A community of 17,000 single-tract houses may seem an unlikely subject over which to wage battles of public opinion, but fifty years ago, the construction of Levittown immediately generated a flood of contradictory reactions.

"One of the most colossal acts ever of mortal creation," claimed an article in the New York Times (12/14/52). "Mechanically, it is admirably done," said the critic Lewis Mumford. "Socially, the design is backward." Held up as an example of conformity and monotony, Levittown was prophesied to turn into an ‘incubator for moral and intellectual atrophy’.

Yet this masterplanned prototype suburb was also hailed by many as a great and unique achievement. Levittown - soon to become synonymous with suburbia - was a huge popular success where it counted - in the marketplace. Aware of the acute housing shortage after W.W.II, the developer William Levitt revolutionized the business of building and marketing homes. At a time when local building firms completed an average of four to five houses a year, Levitt’s innovative assembly-line techniques brought the number up to forty a day - and made the dream of home ownership a reality for thousands of ordinary Americans. For the first time, ordinary Americans were able to purchase their own house and small piece of land. Fifty years ago, a $10 deposit, and $100 downpayment didn’t just buy a house, it bought the average American a piece of the American Dream.

But Levittown, Pa. wasn’t merely a tract of identical houses. Bill Levitt had learned his lesson from criticism of his earlier housing development. In sharp contrast to the endless rows of look-alike houses in Long Island, this Levittown would be ‘the most perfectly planned community in America’. According to Levitt, every inch was planned, "… every store, filling station, school, house, apartment, church, color, tree and shrub." In November 1951, Levitt made young couples an offer they couldn’t - and didn’t - refuse: fully equipped, landscaped houses ranging from $9,000 to $17,000. From June 23 1952 to 1958, 17,311 young families moved into Levittown, Pa.

Unknowingly, these families became part of one of the biggest experiments in mass housing in American history. Throughout the years, Levittown was scrutinized by planners, environmentalist and social commentators. Levittown’s problems - from ugly racial incidents to the country’s first gas riots - were blazoned over the pages of national papers. Academic observers never stopped questioning the wisdom of housing large numbers of people of roughly the same age and economic status in
mass-produced, ready-made communities such as Levittown. The line on the town was that the houses were indistinguishable from one another, and the people would be too.
And yet, Levittown set standard for how much of America lives today. In 1990 the United States became the first nation to have more suburbanites than city and rural dwellers combined. And Levittown, long held up as an example of conformity and monotony, gave ordinary American people what they wanted most - the opportunity to buy their piece of the American Dream.