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On 1,200 flat acres of potato farmland near Hicksville, Long Island, an army of trucks sped over new-laid roads. Every 100 feet, the trucks stopped and dumped identical bundles of lumber, pipes, bricks, shingles and copper tubing—all as neatly packaged as loaves from a bakery. Near the bundles, giant machines with an endless chain of buckets ate into the earth, taking just 13 minutes to dig a narrow, four-foot trench around a 25-by-32 ft. rectangle. Then came more trucks, loaded with cement, and laid a four-inch foundation for a house in the rectangle.
After the machines came the men. On nearby slabs already dry, they worked in crews of two and three, laying bricks, raising studs, nailing lath, painting, sheathing, shingling. Each crew did its special job, then hurried on to the next site. Under the skilled combination of men & machines, new houses rose faster than Jack ever built them; a new one was finished every 15 minutes.
Three years ago, little potatoes had sprouted from these fields. Now there were 10,600 houses inhabited by more than 40,000 people, a community almost as big as 96-year-old Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Plainfield, N.J., or Chelsea, Mass. Its name: Levittown.
Levittown is known largely for one reason: it epitomizes the revolution which has brought mass production to the housing industry. Its creator, Long Island's Levitt & Sons, Inc., has become the biggest builder of houses in the U.S.
Super-Selling. The houses in Levittown, which sell for a uniform price of $7,990, cannot be mistaken for castles. Each has a sharp-angled roof and a picture window, radiant heating in the floor, 12-by-16 ft. living room, bath, kitchen, two bedrooms on the first floor, and an "expansion attic" which can be converted into two more bedrooms and bath. The kitchen has a refrigerator, stove and Bendix washer; the living room a fireplace and a built-in Admiral television set.
Levitt & Sons' President William J. Levitt describes the product simply as "the best house in the U.S." Coming from Bill Levitt, that exaggeration is natural, and pardonable. At 43, the leader of the U.S. housing revolution is a cocky, rambunctious hustler with brown hair, cow-sad eyes, a hoarse voice (from smoking three packs of cigarettes a day), and a liking for hyperbole that causes him to describe his height (5 ft. 8 in.) as "nearly six feet" and his company as the "General Motors of the housing industry."
His supreme self-confidence—his competitors call it arrogance—is solidly based on the fact that he is the most potent single modernizing influence in a largely antiquated industry. Last week he added another cubit to his self-esteem and his builder's stature; in seven days, his salesmen sold another 350 houses in his Levittown "store" (where lumber, piping and other materials used in each house are on display). Said Bill Levitt: "I told them I'd give them an extra week off this summer if they did it. I don't say these things unless I'm sure it can be done." With that batch of orders, Bill Levitt raised his 1950 production goal by another 1,500 houses. In his building year ending next March he will have put up about 5,900 houses, 5,500 in Levittown and the rest in another Long Island project.