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"The Old Freeze." Actually, Levittown's uniformity is more apparent than real. Though most of their incomes are about the same (average: about $3,800), Levittowners come from all classes, all walks of life. Eighty percent of the men commute to their jobs in Manhattan, many sharing their transportation costs through car pools. Their jobs, as in any other big community, range from baking to banking, from teaching to preaching.
Levittown has also developed its own unique way of keeping up with the Joneses. Some Levittowners buy a new house every year, as soon as the new model is on the market.
Levittowners' isolation is more real than apparent. Said one housewife last week: "It's not a community that thinks much about what's going on outside." The members of Long Island's horsy set, who have watched aghast as the Levitt houses have marched toward their sacrosanct land of polo, privet and croquet, also tend to think of Levittowners as a class apart. One elderly dowager regularly takes her friends through Levittown in her chauffeur-driven limousine to show "what Levitt has done for the poor people." Levittown housewives encounter even more galling snobbery. Says one: "Whenever I tell people outside where I live I get the same old freeze. Some of them think that everyone who lives in Levittown is on relief. But the only people who criticize the place are the ones who don't live here."
Future Slums? The most frequent criticism of Levittown, and of other projects like it, is that it is the "slum of the future." Says Bill Levitt: "Nonsense." Many city planners agree with him, because they approve of Levittown's uncluttered plan and its plentiful recreational facilities. Nevertheless, in helping to solve the housing problem, Levittown has created other problems: new schools, hospitals, and sewage facilities will soon be needed; its transportation is woefully inadequate, even by Long Island standards.
But most Levittowners think the disadvantages are far outweighed by the advantages. Said ex-G.I. Wilbur Schaetzl, who lived with his wife and a relative in a one-room apartment before he moved to Levittown: "That was so awful I'd rather not talk about it. Getting into this house was like being emancipated." Bill Levitt puts it in his own brash way: "In Levittown 99% of the people pray for us."
The Money Itch. William Jaird Levitt never planned to be a builder; he just drifted into it. Born in Brooklyn in 1907, he grew up in an argumentative family, and in that atmosphere his self-confidence waxed mightily. His father, Abraham, was a lawyer who used to spend summer nights lecturing to Bill and his younger brother Alfred on everything from art to the Dodgers. Bill, the family extravert, liked the baseball lectures; Alfred, shy and retiring, preferred those on art.