Levittown : Same Place Different Time

The house on the right is a ranch.  The house on the left is about three times its original size

These were probably built as Jubilee homes

A jubilee house that looks generally the same as when it was built

  I took these pictures today, in three different sections of Levittown, Pa.   Although it looks different today, Levittown served as the template for suburbanization in America.  For several decades after its construction, the streets were lined with rows of cookie-cutter houses that epitomized suburbia, although, as can be seen in these pictures, that has changed.   There is a back story to this that has been the subject of many articles and some books. I'm not an expert, but I'll try to summarize this as I understand it.

  The original design Levitt used was based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ranch house (the Levittowner and Jubilee designs would also appear later).  The Ranch was a house in its simplest form.  All features Wright saw as unnecessary were eliminated.  That included porches, basements, attics, and second stories.  Using this basic blueprint, Levitt built rows of these Ranch homes using the techniques he learned building army barracks during World War II.  He developed an assembly line technique of building houses similar to the way that cars were built in Detroit.  Only in this case, the houses remained stationary and the workers moved from house to house.  Thus, the houses could be built quickly and effectively, and eventually over 17,000 were built.

    Of course, over a period of fifty or sixty years, things tend to change.  In the earliest days of Levittown, alterations to houses were not allowed.  Neither were fences or clotheslines.  These rules were either forgotten, lifted, or just proved too difficult to enforce.  The sections of Levittown generally look the same from the outside as they did when I was in school, but the houses now look very different.  Some have been altered radically, bearing little or no resemblance to the original design.  Often, no two houses look the same anymore.  To get a better idea of how the houses have changed over time, I recommend joanklatchko.com.  Joan Klatchko is a photographer raised in Levittown, and although she has travelled the world, her hometown is often the subject of her work.