From Levittown to Leviathan

Levittown was an experiment that changed the way most of us would live. A totally fabricated community created from large tracts of open farmland, Levittown's planners and builders brought Henry Ford's assembly line production techniques to the construction industry. Separate crews of men each had specific jobs that they repeated over and over again. Framers, roofers, plumbers, electricians, plasterers, interior finish carpenters. Day after day they built the same segments of the same house over and over again. They were fast, cost efficient and gained productivity as they repeated their processes each day. Levittown was a huge maze of suburban homes stamped out much like cookies on a baking sheet.
The homes were cheap, small and all created from the same floor plan. The joke was told: "Don’t get drunk, you'll end up in your neighbor's bed!" (So much did they look alike.) What driving force mandated this large number of affordable small homes? The postwar era did. Thousands of returning servicemen and women had married, found jobs and had babies. They created an enormous demand on the housing market. Levittown was an early attempt to solve that problem, and was a success. It was so successful, in fact, that it was duplicated in various forms all over the US, and especially near urban areas.
I was born in 1949, and lived in a kind of Levittown (on a small scale) outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Every house was alike, small (the Cape Cod style was prevalent), and new. Homes were punched out along newly made streets like bottles flying off an assembly line: shiny, clean and the same. Oh, and full of children, everywhere. (They called it the "baby boom" for a good reason.) I think my parents bought theirs for $8000. The floor plan was simple, A living room, kitchen and two bedrooms on the first floor. (The second floor-(attic)-was unfinished, as was the basement.) We were lucky; we had a single car garage. You couldn't fit much in the way of furniture in those homes, and researching 1950's move data, I found he average move to be about 6000 pounds. The moving van was a large straight truck, or rarely, a 26-foot long tractor-trailer. Almost every family I knew was "starting out" and had yet to fill the house with knick- knacks. Levittown dictated the size of home (and amount of household goods) most of us would have, and grow up in the decades after World War II
Not so today. Look around your town, and I'll bet you'll find a few leviathans lurking in the trees. You know, those huge "showcase" homes that would have been mistaken for the library or city hall, or a college, years ago. Levittown, on steroids, perhaps. I am in these homes frequently, and remain amazed at the use (and waste) of space. Master suites, solariums, theaters, au pair wings, libraries, game rooms, guest suites, three and four car garages, gazebos, exercise rooms. The list goes on and often only two people rattle around in these cavernous spaces. It's still suburbia, but a long way from the simple living spaces of my youth (and most of my generation). My parents home would have fit- in it's entirety- in the living room of some of these homes.