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Suburban Pioneers

By Geoffrey Mohan | Staff Writer

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AT THE TIME, no one could have known what the dust clouds rising from the Hempstead Plains would mean. Not the young veteran Herb Kalisman, who regarded them from a train in the Hicksville station as he headed from his rented Brooklyn attic to the relief of a Suffolk County beach.

``I asked the conductor, `What is that?''' Kalisman recalled. ``He said, `This guy is out there building all these houses.' I said, `Who the hell would live out there?'

``A few years later,'' Kalisman said, ``I was one of the who-the-hells.''

Ernie Knoell Jr., the burly son of a farmer, stood amid that dust and watched with mild bemusement as wood skeletons rose from the neighboring fields while he cut spinach on his father's farm in the summer of 1947.

``We worked hours sometimes out in the field at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning, in the dark, and you'd hear these guys hammering across the street,'' the 73-year-old Farmingdale resident said. ``You'd relax after supper, and these guys were still hammering at 10 o'clock at night.''

The full import of that hammering wasn't even clear to the charismatic dreamer William Jaird Levitt, his subdued architect brother, Alfred, and the family patriarch, Abraham, who were building 2,000 Spartan, look-alike boxes on old farmland beside the Wantagh Parkway in a place called Island Trees.

What started in 1947 as affordable rental homes for house-hungry World War II veterans would mutate rapidly over the next four years. By 1951 a complex of 17,447 homes blanketed the farms of Island Trees, spilling over into Wantagh, Hicksville and Westbury.

Levittown, as it came to be known, would help usher in the era of home ownership on a massive scale for a class that previously held only the faintest dream of a house in the country.

It would help transform the building industry from a piecemeal, custom enterprise into an assembly-line industry and create a template for the way the American middle class would settle into the second half of the 20th Century.

Yet by most accounts, Levittown was an ad-hoc revolution that surprised even William Levitt, who found himself at the juncture where unprecedented social, political and financial currents crossed as America came out of World War II.

``There was an amazing, almost voodoo-like combination of circumstances that made the Levittown projects work,'' said Peter Hales, an art historian from the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies postwar suburbs. ``. . . It was almost a can't-lose phenomenon.''

Squeezed first by the hard times of the Great Depression and later the military needs of the war, developers had built precious little since the real-estate market crashed in the 1930s. Young men and women then went to fight fascism, but 12 million GIs came home to live in attics, basements and Quonset huts.

The houses were their reward. But as the Cold War replaced the World War, they took on added symbolism. Defeating communism in Europe meant making capitalism shine here. A single-family house in the suburbs, fully equipped with the best appliances, became a patriotic mission, and Levittown its best example.

``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 Harry Truman pleaded during his 1948 campaign.

Truman and Congress unleashed the largest amount of financing ever made available to the building industry -- tens of billions of dollars that gave an entire generation a boost into the middle class.

Levitt played these forces like a conductor. He pitted postwar patriotism against unions and political machines, red-baited his enemies, banned all but white residents and courted power brokers to convert his colony of renters into a community of homeowners on an unprecedented scale.

Levittown happened through luck, fear, financial aid and force of will. It'll be 50 years on Wednesday since the first 300 families moved into the Cape Cods clustered in Island Trees.

Five decades later, Levittown has become the most studied, scorned and mythologized community in America -- idealized by some as a planned utopia, pilloried by others as the grandfather of the sprawling conformity that came to mark modern suburbs.

History shows neither is entirely true.

The Levitts, especially financier-salesman William Levitt, draw credit for inventing suburbia, assembly-line homes and cellarless houses.