In the first year of peace, more than two million couples were married. By 1950, 21 million babies had been born in a seemingly endless baby boom. I came out of service out of the Navy in 46 and I wanted to go and marry the girl that was writing the three letters a week to me for four years and she lived in Floral Park. I had a tavern there and I moved in with the family. family.
There was a mother and father, her sister and brother, and myself, and a baby coming on after a year. Despite weeks and months of house hunting, some three million married couples throughout the country today are are still unable to establish homes of their own. When you look at the books that you read in school, you read of people in a house.
You never read of people living in an apartment, which we did, and trees. It sounds, and it's all new. You know, it was really something that you would like to have.
I guess I don't have to tell you, Mrs. Blandings, what a woman's touch could do to a place like this. Yes sir, couple coats of paint, that'll point it up here and there. Of course, we wanted our own house, and after what, was it two years? Yeah, two years in furnished rooms, and if you could see some of the dumps we lived in, it was really...
Remember that attic room? Yes. In Jamaica? Yuck. I've got to have a home.
No one is to blame. Everyone is to blame. There's been a lag in home construction for more than 15 years.
In 1945, Americans needed 5 million new low-cost homes. And they needed them right away. The elusive dream of home ownership would soon be realized by a man about to fulfill a dream of his own and invent a new phenomenon, suburbia.
Bill Levitt, as a young man working with the Seabees in World War II, has this brilliant idea, taking some of the techniques he's seeing right then and there in World War II, building airstrips, putting up housing for GIs, and bringing them back to America for ordinary people. He's sitting there at night with his pals in the Pacific in World War II and saying, you know, what do you want when you get home? Well, I want a house and a car. Bill Levitt's special genius was figuring out how to mass-produce the American dream. We first came to see that property where they were going to build.
It was potato farms, and it stretched like from here to eternity. You would see concrete foundations, nothing but concrete, with the heat in. And then down the road...
there we were in the midst of all the dust was a frame job going on and then down on the dust was where he completed was the sheathing going and then down the road a bit and it was like putting your clothes on from your socks on first you know and then putting your your underwear on and the shirt and finally way down on the other end was a finished for the finished house and yet you could see how it grew Before the war, the average contractor built five houses a year. In Levittown, Long Island, they built 36 houses a day. A grand total of 17,450.
Designed for a family of four, Levitt's basic Cape Cod sold for a minimum down payment at a price most people could afford. I think there's a great ad in there, Mr. Veteran, you're a lucky guy. You know, you can buy this house with $100 down. The first day that they were going to sell them, the lines were...
I mean, people started lining up 72 hours before the houses went on sale. Even Leavitt was stunned. A second Leavittown in Pennsylvania was every bit as successful as the Long Island Leavittown. Everyone, it seemed.
wanted a Bill Levitt home. I beg your pardon, sir. Would you mind telling me who you are and where you're from?
I'm David Poole from Atlantic City, New Jersey. And would you tell me why you're moving here to Levittown? Well, I'm working in this area now, and I've looked the houses over, and I think it's a fine place to raise a family, so I decided to buy one. Very good, sir.
My house was a little Cape Cod cottage with a trellis over the door and one window on either side, and it was... It was four rooms, nice kitchen, an eat-in kitchen, decent-sized living room, two small bedrooms, and a bathroom. And it had doors that I could close and open and close and open with. We had always lived in furnished rooms.
We had no privacy whatsoever, nothing. It was perfect for a young couple. And we had a Bendix in the kitchen. That's right, Bendix washing machine in the kitchen. First time I ever saw a washing machine, I think.
And we fell in love because that washing machine was underneath the ceiling. stairs you know and before that when we had the baby you know it was like 16 17 diapers a day to wash boil them on the stove and needless to say the family wanted to get rid of us too they didn't need a baby that was crying in that you know we tight quarters You know, and to have a house of your own, man, that was the way we felt, you know. After the Depression, all this has come on, so it was kind of a gift from heaven, you know, you found these wonderful houses to move in. And the best thing about it, I guess, was our independence.
It was the first time we were away from our parents, completely independent. We did what we wanted when we wanted. Like any kids, they wanted to be on their own.
And we were. And we could start our family. That's right.
and the rapport between neighbors was, at first, was very good. Excellent, in fact. They were all in the same boat as us.
They were all first starting out, mostly young like us, and just starting with their family and their first house, too. The new middle-class families of Levittown had one other thing in common. They were all white.
I walked up to the salesperson and I said to him, we're very interested in your house and we'd like an application. And I remember what he said to me. He looked at me and said, it's not me, but the management has not as yet decided whether he's going to sell these houses to Negroes or not. And, uh...
You can't believe it. You really thought you had it made. You... You know, everything is falling into place. Well, I'd like you to conceive that...
somebody telling you that there's no recourse telling you that openly and outright like that bill levitt saw himself as a home builder not as a social engineer and he refused to sell the blacks there were court cases against him and the fact is he was all too typical of what existed in real estate in america in those days and so in believing that you did not have to and should not have to sell to people who are not white. Ladies and gentlemen, this is William Levitt, who heads the largest home building firm in the world. Bill Levitt would become one of the richest men in America by providing architectural, not racial, equality.
Unlike anything we ever encountered before. This is one of four models which are now being built throughout Levittown. The four models vary slightly in overall design, but each has the same number of rooms. I think it was that sense that Americans really did like the comfort of having what the other guy had, but yet they could put a little fence around it and say, this is mine.
And that's really a particular American genius, is to say, this is yours, this is mine, but we're still all the same. Did you get all your trees yet? Or is this the first one?
An army of Levitt imitators carried the housing revolution across the country. By 1955, three out of every four houses built were built in Levitt's town. style subdivisions.
I think Levittown represented to a lot of city dwellers a dream that had eluded them all through the depression and the war, which was to have a place somewhere with a patch of green in the back. where their kids were going to be able to live better than they did. And to that extent, it fulfilled that particular vision.
To another whole group of us growing up in cities, Levittown was a surrender. You know, that was exactly what we didn't want to be. To us, going to Levittown would be like going to Attica. Its critics said that Levittown was little more than a voluntary prison, a multitude of uniform houses lined up.
at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless waste. What the critics said did not matter to the homeowners of Levittown. They had built sturdy new lives in sturdy new houses, and wrapped their newborn into the nest. What worried many Americans was not the conformity of their own lives, but Communist Russia.