities. When Lew came home with his toolbox, the family knew he’d been fired that day.

  During the trial of suspected Communists Julius and Ethel Rosen-berg, the Wechsler family took to the streets in their support. “These were good people who believed in peace and justice and were arrested for their beliefs,” Bea and Lew told their kids. But it was to no avail. On June 19, 1953, the family sat in their apartment listening to the radio as news came of the Rosenbergs’ execution. Katy looked out the window and saw a bloodred sun setting in the distance. A chill shot through her body. It could have been Mom and Dad, she thought.

  But nothing could keep the Wechslers from their fights. And the fight for the Decaturs was on. On the day of the family’s scheduled eviction, Bea showed up at their home with other representatives from the Tenants Council. The eviction team came in as Sophie Decatur was cooking dinner for her two kids. But that didn’t stop them. When Bea and her team refused to move, the tough guys closed in—grabbing them and throwing them down a flight of steps.

  Bea was bruised and, worse, defeated. All these protests, all these fights, and for what? But she picked herself right up and hatched a plan. She knew of a perfect place where the Decaturs could move: the Wechslers’ house. The time had come, Bea and Lew decided, to move from the Bronx. Lew had recently completed a master’s degree in social work at Columbia and wanted to join the workers in a steel mill outside the city. Bea’s sister, Florenc
e, and her family had already left for similar pursuits, and Bea agreed to move. With the Wechslers out, the Decaturs could take over their lease and get back to their lives once and for all.

  There was just one problem: Nick and Katy didn’t want to leave. They were happy with their friends and school. But Bea and Lew cut them a deal. If the kids would move, they would get two things they always wanted: a dog, and a trip to see the family hero Jackie Robinson play ball. Nick and Katy considered the offer and accepted. The Wechslers would go to the suburbs. And they knew just the place.

  Four

  THE PERFECT PLAN

  BILL LEVITT KNEW just where to find his little brother, Alfred: deep down inside “the Hole.” The Hole was Alfred’s family’s nickname for the home office bunker he had designed for himself. To get there, Bill had to squeeze through what used to be Alfred’s wife Sylvia’s walk-in closet, through a hole in the wall that Alfred had punched for a door, and down a narrow stairwell into the darkness. There, Alfred sat in his bathrobe in his cozy little room, coffee in hand, science fiction magazines on the floor, dreaming up the homes of tomorrow. As one journalist put it, for Alfred inspiration was never lacking. Alfred would “wake up at 3 a.m. with an idea for a movable storage wall.”

  The Hole was located partially underground in the new home thirty-year-old Alfred had designed for his family in Cedarhurst, Long Island. It sat on 3.5 acres with a tennis court and a swimming pool. Like the rest of America, the Levitts were consumed with the fantasy of their dream home—the difference: while most lost their shirts in the Depression, the Levitts earned enough money to realize their goals. By 1940, Levitt & Sons was already a great success—but not without its problems. A palpable tension existed between the ambitious young brothers. Bill craved the spotlight, and Alfred felt his innovations were either overshadowed or claimed by his big brother. But, as in many great partnerships, the conflict fueled advancement.

  The Levitts had completed more than two thousand homes in the upper-crust neighborhoods of Long Island’s Gold Coast. Life was good. Abe was known to walk down the street and toss coins to children. Bill, thirty-four, had fulfilled his lifelong dream of having “a big car and a lot of clothes.” Alfred disappeared into his lair to sketch, read pulp magazines, and play chess. To celebrate their success, Alfred and Bill built homes of their own down the block from each other on an aptly named regal spot, King’s Point Road.

  But the good times would come to an end on December 7, 1941, when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. With World War II on, the government put an end to almost all building except for war-related projects. The Levitts weighed the choices: lose their business or make a pact with Uncle Sam. Seeing an opportunity, they struck a deal to build 750 rental homes for naval officers in Norfolk, Virginia. There was just one problem: it had to be done in a year, nearly a quarter of the time they figured it would take them to complete. The best discoveries come under pressure. And for the young, self-taught builders the solution was simple; as Bill put it, “We have to dream up new methods.”

  They found inspiration in mass production. Ford had brought the assembly line to the automotive industry with great success. As Alfred well knew, they weren’t the only home builders paying attention. In 1936, he had spent months watching and learning from famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who was building a home in Great Neck. “He told me about certain houses that he had in mind for mass production in this country,” Alfred recalled, “. . . built of brick and steel rod. The roof was to be flat. And when I did slip in ‘How would that be finished?’ he said, ‘A half dozen or two dozen shovels of topsoil, but then there’s the problem of weeds’ . . . The noncompromising attitude of topsoil on the roof or high skill in detail that 99 per cent of American architects draw and insist upon is so unrealistic that if this is the form in which they believe that their sense of art appreciation can be passed on to the American people, they are up in the clouds in their dreams.”

  The Levitts determined to bring mass production more down to earth. They framed an entire wall on the ground, then raised it up in place. They churned out their own precast concrete septic tanks, allowing them to make twenty in a day instead of the usual one. They poured long strips of concrete floor slabs and hoisted a plumbing tree and prebuilt chimney from the muck. With Bill selling the plan and Alfred engineering the production, Abe, the horticulturalist, focused on bringing the homes to life. He made sure that each home came with a variety of trees—apple, crab apple, chestnut—and shrubs. “It is part of my special department, landscaping,” Abe said, “. . . and it’s one special thing which we intend to do always hereafter.” Some in the company jokingly called him Levitt & Sons’ “vice president in charge of grass seed.”

  Not only did they complete the Norfolk job, they shaved two months off the deadline—and were rewarded with more homes to build. By the end of the war, they would build 2,350 homes for the federal government in record time. It convinced them of something that would shape their futures: inexpensive homes could be mass-produced. When Bill shipped off to serve during the war, he only grew in confidence. In 1944, Bill went to Oahu to join the Seabees, the navy’s construction division, as a lieutenant. As he later bragged, the military had more to learn from him than the other way around: “That little branch of the Navy that had the pleasure of my company learned much more about building from me than I did from them.”

  Bill’s ego swelled in the company of the 260 servicemen he managed. As the press later recounted, in the navy he learned how to “disobey orders and ignore red tape.” Levitt made sure his men had the best accommodations—and would hustle to get them, striking deals for vodka, the finest chocolate, or Johnnie Walker Red. They would stay up all hours singing Hawaiian songs as he played the piano and sipped a dry martini.

  Back at home, his brother, Alfred, tended to the business because he was flat-footed and unable to serve. As the war raged on, he saw the need for housing reach crisis proportions. “How can we expect to sell democracy in Europe until we prove that within the democratic system we can provide decent homes for our people?” President Truman would later say. Alfred read ads in the pages of architecture magazines urging builders to get ready for the postwar efforts. “Are you doodling or planning for that building boom?” one advertisement read, over a sketch of a spherical science fiction home on a farm. For Alfred, there would be no dreaming of fantastical utopias anymore. As the homes in Norfolk popped up around him, he realized the fantasy houses could become a reality.

  Bill agreed. All the elements were in place: the demand, sixteen million veterans were coming back to America in need of homes; the government subsidies provided by the GI Bill; the innovations in mass production; and banks “busting with money,” as Bill put it. The time was ripe for the Levitts to cash in. While sitting with companions at Pearl Harbor, Bill said, “Do you fellows realize that for five years, the year before the war and four more for us, there’s been literally no housing built for people. Some defense housing, but that’s all. And when we get home, there’s going to be a mad rush.” So he made the troops a promise. When I get back, he told them, I’m going to build you your homes.

  Then he telegrammed his father, Abe, and his brother, Alfred: “Buy all the land you possibly can . . . Beg, borrow or steal the money and then build and build.”

  Like some great science fiction movie, it started with an invasion and ended with heroes. The invasion came in the form of a tiny parasite called the golden nematode, which was ravaging the potato crops over thousands of acres in Island Trees, a farming community in Long Island. In 1946 the Levitts came to the farmers with cash and the offer of a lifetime: Sell us your land. Before long, they had amassed over thirty-five hundred acres of potato fields. And the Levitts hatched their ambitious plan: to mass-produce the American dream for the common people, the veterans coming home from the war. They would build a town.

  With pencil in hand, Alfred descended into his Hole and got to work. They weren’t just constructing homes,
he resolved, they were building a community. As Alfred put it, “Intelligent planning of communities is not a Utopian dream. It is just plain common sense.” He drafted up the vision—“a suburban community of several thousand homes, with its own shopping centers, churches, swimming pools, parks, and recreational facilities.” There would be winding, curvilinear streets for a rural feel, and culs-de-sac where the kids could play and run. They would, he said, “plan an entire community before the first bulldozer starts clearing the site.” His brother, Bill, added: “Access to a swimming pool or a baseball diamond is as important a part of what a purchaser buys as solid walls or a strong roof, because he’s not just buying a house, he’s buying a way of life.”

  And the life had to center around a low-cost but inspiring home: the Cape Cod. Alfred stripped them down to the bare essentials: two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. Aside from a couple of nostalgic touches—a birdhouse on each fence that matched the shutters, a relief of a candle on each banister—the homes would be models of futuristic cleanliness and ease. “There will be no need for chiffoniers or dressing tables in these little houses,” Abe boasted to the press. “That furniture will all be a part of the closets, which will cover an entire wall of each bedroom and contain appropriate storage space for all clothing of all members of the household, as well as linen and blankets. There will be thirty-two closets in all. They will be shallow, and when any closet door is opened, a light will go on automatically, so that no one need rummage to find what he wants.”