Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up Read Online Free PDF Page B

subsidies, it also encouraged new housing frontiers through its mortgage benefits.
    One of the major barriers to home ownership in pre—World War II America was the size of the down payment. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act largely changed the rules by allowing a number of circumstances where the government would essentially guarantee the mortgage loan and encourage a policy of no down payment. The first entrepreneur who fully appreciated the impact of this provision was William Levitt, a New Yorker who had spent his wartime service managing the mass construction of buildings for the U.S. Navy.
    Soon after his discharge, the forty-three-year-old veteran, described as a “cocky, rambunctious hustler with the hoarse voice of a three-pack-a-day smoker,” bought twelve hundred acres of potato farmland near Hicksville, on Long Island about twenty miles outside of New York City. He turned his military organizational abilities into a construction campaign designed to entice young buyers into believing they could secure a part of the new American dream of home ownership in the pristine world of suburbia. From dawn to dusk in the muddy fields of a rising community called Levittown, the ground would shake as a convoy of tractors rumbled like charging squadrons of Sherman tanks. Every hundred feet they would dump identical bundles of lumber, pipe, boards, shingles, and copper tubing, all so neatly packaged they resembled enormous loaves of bread dropped by a bakery operated by giants. Then other massive machines fitted with a seemingly endless chain of buckets dug into the earth to form a trench around a twenty-five-by-thirty-two-foot rectangle. As men and machines engaged in a carefully coordinated operation, a new house would emerge largely complete every fifteen minutes until by July 1950 more than eleven thousand nearly identical homes sprawled across thefields, with parallel Levittowns rising in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

    The three original Levittown communities in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, above, symbolized the emergence of modern suburban lifestyles. By the sixties some Boomers would criticize their childhood homes as “ticky-tacky boxes.”
(Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
    A sale price of $7,990 bought mostly young couples a new home that, even if it would never be mistaken for a castle, offered a phenomenally child-friendly environment in which to raise a rapidly expanding family. Each home featured a picture window fronting a twelve-by-fifteen-foot living room, a bathroom, a kitchen, two bedrooms, and an “expansion attic,” which could and usually was converted to two more bedrooms and an additional bath. Each house was equipped with a refrigerator, stove, washing machine, fireplace, and built-in seven-inch television.
    While young couples fired barbeque grills and their children raced tricycles and used their skate keys, most Americans who were either single or over thirty-five initially stayed well clear of the planned-community experience. Levittown and its hundreds of nationwide clones were worlds teeming with children and baby carriages but largely devoid of nightclubs and taverns. The first Levittown was peppered with huge new shopping centers, surrounded by enormous parking lots easily accessible from connecting roads. More than a hundred miles of winding streets and sidewalks teemed with vehicles partial to children, from station wagons to kiddy carts. If myriad descriptions were accurate, young mothers pushed strollers, held toddlers’ hands, dodged tricycles, and swapped recipes in the morning until an eerie silence descended on most of the community around noon. The next two hours were a mutually refreshing respite as children napped and mothers slumped into chairs or caught up on other chores. As late as 1950, only 10 percent of the children of Levittown were over seven years of age, encouraging one mother to explain that “Everyone is so young that