Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania (review)

Successfully proving that there is more than one way to walk the fine line between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania, edited by Dianne Harris, considers a truly remarkable range of stories in its pursuit of the meaning of Levittown, Pennsylvania, to the history of postwar American suburbanization.

Harris’s introduction makes the case that the Pennsylvania Levittown deserves as much analytic attention as its more famous Long Island predecessor. The book is divided into two parts, the first composed of firsthand recollections of Levittown in the form of oral histories, comic strips, photographs, and memoirs. The inclusion of Bill Griffith’s “Zippy the Pinhead” comic strip is a particularly inspired choice, as it provides both contemporary and retrospective portrayals of what it meant/means to (have) “grown up Levittown.”

Part 2 provides several analytical perspectives, including architecture, planning, environmental, racial, sociological, and landscape histories. Jessica Lautin’s article on a Yale University architecture studio held in 1972 explores the meta-history of Levittown, recounting both the history of what actually happened and how those choices (in this case, of architectural design) have been perceived over the years. Christopher Sellers’s chapter on environmental activism among Levittown residents (which also includes some firsthand recollection) builds on the work of Adam Rome and others who have delineated the fundamental irony of suburban environmentalism, namely that the existence of nature nearby created a movement to preserve what was already an artificial, or at least built, environment.

In the midst of this analytical plenty the actual thoughts of most Levittowners (aside from those presented firsthand) are assumed on many occasions; the use of advertising to divine changes in Levitt family motivation and Levittown resident aspiration is but one example. The firsthand perspectives are valuable, but their applicability to the great “mass” of residents is unclear. One senses that those who have written memoirs (Daisy Myers) or become self-appointed keepers of Levittown’s heritage (David Marable) might not have had typical experiences, if such things exist. This problem is highlighted when firsthand interviews and recollections form the major source, as in the case of the Myers, a black family who bought a home in Levittown in 1957. Daisy Myers’s recollections portray her family as normal people who simply wanted a home to call their own. Their arrival in the community was met with violent reaction by many there. But if, as Thomas Sugrue’s chapter argues, the Myers family was actually promoted by the Quakers and other outside groups, and if their supporters actually included communists, then how does that knowledge transform our understanding of how Levittowners reacted to the arrival of the Myers? Connecting these two narratives would provide even more fruitful material for exploration of the significance of race.

Even so, the combination of Myers and Sugrue goes a long way toward placing race squarely in the middle of this lily-white suburb. Perhaps the biggest drawback of Second Suburb is that the post-Levitt focus of the work serves to obscure the pre-Levitt residents of the area. These folk make some cameo appearances, but a volume that so lovingly explores the class, race, gender, ethnic, and environmental concerns of the new residents virtually ignores those who lived there before. This oversight reinforces one of the most glaring deficiencies in recent suburban studies, namely the focus on suburbia as disjunctive, with “subdivisions” created de novo by developers and culture by the new homebuyers.

While it is true that the new suburban space indeed helped to create (and was created by) a culture that replaced what had gone before it, we cannot forget that there is an actual, physical space at the center of this story, and it is the actual, physical location of and changes to that space that form the core of the suburban quandary. Overall, however, the multifaceted approach works remarkably well to underline the multiple experiences that make up this “second suburb’s” history. The result is a deeper understanding of the ins and...