I grew up in what political activist and sanctimonious Quaker Malvina Reynolds called ticky-tacky little boxes. So I figured I needed to read Edward Berenson’s “PERFECT COMMUNITIES: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia.” Edward, too, grew up ticky-tackily.
My childhood homes might have been the sort built by Bill Levitt after World War II (and by my father, who was a contractor about that time), but they were decidedly NOT in a typical beehive suburb. They were in small towns or in the countryside. One was a Cape Cod, one a ranch house.
And they weren’t tacky because they weren’t in a beehive formation. I hope.
But is this tacky?:
Well, it’s not tacky if you were a veteran coming home from World War II or the Korean “conflict” and desperately needed a place to live and raise a family in a high-value situation.
Developer Bill Levitt jumped into the gap and mass-produced on-the-spot communities – cities, really – at low cost. He did it throughout the northeast and Maryland and eventually beyond. The houses were (mostly!) sturdy and well-built, and most residents loved them.
Most importantly, they could afford them. They were a good deal.
But Berenson points out the fly in the soup, if that’s the expression. Levitt wouldn’t sell to Blacks.
A large part of “PERFECT COMMUNITIES” is about the racism of the postwar suburbs. They were uniformly inhospitable or unavailable to Blacks.
Levitt was a racist without being a racist but was a racist. Maybe. As laws and courts changed things, he begrudgingly opened up his communities.
But he was certainly not in the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement. He did what his overwhelmingly white veteran customers wanted, and kept his developments segregated.
This had the knock-on effect of making him more money. And what developer isn’t in the business to make money? They certainly aren’t in it to build critically-acclaimed domestic architecture. They build to a price point.
So should Levitt have pushed the racial integration boundaries? Yes. But dragging his feet was reality.
Levitt died penniless, a charity case patient in a hospital that he had years earlier helped to fund. He sold out to ITT, the master conglomerate merger hound of its day, in a very bad business decision. He loved his yacht – the third biggest private yacht in the world at the time – and his very non-Levittown estate. He loved drinking and partying and buying his wife jewelry.
So, in the end, no amount of money was enough for Bill Levitt anyway.
He would have had something more valuable at the end of his life if he had fought the times and built for all. And he would be even more fondly remembered today, even by songwriters.
