Suburban Paradise

The Michener Art Museum hosts Levittown: A Home of Our Own.

By: Matt Smith
   With a wood-paneled wagon full of possessions and the deed to a tiny parcel of land in their back pockets, countless Americans set out for the wide-open frontier with hopes for a better life — in suburbia.
   "When people think of the frontier, they think of the West, the gold rush," notes Curt Miner, curator of popular culture at the State Museum in Harrisburg, Pa. "This was the largest internal migration in our country’s history — the movement of people from cities and small towns to the suburbs — but it tends to be overshadowed by much more fabled Western migrations."
   For the suburban pioneers of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the move out of cramped city neighborhoods and crumbling mill and mining towns wasn’t just a physical transition — it also was psychological.
   "You were buying your piece of the American dream," says Mr. Miner, "buying into the whole package — a car, consuming, TV dinners. Your lifestyle was more important than what you did for a living."
   For would-be Pennsylvania suburbanites, Levittown — builder William Levitt’s 5,600-acre, 17,311-home development in Lower Bucks County — offered the complete package: an affordable home on a tree-lined street, brand-new churches and schools, and your very own slice of backyard. The "Henry Ford of housing" constructed 40 connecting neighborhoods of 300-500 homes each, creating a community of more than 70,000 people. Levittown: A Home of Our Own, which arrives at the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pa., Jan. 25, celebrates the 50th anniversary of the suburb that changed America.
   One of Mr. Miner’s favorite artifacts in the exhibit, which was on display in Harrisburg until the first week of January, is a rusted old power mower donated by Philip Smythe, a resident of Levittown’s Stonybrook section. He says it is the perfect representation of the suburban mindset.
   "This person moved from a little row house in South Philly, where they had a push mower," Mr. Miner says. "Now that they had a ‘big’ yard, they felt they had to trade up to get the power mower… they felt they needed lawn chairs, a patio, a whole new lifestyle."
   The Michener is adding its fine-arts touch to its version of the exhibit, including Joan Klatchko’s contemporary photographs of her native Levittown and New Hope, Pa., photographer Jack Rosen’s images of a 1957 race riot spurred by the arrival of William and Daisy Myers, the first black family in the previously all-white development.
   Levittown: A Home of Our Own is the first museum exhibit of its kind, according to Mr. Miner. The Smithsonian attempted to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first Levittown, begun five years prior (1947) on Long Island, N.Y., but efforts fizzled. (A third Levittown was built a few miles away in South Jersey, but changed its name to Willingboro in 1963 to avoid confusion with its Pennsylvania neighbor.) The exhibit also is a first for the State Museum in Harrisburg, an institution heavy on Colonial and 19th-century history, which didn’t own a single Levittown object until Mr. Miner went to work.
   "We had nothing to begin with," he says. "We borrowed a number of objects from Levittowners and acquired others… We tell the story with common, everyday stuff, which had been tossed out in many cases. Some of it came from junkyards, and I literally pulled things out of waste bins."
   Another favorite of Mr. Miner’s is an aluminum milk box from the 1950s: In the early days, Levittown was besieged by milkmen, delivering glass bottles right to the doorsteps of eager housewives. There’s also a Westinghouse "Tudor" television — the "electronic hearth" of suburbia — and a recording of Pete Seeger singing Malvina Reynolds’ ode to Levittown, "Little Boxes (Ticky Tacky)." But the crown jewel, says Mr. Miner, is a wholly reconstructed, unavoidably pink, pastel kitchen from 1958.
   "It’s the largest artifact in the exhibit," he says. "The center of the house tended to be the kitchen, where the housewife was thought to reside, the ‘Leave it to Beaver,’ suburban housewife.
   "Levitt was the first large-scale builder to introduce houses with built-in kitchens, which were mortgaged in with the cost of the home. The refrigerator and range were included. These gadgets were important in the 1950s in establishing what it meant to be middle class. You were leaving behind the gas range and free-standing cabinets for a built-in electric kitchen that was the height of modernity."
   Although Leave it to Beaver would have you believe 1950s suburbia was populated by identical, conformist nuclear families living in a neatly black-and-white world, Mr. Miner says there was an undercurrent of self-expression and color bubbling all the while.
   "That’s the criticism of Levittown, that it all looks the same and all the people are the same," he says. "It was supposed to turn us into a nation of conformist automatons — uniform housing and uniform people. Obviously that did not come to pass.
   "It wasn’t even true in the 1950s. Yes, Levittown was white, but at the same time Levittown actually had a disproportionate number of Catholics and Jews, leaving cities that were teaming with immigrants. The people moving into suburbia weren’t white, middle-class Protestants — they were all aspiring to that."
   That uniquely American impulse for individuality is evident when you drive through Levittown today. Although there were only six basic house types (Jubilee, Pennsylvanian, Colonial, Country Clubber, Rancher and the Levittowner), no two homes in Levittown today look alike. In Ms. Klatchko’s signature image, a wall of identical Jubilee models stands against photographs of the same number of Jubilees today, transformed by added-on garages and bedrooms and a fair amount of vinyl siding.
   Writing by e-mail from an Internet café in Vientienne, Laos, where she’s working on an educational photography project called "Kids Like Me: A Multicultural Journey Around the World," Ms. Klatchko says she was surprised by the physical and cultural diversity of Levittown when she returned to Bucks County a few years ago after living overseas. The subjects of her photographs are diverse in age, race, gender and occupation, but all are represented as true-to-life as possible, Ms. Klatchko says.
   "I tried to capture that moment of drama, or that one thing that made that family or situation special," she says. "Some pictures took months to do. Many times it was a collaboration with my subjects. We would talk about their lives, and what they saw as special, what was important to them."
   On one of the most engaging is a shot of a man contentedly reading a newspaper in his backyard hot tub, with the accompanying quote "We hardly ever leave Levittown anymore." Reflecting back some 20 years after she first left Levittown, Ms. Klatchko says she couldn’t wait to see what waited beyond her backyard.
   "I lived in Levittown until I was 18," she says, "but since my father regaled us with stories of Europe, I always had a feeling that there was a wider world out there — a world I was determined to explore."
   In 1998, Ms. Klatchko left Hong Kong, where she lived for seven years, and returned to America for an extended visit. She ended up taking on the Levittown project. A Bucks County resident once more, she writes in the artist’s statement that accompanies her photographs at the Michener Art Museum that she "rediscovered" her country through her childhood home.
   "By focusing on my community — my hometown — I had in some ways rediscovered my own country. Levittown is, in many ways, a microcosm of America. The dreams of the people in this famous suburb are the dreams of all America."
Levittown: A Home of Our Own runs at the James A. Michener Art Museum, 138 S. Pine St., Doylestown, Pa., Jan. 25-April 13. Exhibition lectures: Suburban Sprawl: Causes, Consequences and Cures — David Contosta, Jan. 26, 3-4 p.m.; What Ever Happened to June Cleaver? The Not So Golden Years — Laura Katz Olson, Feb. 9, 3-4 p.m.; The Dream of America: Circa 1950s — David Marable, Feb. 23, 3-4:30 p.m.; Picturing Home — Joan Klatchko, April 6, 3-4 p.m. Lectures are free with museum admission. Also: 1950s Dance Party, featuring the Courtney Colletti Band, takes place Feb. 8, 8 p.m.-midnight; $45, $35 members. Children Celebrate Levittown, an exhibit of artwork by elementary students from the Neshaminy, Pennsbury and Bristol Township school districts, runs Feb. 2-26, with a reception, Feb. 2, 2-4 p.m. Museum hours: Tues.-Fri. 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sun. noon-5 p.m. Admission: $6, $5.50 seniors, $3 students/children; free to members and children under age 6. For information, call (215) 340-9800. On the Web: www.michenerartmuseum.org. Joan Klatchko on the Web: www.joanklatchko.com