The House That Levitt Built

More than a decade before the first Levittown slab was poured, 24-year-old Alfred Levitt took a leave from the family firm to watch legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright work his magic. It was 1936, and every day for 10 months, Levitt would head to the Great Neck site where the designer was building publisher Ben Rehbuhn's house, a sweeping horizontal brick-and-glass structure that echoed Wright's earlier Prairie School designs. Alfred drank in the details, riveted by the foppish Wright's utopian theories (he believed form follows esthetics) yet repulsed by his profligacy (nine out of 10 bricks delivered to the Rehbuhn site were rejected as imperfect). Alfred loved the openness of the plan. The unity between interior and landscape. The signature fireplace, which served as the focal point of the house.

Thirteen years later, when Alfred, his brother, Bill, and their father, Abraham, turned out the first Levittown ranch -- the house that would so embody suburbia that the Smithsonian Institution is still hunting for a pristine version for the museum -- it was clear that Alfred had adapted many of Wright's ideals to his own, less affluent audience, all the while defying Wright's sense of elitism. Alfred, the self-taught student of architecture, explained, ``There's no point in trying to do something unless it can be handed out to the great masses of people as a cultural increase.'' Architectural daring is not the first concept most people would apply to Levittown. But the $7,990 ranch owes as much to Alfred's lofty dreams as it does to Bill's fiscal realism. The elimination of the basement and garage was the most obvious concession to President Harry Truman's moves to use federal financing and material allocations to keep house prices less than $10,000. But the two-sided fireplace in the kitchen, the Thermopane windows in the living room and the built-in storage units in the bedrooms were among the elements that reflected Alfred's passion for architectural and technological innovation. And it is both money and theory -- not one or the other -- that explain why a Levitt house looks like a Levitt house. ``We don't follow a recipe,'' Alfred said. ``We build by taste, like a good cook.'' He wasn't exaggerating. The Levitts created the 800-square-foot ranch by trial and error, building and razing a model 30 times at the then-hefty cost of $50,000. In the process, Alfred drew on all sorts of muses, from Wright to the sliding-glass windows at a White Castle hamburger stand (the spark for using double-glazed Thermopane) to the ancient Romans' diversion of hot-water springs under stone floors (which inspired the radiant heat coils embedded in Levittown's concrete slabs). Of course, unlike Wright's custom-made houses, Alfred's relied on standardized interiors, preassembled components and armies of unskilled workers to pull it all together. Psychologically, at least, the key was the ranch design itself -- something of a misnomer, since the floor plan of a 1949 Levitt ranch was essentially a 1947 Levitt cape rotated 90 degrees side-to-front. No matter. To most Americans, ranches were the epitome of modernity, and in this increasingly prosperous postwar era, everyone clamored to be modern. Of the 1.25 million houses built in the U.S. in 1950, virtually all were ranches. ``After the war, people were thinking about how great things were in California, and so they started importing the California good life,'' said architect and author Lester Walker, a former professor at City College of New York. ``And the style of house that meant the California good life -- the beautiful, relaxed good life -- was the California ranch.'' Culturally, the ranch was where porch society gave way to patio society. Where the formal dining room gave way to the barbecue and the TV dinner. Where white gloves gave way to pedal pushers. And the Levitts -- who'd pared the ranch to living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and expandable attic -- zealously embraced this growing informality. Nowhere was it more apparent than in the kitchen. With the twist of a blueprint, Alfred had upended generations of tradition, shifting the kitchen from the back of the house to the front. And though the reasons were economic -- it was cheaper to route the sewer pipe out the front -- the results were revolutionary: It made both kitchen and housewife the centerpiece of the home. In a 1949 ad, the Levitts boasted that the kitchen ``belongs'' up front, ``where it's just a step for your wife to answer the door, and where she can see who's there and what's going on.'' ``This was a new era of togetherness,'' said Barbara M. Kelly, curator of the Long Island Studies Institute at Hofstra University and author of ``Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown.'' Of course, she added, togetherness wasn't always a good thing. ``No one ever asked if a woman would want to be alone and not at the beck and call of others. It was just assumed she would have no possible reason for privacy.'' Even in this pre-feminist era, togetherness had a price: Everything from the dirty laundry to crumbs on the kitchen table was on display to anyone who walked through the kitchen door (which was also the front door). Alfred acknowledged the problem. ``The milkman and the boss coming to dinner will both use this door,'' he said. And he even tried to temper the loss of privacy by installing a pivoting wall unit that could be used to close off the kitchen. But it was too late. The Levitt house was predicated on openness. And the ``central pivot'' of the plan was the two-sided fireplace that faced both living room and kitchen -- a ``control station,'' as Alfred called it, ``from which the housewife can easily reach any part of the house.'' A spot where she could look over to the bedrooms. Up to the attic. Or contentedly at her guests as they roasted hot dogs on the open hearth, which Levittowners say they often did. Of course, by today's bigger-is-better standards, these open spaces were rather closed. The living room measured just 12 by 19 feet, the kitchen 10 by 10. But Alfred, again borrowing from Wright, wanted to reinforce the illusion of airiness. Calculating that glass was no more expensive than the 25-cents-per-running foot that it cost to build a traditional wall, he installed 19 feet of Thermopane windows along the back of the house. Sitting there, in an era before above-ground pools and 6-foot fences, the vista was endless, or so it seemed to a generation that had spent the immediate postwar years cramped in their in-laws' attics. ``The thing about the window is how it brings the outside in,'' said Vivian Montgomery, who moved into her Levitt ranch in 1951. ``You can sit here looking out at your garden, and you don't realize how small the room is.'' What intrigued Alfred about the glass wall, however, wasn't just the view. Ever the dreamer, he worshipped new technology. And he saw Thermopane -- which most Americans didn't discover until the 1973 Arab oil embargo sent fuel prices soaring -- as an obvious way to slash heating bills. The Levitts also bypassed plaster walls in favor of lighter, cheaper Sheetrock, which could be hung without skilled craftsmen. They opted for copper heating coils in the concrete slabs instead of baseboard units. And they sheathed the house in 32-by-96-inch Colorbestos sheets developed for Levitt by the Johns-Manville Corp., when they couldn't find standard shingles that wouldn't crack. Not surprisingly, the choices often resulted from battles between Bill and Alfred, tugs-of-war between finances and idealism. No argument was fiercer than the one over the garage. ``I had to fight father, brother and the head of the sales department on the garage business,'' said Alfred, who opposed the garage, but ultimately agreed to install a carport. It wasn't the Levitts' only mix of art and commerce. The kitchenful of sparkling new appliances -- Bendix washer, G.E. refrigerator and stove -- was a radical (and expensive) idea but a sure-fire marketing appeal to an audience that wouldn't have had spare cash for housewares. The pre-assembled white metal Tracy cabinets were not just trendy -- even the White House kitchen had them -- but faster and cheaper to install than wood kitchen cabinets, which had to be measured, painted, sanded and painted again. And the black asbestos floor tiles were plentiful and cheap, even if they did crumble after a while. In the end, Alfred never said if he felt the Levitt ranch matched his Wrightian esthetic -- critics, who have blasted the house as derivative, would certainly doubt it. But at the 1952 convention of the American Institute of Architects, this nonarchitect talked about his Levittown efforts to meet, and elevate, public taste. ``Without even a trial balloon you guess in advance just how far you could push people and persaude [people] to take either open planning or living in a fishbowl ...,'' he said. ``But that awareness on the part of the mass builder, awareness that the public will be persuaded, can be pushed, not too fast, but each year they can be pulled along a little bit more.''