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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)

By Geoffrey Mohan | Staff Writer

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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.