May 7, 1947: The 1st Levittown

May 7, 1947: The 1st "Levittown" community is announced, to be built in the Town of Hempstead, on New York's Long Island. Two days later, the New York Herald Tribune reported that half of the planned 2,000 homes had already been rented. The builders, Levitt & Sons, quickly announced 4,000 more homes. By 1951, Levitt & Sons were America's leading homebuilders.

Abraham Levitt founded the family firm in 1929, as a builder of custom homes in upper middle-class communities on Long Island. During the war, however, the home building industry languished under a general embargo on private use of scarce raw materials.

Abraham's son, William "Bill" Levitt, served in the U.S. Navy, in the service's Construction Battalions, a.k.a. the C.B.'s or "Seabees," and developed expertise in the mass-produced building of military housing using uniform and interchangeable parts. He was insistent that a postwar building boom would require similar mass-produced housing, and was able to purchase options on large swaths of onion and potato fields in undeveloped sections of Long Island. His brother, Alfred Levitt, served as the firm's chief architect and planner.

The brothers designed a small one-floor house with an unfinished "expansion attic" that could be rapidly constructed and as rapidly rented to returning GIs and their young families. Levitt & Sons built the community with an eye towards speed, efficiency, and cost-effective construction.

These methods led to a production rate of 30 houses a day by July 1948. The houses were sold, with kitchens fully stocked with modern appliances, and a television in the living room, for as little as $8,000 each -- about $104,000 in 2022 money. Compare that to the average price of a single-family house in Nassau County, New York in 2022: About $750,000.

They used pre-cut lumber and nails shipped from their own factories in Blue Lake, California, and built on concrete slabs, as they had done in a previous planned community in the Navy city of Norfolk, Virginia.

With the full implementation of federal government supports for housing, administered under the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), the Levitt firm switched from rental to sale of their houses, offering ownership on a 30-year mortgage with no down payment and monthly costs the same as rental. The resulting surge in demand pressed the firm to further expand its development, which changed its name from Island Trees to Levittown shortly thereafter.

Levittown was designed to provide a large amount of housing at a time when there was a high demand for affordable family homes. This suburban development would become a symbol of "the American Dreamm" as it allowed thousands of families to become home owners.

There were also Levittowns built in Pennsylvania, between Philadelphia and Trenton; in South Jersey, outside Philadelphia, a town later renamed Willingboro; in Maryland, between Baltimore and Washington, a town later renamed Bowie; and in Puerto Rico.

It's worth noting that the original Levittown froze out union workers, though the workers they did use were paid as much as union workers. It's also worth noting that they only rented to white customers. Furthermore, it's further than you might think from the Long Island Rail Road: 3 miles south of the Hicksville station, 4 miles west of Farmingdale, 4 miles north of Wantagh, and 6 miles east of Hempstead. It is about 27 miles east of Midtown Manhattan.

And the houses' lookalike nature drew criticism, especially that it made suburbia "boring." In 1962, folksinger Malvina Reynolds saw a similar development, south of San Francisco in Daly City, California, and wrote "Little Boxes," with its refrain of, "and they're all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same."

In 2022, Levittown, New York is home to about 52,000 people. However, most of the lookalike houses have, over 75 years, been altered to the point where, when the Smithsonian Institution wanted to put an original, unaltered Levittown house on display in Washington, they had a great deal of trouble finding one in its original form.

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May 7, 1947 was a Wednesday. Only 3 baseball games were played that day:

* The Brooklyn Dodgers lost to the St. Louis Cardinals, 2-1 at Ebbets Field. Rookie Jackie Robinson, only 22 days into his desegregation of the major leagues, went 1-for-5. Stan Musial went 0-for-1, with 3 walks.

* The Boston Braves beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 3-2 at Braves Field in Boston.

* And the Philadelphia Athletics beat the St. Louis Browns, 6-1 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.