Before it was suburbia, this stretch of Long Island was called Jerusalem in the 1600s and later Island Trees, farmed for potatoes and onions after the railroad arrived in 1837. Levitt & Sons, founded in 1929 by Abraham Levitt, built slow custom homes until William Levitt, born in 1907, returned from the Navy Seabees with a method for mass-producing buildings from uniform parts. With his architect brother Alfred, he broke each house into 26 steps handled by specialized crews moving plot to plot. The company bought timberland and a lumber mill in Blue Lake, California, and a nail factory in Pennsylvania, pushed local officials to drop the basement rule in favor of concrete slabs, and paid non-union crews piece rates. By July 1948 they finished 30 houses a day, and by 1951 there were more than 17,400.

A house cost about $8,000, and with GI Bill and FHA backing a veteran could buy in for $400 down, with 1949 ranch models offering radiant floor heating, a Bendix washer, and a built-in Admiral television. Clause 25 of the lease and purchase agreement barred anyone but members of the Caucasian race, and FHA redlining refused to insure mixed neighborhoods. William Levitt, himself Jewish, claimed he could not solve a housing crisis and a social crisis at once. Activists formed the Committee to End Discrimination in Levittown, and the Supreme Court’s 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer ruling made such covenants unenforceable, yet the 1990 census still showed a tiny non-white population. By 2020, Hispanic residents were over 16 percent and Asian residents over 11 percent. Levitt & Sons, by then in Florida, went bankrupt in 2007.

• How the Seabees’ wartime airstrips and barracks inspired a stationary assembly line on potato fields
• Half of the first 2,000 rentals claimed within two days of the 1947 announcement
• Why home equity denied in the 1940s meant generations of lost family wealth
• The Levitts building pools and community centers while leaving schools and sewers to local towns
• Billy Joel’s childhood home and Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands neighborhood drawn from Levittown