Redefining Suburbia

There are four characteristics that define the post-World War Two suburban building boom ushered in by Levittown: explosive population growth, extensive real estate development, broad commercial expansion, and the entry of hitherto blue collar families into the middle class. It takes little imagination to appreciate the fact that this dynamic, unstoppable as it seemed in the 1950s and 1960s, is spent and has, indeed, exhausted itself - albeit protractedly - over the course of the last thirty years.

Not that suburbia itself is in decline, Hardly. In fact, just look at what's happening in communities that surround Hong Kong, Singapore and Beijing. But suburbia as we have come to define it has.

Still, there's no reason to think that places like Levittown won't flourish in the 21st Century; that maybe the suburban ideal that served us well in the 50's and 60's will find expression in another paradigm; that it will be redefined. "There can still be a suburban dream here", wrote Michael A. Miller in the June 11, 2010 issue of The Levittown Tribune, "but it can't be the dream of 1960. Not any more."   

Whatever the future holds, we have clearly moved out of the suburban period of our history and into the exurban period wherein concerns previously associated with urban municipalities - crime, unemployment, homelessness, mass transit, immigration, and the environment - are now the concerns of what historian Ed Smits called "Nassau County: Suburbia, U.S.A." in a book by that name. Two events in Levittown's history have been symptomatic of this transition: the 1978 teacher's strike and the 1989 visit by Gov. Mario Cuomo.    

A 1962 New York State Department of Education report once described Levittown as a place where "the full weight of differences - expressive, political, and ideological - is brought into school politics....questions of [school] board member's religion, their political leanings and their personalities marked debates."  There's some truth to this and in 1978 it all came to a head with a two-month strike by Levittown United Teachers that left the community bitterly divided with picket lines, public disturbances, court injunctions, a twenty-day jail sentence for LUT president Martin J. Cullinan, and intervention by Gov. Hugh Carey. And on May 10, 1989, Carey's successor, Mario Cuomo, responded to an impassioned letter by Newsday taxpayer Carolyn Schiller. School taxes were killing the middle class homeowner, Schiller told the governor in her kitchen over some coffee and chocolate-covered strawberries. Indeed, in one year, taxes in her Levittown had gone from $4,500 to $5,742 and there seemed no end in sight.    

What's the significance of these events? Both illustrate that the certainties of the three decades that followed World War II and the building of Levittown and sired the building boom that engulfed the American landscape, had eroded considerably by the late 1970s as inflation, rising interest rates, growing unemployment, and oil embargos by OPEC sent the U.S. economy in a roller coaster ride. Too, that the Reagan era anti-tax-and-spend ideology failed to trickle down to the Levittown homeowner.

There had been a teacher's strike before in Levittown in the early sixties but it had been a brief affair without the attending rancor and school district upheaval. But by 1978 the Union and Board of Education entered contractual negotiations armed with two seeming mutual exclusivities; each representing, respectively, Levittown teachers and Levittown taxpayers - both of whom no longer felt secure in their income, no longer certain that they could maintain the suburban middle class life for their families. Both realized that it wasn't the 1950s anymore. This insecurity, and the attending realization, manifest itself not in curriculum disputation - as had been common in the Levittown school district in the Eisenhower/Kennedy years - but over taxes and finances. It prompted some families to seek greener pastures from the community that thirty years earlier had been the very epitome of greener pastures.    

The 1978 teacher's strike and Gov. Cuomo's "kitchen conference" with Carolyn Schiller illustrated that gone were the days when a blue collar worker with a eighth grade education and half dozen kids could hope to enjoy the self-described American Dream. The incidents intimated the shape of things to come in the 21st Century when suburbia will be forced to redefine itself or risk becoming the economically-depressed slum its critics in the 1950s believed would be its fate.    

Want to learn more about the history of Levittown and the surrounding communities? Visit www.levittownhistoricalsociety.org