Mass Production of Houses
In 1941, the Levitts won a government contract to provide 2,350 housing units for defense workers in Norfolk, Virginia. While building these units, the brothers learned valuable lessons about the mass producing of houses. In 1944, William Levitt, then 36 years old and father of a 10-year-old son and a baby, James, was sent to Oahu, Hawaii as a lieutenant in the Navy Seabees. He was the personnel manager for 260 men in the Navy construction unit, but spent most of World War II gambling, drinking, and playing jazz piano. He also thought about what he would do after the war, knowing that his father and brother were making plans for him. Levitt felt that anyone who built a lot of low-cost housing after the war was going to be very wealthy. Wartime shortages had crippled the housing industry, but veterans were eager to buy homes and take advantage of government loans after the war.
While William Levitt was in Hawaii, his father took over as company president and planned to build a community of 6,000 low-priced homes in Nassau County, much larger than any other U.S. development. The company bought 1,000 acres of potato farms on Long Island. On July 1, 1947, Levitt broke ground on the $50 million development, Levittown, which ultimately included 17,000 homes on 7.3 square miles of land. Alfred Levitt created the mass production techniques and designed the homes and the layout of the development, with its curving streets. Abraham directed the landscaping, whose focus was two trees to each front yard, all planted exactly the same distance apart. William was the financier and promoter, who persuaded lawmakers to rewrite the laws that made Levittown possible. The houses, which were in the Cape Cod and ranch house styles, sat on a seventh-of-an-acre lot. They had 750 square feet with two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen, an unfinished second floor and no garage.
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The Navy Years
AS THE NEW Deal expanded and the nation lurched into World War II, the Levitts took their first tentative steps away from custom, upscale homes toward cheaper housing backed by federal credit. Wilile far from successful, Bill and Alfred later said they learned valuable lessons mass producing Navy housing near Norfolk, Va., in 1942. In fact, Bill Levitt would say that experience proved far more valuable than his days as a lieutenant in the Navy Seabees in wartime Hawaii.
Lewitt was 36 with a wife, a 10-year-old son and a baby boy, James when he shipped out to Oahu in 1944 with the famed Navy construciton unit, serving as a personnel manager for 260 men. If anything, Levitt later recalled, the Seabees didn't give him experience, he helped the Seabees. "What experience?" Levitt once said. "It was the other way around."
The only thing Levitt built in Hawaii was a reputation as an officer who cared for his men and knew how to have a good time, said Kamu, an engineer who roomed with Levitt in the officers' barracks and later became president of the Levitt organization.
In bearing, Lt. Levitt more resembled Ensign Pulver than John Wayne, Kamuf said, recalling that his future boss spent much of the war shooting craps, playing jazz piano and drinking. "Johnny Walker Red," Kamuf said. "And martinis -- dry, straight up."
Even though he was in the Paciflc, Levitt's thoughts were back on the Atlantic Coast, where Abraham and Alfred were drawing up a detailed building plan of grandiose proportions. Naval buddies recalled Levitt saying, "Beg, borrow or steal the money and then build and build," because whoever developed immense tracts of low-cost housing after the war was going to become extremely wealthy.
"The dice were loaded," Levitt, the inveterate gambier, later recalled thinking. "The market was there, and the government was ready with backing. How could we lose?"
As World War II drew to a close, Abraham and Alfred Levitt were convinced they had the right idea for the right place at the perfect time -- a Levitt town on the farm fields of the Hempstead Plains.
In Bill's absence, Abraham took over as company president and by 1944 exercised options to buy land and began lining up materials to build a community of 6,000 low-priced homes -- dwarfing the nation's largest development.
The mass-production techniques, the niftily designed homes, the layout of the development grew from all the tricks of the trade that Alfred had saved up for years, according to relatives and business associates.
"Alfred was the creator," said Ralph DeIla Ratta, 75, who worked closely with Bill for four decades after the war. "lt was his product that sold."
Everyone involved in the creation of Levittown agrees, though, that Alfred and Abraham would not have been able to build the project without Bill's strengths as a financier and enthusiastic promoter.
lt was Bill who persuaded politicians from the Hempstead Town Board to the U.S. Senate to rewrite the laws that would make Levittown possible.
Abraham, by this time in his late 60s, had ceded control to his sons, dedicating himself to directing the planting of trees, shrubs and flowering plants at the new development. Alfred, a drawing-board idealist, and Bill, a bottom-line realist, clashed.
Biederman and others said Alfred's principles continued to frustrate Bill, who even lost an argument with Alfred over whether a garage should be included with the first Levittown model. (Alfred compromised and later versions included a carport.) "Until people are decently housed," Alfred said, "I believe we have no moral right to house autos."
For his part, Bill said he barely had to advertise Levittown because the response to the first offering in 1947 was overwhelming. "Any damn fool can build homes. What counts is how many can you sell for how little," Levitt said. But for years he wouldn't sell or rent to blacks, even after courts struck down racial covenants. Levitt -- whose family, fearing a decline in property value, moved to Long Island from Brooklyn after a black attorney moved next door to them -- said he wouldn't have been able to compete if he didn't follow the discriminatory practices of the time.
In all, Levitt & Sons built 15 other projects throughout the Island.
In 1952, they moved the mass production Operation to Bucks County, Pa., near Philadelphia, for another 17,000-home Levittown. Completing that in 1958, Levitt crossed the Delaware and built a 12,000-home Willingboro, N.J., project.
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