Levittown

by David Kushner

  A spirit of change was around them, and they could feel it. Ever since the ruling on Brown v. Board of Education, a new era was sweeping the country. When the Myerses settled down after dinner one cold night, they watched the latest struggle unfolding on their black-and-white TV. It was taking place in Montgomery, Alabama. On December 1, 1955, a forty-three-year-old woman who worked as a secretary for the Montgomery NAACP boarded a bus just as on any other day. In the South, as Daisy had long experienced, the buses were segregated. In addition to having to sit in the back of the bus, African-Americans had to give up their seats in the middle section if a white person wanted one. But on this day, when the bus driver told Rosa Parks to get up and relinquish her spot, she refused. And she was arrested.

  Word spread of her courageous act, and the black leaders in town quickly organized a boycott of the bus system. It was time to demand equal rights in transportation once and for all. Locals packed the churches to hatch the plan and drew up signs. PEOPLE DON’T RIDE THE BUSES TODAY, the signs said, DON’T RIDE IT FOR FREEDOM. Black-run taxicab companies agreed to lower their fares and only charge the equivalent of a bus ride. A group called the Montgomery Improvement Association formed and nominated a leader, a twenty-six-year-old preacher named Martin Luther King Jr.

  Crowds packed in to hear the dynamic young man speak. “There comes a time that people get tired,” King intoned. “We are here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us so long that we are tired—tired of being segregated and humiliated; tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression . . . For many years we have shown amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we like the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice. One of the great glories of democracy is the right to protest for right . . . We will not retreat one inch in our fight to secure and hold on to our American citizenship.” The crowd burst into triumphant applause.

  With the Myerses and the nation following the saga in newspapers and on TV, the Montgomery boycott dragged on for months. King called for a strong but nonviolent protest. The supporters endured long, tiring walks through cold, awful weather, but did not venture back onto the buses. They refused to comply until the system was equal—and open—for all. It would not come easy. In response to the boycott, segregationists were growing in numbers and in power. A bomb went off in the house of King and another leader. No one was injured but the stakes were rising. Finally on November 13, 1956, nearly a year after the protest began, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that buses would be desegregated once and for all.

  King had become a national icon for a movement on the rise. And while the Myerses supported his efforts with all their heart, they remained leery of getting too deep into the civil rights struggle themselves. They had busy lives of kids, jobs, and chores. They had a home. They weren’t about to risk it all for the sake of this fight. “We’ll take a backseat,” Daisy said, “we won’t be at the forefront.”

  But they couldn’t ignore the inequalities right in their own backyard. On all sides of Bloomsdale Gardens, a strange new community was sprouting up. Crews built it wildly fast like some cartoon assembly line. Trucks plunged saplings into muddy fields. Rows of identical homes popped up wall by wall from the ground. Busy men carried shiny appliances inside the finished homes. Smiling couples began filling the houses with their children and dogs. They were young. They were happy. They had come from miles away to live here in Levittown, Pennsylvania, the second community from the nation’s biggest and most beloved builders.

  And not one of them was black.

  Six

  PIONEERS

  THEY CALLED HER Biff. The dog was a brown mutt with cute bright eyes, and best of all, she was now a Wechsler. Little Katy Wechsler with her dark, curly hair crouched at the end of her narrow hallway in the Bronx and called her name—“Biff! Biff! Biff!”—for hours, delighting in watching the swift, little pooch dart up and down the way.

  By August 1953, the time had come to join what was now the greatest internal migration the country had seen since the western expansion of the 1800s: the flight to the suburbs. Flush with postwar money and seduced by assembly-line convenience, more than twenty million Americans were moving into these neighborhoods. For veterans such as Lew eligible for the GI Bill, the iconic place offering the biggest suburban dream for the littlest money was Levittown. Now the Wechslers were heading to the newest Levittown—being built on five thousand acres of broccoli and spinach fields in Bucks County, Pennsylvania—to begin again.

  From its inception in 1951, there was one main distinction between this place people were calling Levittown II and the original one on Long Island. While the first Levittown had a degree of organization, it was still, by the family’s own admission, a seat-of-the-pants project. But the Bea and Lew had given their kids the puppy on the night before they moved out of the Bronx. Biff was part of their promise—along with an IOU to go see Jackie Robinson play—in return for moving to the suburbs without a struggle. new community would be different; in Pennsylvania, it was all about the master plan. “We bought five thousand acres, and we planned every foot of it,” Bill Levitt boasted. “Every store, filling station, school, house, apartment, church, color, tree, and shrub” would be coordinated by the Levitts.

  The plan started with one of the main reasons to come to the area: jobs. The second-largest steel mill on the East Coast, the Fairless Works of the United States Steel Corporation, was set to open in the Delaware Valley in 1952. The steelworkers would need homes, and housing these blue-collar veterans was the perfect challenge—and market—for the Levitts.

  Even more so than the Long Island community, this Levittown, which started with “absolutely nothing,” Bill said, would have to be completely built from the ground up: the roads, the sewer and water systems, the homes, and community. For Alfred Levitt, it was a delectable challenge, and he stayed up many a night deep in the Hole of his house sketching out his plan for something that was still new in America: a perfectly planned, but affordable, suburban town. There would be a variety of affordable homes, from the modern ranch Levittowner, to the more upscale Country Clubber, each complete with the built-in appliances and hideaway storage areas that the Levitts had trumpeted on Long Island.

  Each neighborhood would be contained in a one-mile-square unit called a master block, with between three hundred and five hundred homes in each. There would be Little League fields, Olympic-size swimming pools, and an enormous shopping plaza that would be the biggest east of the Mississippi. Schools would be close enough, Bill promised, so that “no child will have to walk more than one-half mile to school or cross any major road.” Abe Levitt insisted that each plot would have a lawn, over a dozen trees, and more than three dozen shrubs and bushes. In total, he liked to boast, there would be more than forty-eight thousand fruit trees in town—just one reason that magazines such as House and Home anointed him “God’s gift to the nurseryman.”

  Each Levittown neighborhood bore an idyllic name—such as Stony-brook, Lakeside, or Birch Valley—and the streets within that area all started with the letter of the alphabet that began the block name. In Dogwood Hollow, for example, there would be Deepgreen Lane and Daffodil and Daisy streets. The idea was that each neighborhood would assume its own identity and sense of pride. “It is hoped, tender shoots of friendship, kindness, and goodwill can push through the chaos and blight of our machine society,” the New York Times wrote of Levittown, Pennsylvania’s promise.

  The Levitts eagerly promoted their new town, taking out full-page ads in the local papers to trumpet their tagline: “The most perfectly planned community in America!” On December 8, 1951, they opened the door to their showroom, a one-story building with glass walls called Houses of Levittown. Mobs of eager home buyers lined up outside waiting to crash in. Inside the showroom, crisp and dutiful sales agents took the couples through the selection of homes, detailin
g all the modern appliances and amenities that awaited them. Visitors were invited to inspect “all equipment and materials . . . down to the last gallon of paint.” By the end of the opening weekend, a staggering thirty thousand people had come through the showroom.

  Sales were unstoppable. More than sixteen hundred homes were being sold a month, with up to fifty sales being closed in the showroom at a time. With the first Levittown having already elevated the builders to icons, the second one evoked the greatest hyperbole yet. The New York Times called it “one of the most colossal acts of mortal creation.” The Saturday Evening Post wrote, “Bucolic Bucks County was jarred as it had not been since that other dour December day when word got around that Washington crossed the Delaware.” Observers marveled at the utopian planning. “There is no social strata in the community, and therefore no social upper crust,” read a community survey. “Everyone is socially on a level with everyone else, thus forms of discrimination associated with Society are eliminated.”

  After the first residents, John and Philomena Dougherty, moved into the Stonybrook portion of Levittown in June 1952, Bill Levitt vowed to send the woman a bouquet of flowers—roses, carnations, and orchids—every year on the anniversary of their move-in date. “Sure there’s a thrill in meeting a demand with a product no one else can,” he said. “But I’m not here just to build and sell houses. To be perfectly frank, I’m looking for a little glory too. I want to build a town to be proud of.”

  One hot summer day, the Wechslers pulled up to the muddy fields of Levittown with Biff barking out the window. They eagerly joined the line of other veterans at the showroom. After years of renting in New York, they were thrilled at the prospect of owning their own home at such a low cost. Lew and Bea eyed the model homes in the showroom and picked out the best one they could afford, the Levittowner.

  The home had everything, they marveled. A bedroom for each family member. A backyard for Biff. A fireplace open on both sides. And, best of all, thought Bea, a brand-new washing machine! So much for scrubbing clothes by hand on a board. They fawned over the community amenities—the pool, the playgrounds, the fruit trees. Even a shopping center was on its way. With Bea’s sister, Florence, and her family living in Levittown too, it would be like one big happy camp, with all of them together every day, and the cousins within biking distance.

  As they drove following the map to their new home, however, they realized that finding their address would be another story. Despite the glossy sales brochure, Levittown, they saw, was still very much a work in progress. Homes were half-built, lawns big muddy tracts. As they slowly rode toward the Dogwood section, they realized the roads even lacked street signs. It was like a Marx Brothers movie. They kept passing the same couples driving in circles with their maps looking for their homes. But when they finally pulled up to a tiny ranch home, second one in from the corner, marked 39 Deepgreen Lane, all they saw was paradise.

  The shared experience of pioneering imbued the neighborhood with a deep sense of community. The Wechslers became fast friends with their neighbors across the street, the Wertzes. George Wertz was a hardworking Lutheran steelworker and union man. He and Lew swapped stories about union protests, which Wertz too had participated in upstate. He and his wife had two daughters, who quickly pulled Katy into their front-yard games.

  The Wechslers also became close with the neighbors on the corner, thirty-five-year-old Irv and thirty-two-year-old Selma Mandel and their daughter, Ricky, who was Nick’s age. Irv was a drapery salesman and supplied all the new homes in the area. Down the block were Tina and Barney Bell and their three kids. Barney was from Texas and drove a truck for Coca-Cola, but was politically liberal and always there to lend a hand.

  While Lew was off at work at the DeLaval Steam Turbine Company in nearby Trenton, New Jersey, Bea enjoyed life at home with her neighbors and kids. It reminded them of the shows that were coming on television such as Father Knows Best and Ozzie and Harriet. The friendly milkman would show up in his truck and drop off ice-cold bottles, then give Bea and her kids a lift over to the swimming pool.

  After the Bronx, Katy and Nick relished the outdoorsy freedom and adventure. They roamed the half-built homes and teamed up with other kids on the block to build a fort outside their house. Katy was growing into a tough young girl, just like the Wechsler women before her, and would go to great lengths to ward off the tough kids in town. When a towering bully kid gave Nick a noogie on the spot of his polio-shot bruise, Katy let him have it until he backed off for good. “He’s bigger than us,” she told her brother in her New York accent, “but he’s a wimp!”

  On weekends, they’d spend time in their yard with other families, barbecuing and playing with Biff. Lew, always handy, embraced the do-it-yourself culture of the neighborhood—fixing up his house when he could. But, despite Abe Levitt’s rules and regulations, he drew the line at his lawn. Following his decades in the city, Lew just didn’t have the patience to clip, edge, and mow his grass. George Frazier, a fellow Levittowner with whom he carpooled to work, kept ribbing Lew about taking care of his lawn. Once after work, George even took Lew on a tour of his own well-manicured lot. “This is what a lawn is supposed to look like,” Frazier admonished Lew. It was too little too late. By the time Lew got back, his lawn had been restored to a perfect cut—courtesy of the Levitts, who left the bill for the work on his front door.

  This wouldn’t be the last time the Wechslers tangled with the Levitts. When the kids went to school in the fall of 1953, Bea took a job as a waitress in town. One morning a hunched older man came for lunch. It was Abe Levitt. He had an entourage of salespeople with him attending to his every need and request. To Bea’s terror, he sat at one of her tables. When she approached him, he reached into his coat and handed her his pocket watch. “Give this to the cook!” he demanded. “Tell him I want a three-minute egg! Not two minutes! Not four minutes! A three-minute egg.” Bea took the watch back to the cook and told him the story. The cook smiled and said, “Fuck him.”

  Even the Wechsler kids felt the sting of the town’s rules. One morning Katy and Nick ran out to see their newly constructed fort. It had been a work of passion, cobbled together from old lumber and roomy enough to house them, Biff, and even the neighborhood bully, who, since his smackdown by Katy, had become their friend. As they dashed out the door, however, they found the fort had been destroyed, torn down by construction crews to make way for more new homes coming in.

  “We should do something so that we always remember this,” the bully said, “so that we’ll always be in this club together.” Good idea, they agreed. They set the fallen fort on fire and watched it burn.

  No matter how much they enjoyed being pioneers in Levittown, the reality of Levitt’s plan could not escape them: Levittown was whites-only. Or close to it anyway. While Bea and Lew noticed a few families of color—Indian and Mexican—there were no blacks at all.

  In 1952, the Nation magazine sent a writer to Levittown, Pennsylvania, to investigate. “There’s something I want to ask you about that’s very important to me,” he said to a sales agent, who “lifted a reassuring hand” and replied, “You mean the talk of colored people living here? Listen, this is the point of the sale—just between you and me—we sell to whites only, mister.”

  In Levittown, New York, residents who fought against the policy quickly felt the wrath of the nation’s largest builder. After a family there, the Rosses, hosted an interracial playgroup for kids in both Levittown and the surrounding communities in 1950, Bill Levitt informed them that their lease would not be renewed. Once again, integrationists took up the fight. The NAACP defended the tenants, and the American Jewish Congress filed a brief asking the courts to consider “the dangers to our democratic way of life arising from residential segregation.”

  In June 1951, a crowd packed an auditorium at Hofstra College for a “Conference to End Discrimination in Levittown.” William Cotter, the African-American chair of the Committee to End Discrimination in Levittown, which
organized the event, wrote a letter appealing to attendees. “The Constitution says ‘yes’ . . . The Supreme Court says ‘yes’ . . . But William Levitt and Sons says ‘no,’ ” he wrote. “By openly refusing to rent or sell homes to Negroes, the Levitt organization has run counter to American democratic thought, and has condemned Levittown in the eyes of all thinking Americans who believe that now, as never before, the fullest expression of democracy is mandatory.” Cotter concluded, “Help us realize Levittown’s boast as ‘the Veterans’ paradise—for all.’ ”

  But it was to no avail. The Nassau County Supreme Court ruled that Levitt had the right to refuse renewal of the Rosses’ lease. He could throw out the parents, Adolph and Lillian Ross, and their two young children. On February 18, 1952, the night before the eviction, the Wech-sler’s hero, Jackie Robinson, joined protesters organized by the National Coalition of Christians and Jews to rally in support of the Levittown families. “Our world is changing,” Robinson told the crowd, “and today qualified persons of all colors and creeds are being given opportunities as never before in the business, professional, and sports worlds.” When asked if he supported the Rosses’ cause, Robinson said he was “wholeheartedly in favor of the actions of any group to blot out discriminatory practices.” And he added, “If Mr. Levitt and other organizations would stop and think whom they are hurting, perhaps things would be different.”

  Adolph Ross stood firm and said he would not leave until the Levitts agreed to “end this un-American discrimination against Negro people.” The next day, four hundred supporters stood defiantly in front of the Rosses’ house to ward off the evictors. They carried boxes of cake and placards of protest with phrases such as END DISCRIMINATION IN Levittown and PHONE LEVITT. Faced with such opposition, Levitt finally bowed, and the family was reluctantly allowed to remain. But the battles would continue.