Levittown, the house America bought 17,000 times

In 1947, Abraham Levitt and his sons began building on 4,000 acres of potato fields in Nassau County, New York. Returning veterans needed housing badly and there was almost none. The Levitts decided the answer was to stop building houses one at a time.

They broke construction into twenty seven steps and sent specialized crews down the street in sequence, one pouring slabs, one framing, one roofing, one painting white, one painting red. Lumber was precut at their own yard. Nails and appliances were bought direct. At peak they were finishing more than thirty houses a day.

The first model was the Cape Cod. Four and a half rooms, 750 square feet, a slab with radiant heat coils in the concrete, an unfinished attic the owner could expand into, a stove, a refrigerator and a built in television. The price was $7,990, and with a Veterans Administration loan a family could move in for almost nothing down.

Lines formed overnight. By 1951 Levittown had more than 17,000 houses and roughly 82,000 people, and the model was copied across the country. This is where the American suburb comes from, along with the commute, the lawn culture and the shopping center.

It came with a clause. The original leases and deeds barred occupancy by anyone who was not white. That was not an accident of the market. It was written policy, and federal lending practice reinforced it. When a Black family, the Myers, moved into Levittown, Pennsylvania in 1957, mobs gathered outside their house for weeks and the state police had to intervene.

The houses themselves have almost all been altered beyond recognition, dormered and extended and re sided until the original Cape Cod is hard to find.

The pattern they set is still everywhere, and so is the part of it that was drawn on purpose.