Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania ed. by Dianne Harris (review)

The name “Levittown” usually conjures up images of Levittown, Long Island, New York. As a consequence, the second Levittown, located in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, not far from Philadelphia, has generally been ignored by scholars of post–World War II automobile suburbs. Second Suburb, a collection of essays, recollections, and memoirs edited by Dianne Harris, begins to fill that void admirably.

In his forward to the book, architectural historian Dell Upton reminds readers that earlier studies of the various Levittowns—and of virtually all other postwar automobile suburbs—dismissed these communities as “cruel parodies” of the American dream that were also detached from the realities of American life (vii). In contrast, Upton claims that Levittown, Bucks County, like the first Levittown on Long Island and the third in Willingboro, New Jersey, were, in fact, very complex communities. Their residents faced virtually all of the issues that concerned urban-dwellers, including “the security of home and work, the protection of the natural elements that surrounded them, the creation of sophisticated domestic environments, the vicissitudes of the economy, and (for better or worse) the identity of their neighbors. No worries that vexed their urban relatives bypassed the residents of Levittown” (viii).

In her introduction, Dianne Harris states that the main goals of Second Suburb are to correct the common misconceptions that there is only one Levittown, to explain how and why Levittown, Pennsylvania, mattered more broadly, to probe what can be learned from this suburb about “race and space,” to learn how the creation of mass housing affected other housing developments around the country, and to examine how the construction of identities affected those who lived there (2).

Part 1 of the book looks at Levittown from the “inside.” It makes use of oral histories collected by Chad M. Kimmel, a memoir by Daisy D. Myers, a series of cartoons by Bill Griffith called Zippy the Pinhead; and a large selection of photographs of Levittown through the years compiled by Harris. Of particular interest is the account by Myers, whose African American family moved into Levittown during the summer of 1957. The Levitts had refused to sell to black families, and when the Myers family moved in, two weeks of rioting seemed to confirm criticisms that suburbs were racist enclaves.

In part 2, which looks at Levittown from the outside, Richard Longstreth leads off by demonstrating that the Levitts did not invent the concept of “moderate income housing” (125). Rather, they were very adept at identifying and refining methods that had been pioneered by other developers over the years. Longstreth offers many examples of such precursors.

Thomas J. Sugrue gives a detailed account of the struggle to integrate Levittown when the Myers family moved to the community in 1957. The Levitts, he tells the reader, made no secret of their insistence on racial homogeneity. As William Levitt himself put it, “We can solve a housing problem or we can solve a racial problem, but we cannot combine the two” (176). Spearheading and organizing the attempt at integration, Sugrue relates, were a group of local Quakers. Although the Myers family confronted race riots, the second black family, the Mosbys, who came to Levittown a year later, did not have to face rioting. Fifty years later, Levittowners helped to elect Barak Obama as the first African American president of the United States. Much like the rest of the country, Levittown had changed.

Next, Dianne Harris discusses how the various housing types and builtin furnishings in Levittown represented an experiment in “modernism.” Open floor plans, in which one room flowed into another, created a sense of spaciousness in relatively small houses. Kitchens produced an aura of “up-to-date” living, and therefore of upscale status, through the most modern appointments. In the following chapter, Curtis Miner extends the topic of the evolution of Levittown kitchens, focusing on how their designs reflected changing consumer demands. By having the kitchen open into the dining room with no barriers...