Levittown Today

The John Ferri family of Gray Lane enjoys a Memorial Day basketball game. Cousin John Perrazzo takes a shot. (Newsday Photo/John Paraskevas)

Edgar Daniels Jr. sits in the back yard of a house once owned by his in-laws, and points toward the alphas and omegas of a Levittown life.

A few blocks north of his home is Hook Lane, where his father and mother moved in 1949, when Edgar was just 14 months old.

Coming back south on Wantagh Avenue is the red brick First Presbyterian Church of Levittown, where Edgar Daniels Jr. exchanged vows almost 25 years ago with fellow Levittowner Jessica Benoit.

And closer still to his Fams Court house is St. John of Jerusalem Cemetery, with its headstones of original German farmers dating from the mid-19th Century. His parents, Edgar and Pat Daniels, have a plot, and one day will be buried there.

``The point is, lives are lived here,'' Daniels said. ``And they're almost the same lives that were lived before.''

History shows through in overlapping layers in Levittown, like the renovations to its houses. And like the houses, the lives lived here have grown more complex. They are not little boxes, and they are not all the same. Some are stoically unaltered. Some show the ravages of time. Some have been remade in another image. But all in their own way betray the original contours of an American dream that was sold wholesale here 50 years ago.

Levittown still stands apart as a young town with more children than its neighbors. But Levittown also has grandparents in large numbers for the first time, more homes with no fathers, and more children left in day care while their parents work to stay in the middle class. As elsewhere, the days of the nuclear family and low-cost mortgages have receded into history like the nickel telephone call.

This sprawling community still provides the port of entry for newcomers to suburbia, some of whom also are new to America. Very few, however, are non-Caucasian, a legacy, some believe, of Levittown's days of racial exclusion. Those who don't fit that old mold -- Asians, blacks and some Hispanics -- account for just 3 percent of the 44,046 people who live there.

Yet Levittown still stands as a backdrop for politicians who seek to rub elbows with the middle class, where people work hard, pay high mortgages, bemoan their taxes and save their dreams for their children.

To Daniels, it is unfair to excavate his hometown for answers to modern suburban maladies.

The 49-year-old teacher, who grew up lifeguarding at the local pools, knows the Hook Street Gang no longer plays baseball against the Gray Lane Gang in the unfenced back yards where Levittown's youths were pastured. He sees the strip malls of Wantagh Boulevard and Hempstead Turnpike cling like strangler vines over the winding lanes that made Levittown special.

But Levittown fulfilled a need, and still does, regardless of what has crept up around it, Daniels said.

``If the question is, are strip malls nice? No,'' Daniels said. ``No, they're not. And if the question is, do we have too many malls? Yeah, I think we do. I'm not exactly sure what was supposed to happen in its place. I don't know. I honestly don't know.''

Edgar and Jessica Daniels know Levittown was good to them, though. They raised a son and a daughter here, and have lived only in Levittown -- first in garden apartments built on the former South Village Green, then in a Cape Cod on Rock Lane, which they sold a couple years ago to the man who landscaped their lawn.

``These are people who work hard, and they work hard for a reason,'' Daniels said. ``They still see this as a refuge for family and a good place for family . . . It's almost like the ghosts come back. You can see yourself over and over and over again.''

To look at Levittown today is to leaf through a neighbor's family album, full of images at once familiar and strange. These are the snapshots.

A Graying Community

IN THE LIGHT of a late-summer morning, a yellow school bus stands at the curb of a building on Center Lane that once was Sunrise Market, and disgorges a dozen senior citizens. They file cheerfully into a gymnasium-sized meeting room, passing a nursery where an equal number of pre-kindergarten children sit at tiny desks while their parents are at work.

James Edmondson -- executive director of the Yours, Ours, Mine Community Center, which occupies this former village-green store -- hustles in behind them, on his way to a meeting upstairs where he'll find out if the center can get financing to buy the house next door because there isn't room for everyone anymore at the center. He'll get the OK to make a bid before the day is over.

Once a meeting place for restless or wayward teens, Yours, Ours, Mine has expanded its mission to serve an increasing population of senior citizens, from those who just want an inexpensive lunch and a game of Po-Keno -- numbering 170 -- to the 35 or so in the early phases of Alzheimer's disease.

Levittown's 65-and-older population has nearly quadrupled from a slim 3 percent at the end of the 1950s. At the same time, the median age in Levittown is younger than the county average -- an indication that its statistical profile is being tugged at both ends, by the old and the very young.

Nowhere is this more evident than at Yours, Ours, Mine.

On this particular day, there are two dozen seniors, including Charlotte Scheerer, 86, who lives in a Levitt ranch on the Hicksville side of the original development.

``I wouldn't be here except I've got to get out of the house,'' Scheerer said, sliding a red chip over a 2 of diamonds. ``I get so lonely.''

Scheerer moved into the ranch on Dec. 23, 1959, with her husband, a Sinclair Oil truck driver who died in 1990.

With her husband laid up by a back injury, Charlotte went to work for W.T. Grant & Co. discount stores in Freeport and Merrick for the next 34 years, raising four children.

``I have a whole drawer of stock I lost because they went bankrupt,'' Scheerer said. ``And now I'm living on Social Security.''

Social Security and a small pension from Grant barely cover a mortgage and bills. But there is little alternative. Scheerer can drive to see her son in Westbury, her daughter in Bayside and her husband's grave in Pinelawn Cemetery. And she can come to the community center when she is lonely -- once a week, she says.

Her friend, Frances Frey, comes more often. The 78-year-old widow has lived in a Levitt Cape Cod on Peony Lane for 25 years, and her situation is nearly identical -- lonely, financially strapped and unsure of her alternatives.

Frey's husband, Joseph, a laborer in an Astoria factory who was laid off after 40 years, died pensionless 10 years ago. She has four more years of mortgage payments to make.

``I can't get along, either,'' Frey says. ``My boys help me out. I want to move, but where can I go? . . . I pray to God I'll die here. My husband sacrificed so hard for that house.''

By 2 p.m., Frey and Scheerer are gone, and the center's staff hurriedly moves partitions into the room for the streams of school-age children who arrive an hour later for after-school care.

Their parents retrieve them at about 5:30 p.m., as do the parents who left their preschool children earlier in the day. At this hour, the parking lot the Levitts designed for this village green is crowded with cars from new Chryslers to a battered and rusty Ford pickup.

``When I open up at seven, I have cars out there waiting,'' said Vivian Jimenez, director of child care. ``There's a drastic need out there. I have people on a waiting list.''

Eighty percent of the nursery-school children have no father at home, and the rest wave goodbye as both parents leave for work, Jimenez said.

Single parents live in more than a quarter of Levitt houses, which were designed around the nuclear family. That's well above the county average, and more than a two-fold increase since 1970.

Just about the rest of Levittown lives on two incomes -- 60 percent, about 5 percentage points above the county average.

Ramona DeRienzo, a 41-year-old single parent who works as a waitress in a Huntington diner, comes in to retrieve her 11-year-old son, Charlie, at 5:45 p.m.

She pays $96 a month for the small after-school class for Charlie, a $22.50 taxi fare to bring him from school and the county foots the rest. ``I can't make it on one pay,'' she says, ushering Charlie and his trumpet case into a beat-up Monte Carlo. ``Even if it was $10 an hour, that's like six-hundred dollars every couple weeks and the rent is eight-hundred-twenty-five dollars.

``If it wasn't for this place, I don't know what I'd do.''

Levittown's Changing Face

LIKE DERIENZO, the Collazos were renters once, with dreams of owning a house. But to buy their 1951 ranch on Horn Lane 43 years after it was built, Dinorah and Felipe Collazo -- two people whose skin color would have kept them out of Levittown 50 years ago -- struggled for years.

Houses that originally sold for $7,990 now fetch $162,600 on average, and have inflated at a slightly higher rate than the county average. But they're still $15,000 cheaper than the average Nassau house.

Dinorah, who was granted political asylum after her husband was killed in El Salvador's civil war, scrubbed floors at a Pizza Hut, cleaned houses, and swept floors at a beauty salon. Felipe, a native of Puerto Rico who works in a Jewish deli in Plainview, sold a house he had in Puerto Rico and sold his share of a small social club.

``I worked like an animal, but I had a goal, and I started to try to achieve it little by little,'' Dinorah Collazo said.

Now, Dinorah, a 39-year old refugee with a computer degree, owns a beauty salon in Hempstead, a house in America's quintessential suburb, and has rescued herself and her daughter from the life of violence and destitution. To say she is proud of her tidy corner plot in Levittown would be a gross understatement.

The Collazos are among 4.9 percent of Levittown's population that is of Hispanic origin, a number that has risen steadily over the past three decades. Asians -- including Indians and Pakistanis -- account for 2.6 percent of the population, an amount that tripled since 1980.

Blacks trail, accounting for 0.4 percent -- four times as many as any previous decade, but still only a tiny portion of the population.

``There has always been a large Hispanic presence in Levittown, but primarily in rentals,'' said Eric S. Rosenblum, a real-estate attorney who closes upwards of 400 Levittown sales in a year. ``There are more Hispanics coming in, in terms of purchasers, but I don't see it as a significant number. There are some Asians coming in -- fewer than the Hispanics -- and there are still no blacks coming in.''

Rosenblum closed the deal on the Collazo house, which they bought for $136,000 at the end of 1994, a price he said was still typical for Levittown.

Like other minority families who are changing the face of Levittown, the Collazos stood out and struggled to fit in.

``For us at the start, it was painful because the area is only Italian and Jews,'' Dinorah said. ``There were no Latinos there.''

Dinorah recalled a nearby house they bid on in person, only to have it inexplicably taken off the market. Later, it was offered again, and sold.

Anything could explain that, Collazo admitted. But there were other signals that make her uncomfortable.

Marco Berrios, Dinorah's 21-year-old nephew who also lives in the house, has a dark complexion and a hip-hop haircut. He was greeted by racial taunts and a fistfight on his first day of school at Division High School three years ago.

``I came here in early junior year and my first day I had two fights,'' said Berrios, a freshman student at the State College of Technology at Farmingdale. ``It was definitely racial . . . I got a lot of that `We don't want you around here' type of thing. As time went on and I got myself into the sports department, they accepted me.

``Now I go to local bars and say, `Hey, what's up? What are you doing after high school?' and it's like nothing happened.''

Since buying their home, the Collazos put $12,000 into a new kitchen and $15,000 into repairs to the exterior of their house, a pale yellow ranch on a corner lot.

Collazo shows off her property with the same pride that marked Levittown's earlier pioneers. ``Levittown is a very peaceful place,'' she said. ``There aren't any troubles. It's a very clean area.''

Yesenia Larios, Collazo's 15-year-old daughter, had little of the trouble her cousin faced, Collazo said, because she is lighter-complected. Yesenia attends Douglas MacArthur High School, where she takes one English-as-a-Second-Language course and a load of regular classes taught in English.

``Fifteen years ago we had five ESL students,'' School Superintendent Herman Sirois said. ``Now we have 280. So, it's quite a growth.''

``We're not an integrated community,'' Sirois said. ``It's changed somewhat in terms of Asian or Spanish-speaking, but it hasn't crossed the real color line. How that all happens or why -- it's pretty much outside the school.''

Yards of Faded Dreams

THE EPPLE HOUSE on Cross Lane shelters two generations of Levittowners -- one that could afford a house 38 years ago, and one that can't today.

The first generation, Donald and Margaret Epple, bought a nearly immaculate 10-year-old ranch in 1959 for $12,300 -- at the time a bit of a stretch for Donald, a union pipefitter making less than $3 an hour.

When it came time for Epple's youngest son, Kenneth, to search out a house five years ago, Levittown was out of range for a family with just one salary -- the same kind that moved in by the thousands in Levittown's early years.

So Donald Epple tore the roof from his house, hired contractors and, $60,000 later, built a legal three-bedroom father-son apartment for his 33-year-old son, his daughter-in-law and their children -- now numbering three.

Today, it's as difficult to find the outlines of the original 1949 ranch as it is to find the kind of bargain that it represented 50 years ago.

``Affordable?'' Kenneth Epple asks sarcastically. ``After the war, yeah. I never even tried, with the prices. I looked at an apartment close to the firehouse and I just laughed at the person. They wanted $750 for the upstairs of a basic Levitt house.''

The Town of Hempstead legalized so-called mother-daughter apartments and two-family senior residents in Levittown -- effectively allowing homeowners to add a kitchen and divide their homes if the tenant is related or if the owner of the house is 62 or older.

Since 1992, when the law went into effect, the town has granted 58 applications for both types of apartments, according to Hempstead Town spokeswoman Marlene Kastleman.

In that time, the town also fielded complaints about 234 suspected multiple-family houses, she said. More than half -- 124 -- have been settled, mostly by ordering homeowners to remove the illegal kitchens that define a separate living quarters.

``The rest are either in court or under investigation or we can't obtain access,'' Kastleman said.

The Epples, however, are following the rules scrupulously, going as far as submitting photographs of Kenneth and his family to town officials, though only photos of the house are required.

Still, the combined Epple family now faces a much higher school-tax bill -- more than $5,000 a year - because of the higher assessed value of the home due to the alterations. Taxes have been the bane of Levittown's history. With virtually no industry to tax, homeowners bear most of the cost of schooling. The district became a poster child for this quandary when it led a suit in which 27 New York districts demanded more aid from Albany to bring low-tax-base districts to par with wealthier neighbors. The state Court of Appeals rejected the argument in 1982, ending an eight-year battle.

So taxes on houses like the Epple residence continue to rise.

After moving into the house in 1959 as its fourth owner, Epple finished off one room of the attic, and put on a garage. He and his wife raised three boys that way.

Kenneth followed in his father's footsteps -- as Donald had followed in his own father's -- and works as an apprentice steamfitter for the same company as his father. More than a third of Levittown's work force labors in blue-collar jobs, compared to 27 percent countywide.

With three children, ages 7, 5 and 6 months, Kenneth Epple's dream of a house has faded. ``To tell you the truth, I can't see it,'' he says. ``Not with the three kids.''

Home Again

KRISTINE O'MALLEY has come home again. After 11 years in Brooklyn, the 32-year-old artist moved into a Cape Cod on Pasture Lane, where she grew up, and where her mother grew up before her. A marital breakup and the prospect of raising children in Brooklyn have brought her back to the place she once called a cultural vacuum.

O'Malley is rediscovering things like driveways, and shopping carts with baby seats that you can take out into the parking lot. There are the pools, and story hour at the library. Mostly, there's leaving the kids with her mother, Hope Spradlin, just a couple houses away. It all comes without a fee.

``It's still not Lincoln Center,'' said O'Malley, ``but there's a lot to be had with nothing.''

Back in her teens, when she was in with the out crowd of the theater clique at Division Avenue High School, ``It just seemed so narrow. I used to say this might as well be Ohio,'' O'Malley said. ``I had my problems with it as a teenager. I felt that it was a little too provincial, a little too homogeneous.

``But after I moved away, I realize that there was a lot of positive things here that as a teenager don't mean anything to you,'' she said. ``Raising kids and a great library. I mean that means very little to you when you're 16, 17.''

O'Malley's pastel paintings based on photographs of Levittown have been in local museums, and have been made into a calendar. She calls them photo-hyper-realism.

Some are blatantly nostalgic. In one, she shows her grandparents, Robert and Grace Coe, with her mother and aunt as children. Behind them is a row of look-alike Cape Cods. Robert Coe is in his Army uniform.

Others segue into slightly darker takes on the domestic scene -- ominous colors, exaggerated figures and doll-like postures that tease toward the image of Levittown as stiff and conforming.

``When I was little I used to do watercolors of Norman Rockwell paintings, and used to sketch all the time,'' O'Malley said. ``The stuff I have in there is very reminiscent and nostalgic, and borderline schmaltz. And it would be schmaltz if I didn't grow up here. It's valid because of my background.''

In one of her emblematic Levittown pieces, O'Malley shows six giant children of different ethnic backgrounds squatting and playing with Levitt houses. It's the multiracial future of Levittown, she said.

``Where I lived, in Clinton Hill [Brooklyn], it was like the UN, and I liked that,'' O'Malley said. ``Levittown is just a monolith, which isn't a good thing.''

Even with a fashion-design degree from Pratt Institute and a state arts grant behind her, O'Malley finds it hard to convince people that Levittown can produce good art.

``It's a real detriment to have this address,'' O'Malley said. ``Even on the North Shore, if I market my work, I'll get a post-office box somewhere. People don't want to come to Levittown to get their portrait done, unfortunately.''

The renegade daughter of the suburbs who once cut school to hang out in Greenwich Village now keeps her garbage cans tidy. She mows the lawn. She fits in, on the outside.

And when O'Malley sketches Levittown, she sees both abiding values and kitsch, stability and rigidity. It is what it is: Houses. Suburbia. Shopping malls. Families.

``Obviously, I love the place or I wouldn't have come back,'' she said. ``I don't think Levittown is perfect. Not by any means. It still largely has one viewpoint. But it's still a great place. I think you have to be able to poke fun. You just can't take yourself that seriously. You just can't.''

The Lost World

COMING HOME again was trickier for Joe Meehan.

On a weekend in mid-July, Meehan drove down from Connecticut to attend a reunion of the first classes to graduate from Levittown Memorial High School. Most were goodbye babies, conceived as World War II got under way.

With his old flame beside him, Meehan headed from the reunion hotel in Melville back to the town where he grew up. They wound up staring at the boarded-up windows in the North Village Green, where Meehan had worked as a soda jerk at a time when it was busy with the wives of veterans trailing toddlers.

``We sat and stared at the window that was boarded up,'' Meehan said. ``We said, `What a waste.'''

The North Village Green, the first of seven shopping and recreation hubs the Levitts designed as a kind of town square within walking distance of most houses, has suffered over the years. The South Village Green fared so badly it was torn down and converted into garden apartments. The main supermarket at Center Lane's village green succumbed to competition and the bad image created by teens who hung out there. Only the greens on main thoroughfares have truly prospered, and these days most people drive to them.

Meehan headed to Hempstead Turnpike, as most Levittowners always did. He tried to find Jahn's Ice Cream Parlor, and the Levittown roller rink. But nothing answered to its name. It was Staples now, and Rockbottom. Times Square Stores, Sears and Mays were Kmart, King Kullen and the Tri-County Flea Market.

Meehan, who lives in Salisbury, Conn., and is an editor of two photography publications, tried to remember shortcuts through town. But the paths in his mind didn't match those around him. Nor did the people behind the fences that weren't supposed to be there. Everything looked familiar, yet everything was so different. He was a stranger, and got an outsider's treatment.

``There's a whole different attitude now,'' he said afterwards. ``I almost got run over. I got lost, totally lost.''

Howdy, Neighbor

EACH SUMMER, Levittowners embark on a block-by-block restoration of the world Meehan could not find. On any given weekend, there are a handful of block parties scattered over its thousand lanes.

Pinetree Lane has held them for most of its 50 years, starting Oct. 13, 1947, less than two weeks after the first 300 pioneers moved into this section.

Just shy of 50 years later, there is a pig roasting on a spit on one end of the street, while a dozen teens and twenty-somethings loft a volleyball across a pink-bordered net strung between a basketball backstop and an antique gaslight street lamp.

Three generations of the Kiesecker family are arrayed on the driveway of the home that Fred, a former bakery truck driver, and Florence Kiesecker, both 81, moved into in 1955.

The yellow Cape Cod with black shutters is almost the same as it was when they moved in, except it is flanked by a garage, the lawn is green, the shrubbery mature, and the children grown with families of their own.

There is a flagpole just off the sidewalk, spiking the right front corner of the Kiesecker lawn. Almost 50 years ago, Fred Kiesecker put it up with his father's help. Six months ago, someone swiped it. Four neighbors bought replacements. One of the replacements now stands on the same spot.

It's a small gesture, but one laden with meaning in a town striving to hold onto a sense of itself as tight-knit and sharing.

``One thing about Levittown is neighbors take care of each other,'' Barbara Kiesecker Klink said. ``I moved to New Jersey, and in my neighborhood, I know maybe three people.''

If Levittown works as a community, despite the sprawl and the six-lane roads crossing through it, it works block by block. There are probably more block parties held every summer in Levittown than any other community on Long Island. A quarter of the block-party permits issued in Hempstead Town are for Levittown postal addresses.

The Kiesecker children -- Barbara, Joe and Fred -- have brought their children to Pinetree Lane's block party in the hopes of showing them a little of what it used to be like when Levittown was new and special.

Fred and Florence know just about everyone on their winding block, even though the early Levittown pioneers get fewer every year. Ken Taylor, a retired Nassau County police officer who lives on the other side of the street, a few houses south, put in a faucet for the Kieseckers recently. ``He does everything,'' Florence Kiesecker said. ``He never charges us.''

Fred Kiesecker was an Army antiaircraft gunner -- Serial No. 32020356 -- and served the duration of World War II. From a time when virtually every man in Levittown was a veteran, now only 29 percent of those houses harbor a veteran.

The snow was clean, the children were playing and it looked like paradise from the windshield of a delivery truck when Fred Kiesecker saw Levittown 42 years ago. So he borrowed $475 from his sister-in-law and came out with a VA-FHA mortgage of $65.46 a month.

The Kieseckers could sell their house for upwards of $150,000, like so many others have, and escape to Florida and other balmy climes. He stays, though, and represents something Levittown never had in its early days -- grandparents. Altered as they are with dormers, wings, breezeways and second floors, many houses in Levittown sell in the $200,000 range.

But Fred Keisecker isn't selling. ``We gotta stay here,'' he said from his lawn chair. ``This is where we're going to die.''

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