Levittown's Unintended Consequences

Veterans moving into Levittown in the late forties and early fifties dubbed William Levitt "Everyone's Friend" for, indeed, the man went out of his to assist new residents.

"Bill Levitt was one of the greatest men I ever knew", a old vet down in Levittown, Pennsylvania told me back in 2002, citing how the former lent him money - interest free and without due date - for the $56 down payment he couldn't scare up.

Indeed, Levitt was also the best friend of the local business community, from retail chains to banks to newspapers who wasted no time in appreciating the fact that tens of thousands of new residents translated directly into new customers, depositors, and readers.

With nearly two-thirds of all Levitt & Sons homes built north of Hempstead Turnpike, and as many homeowners commuters into New York City as employees of firms like Grumman's, the impact of the Levitt development was probably more keenly felt in Hicksville than in the other nearby communities. By 1958, for example, Mid-Island Shopping Plaza (as the Broadway Mall was called) had grown from land owned by the Roman Catholic Church and St. John's orphanage to a facility with eighty-eight stores and lagging only behind Roosevelt Field as the state's largest retail location. Hicksville became Long Island's third largest business community. Levittown was having a rippling effect.    

Enter the law of unintended consequences. Accompanying this explosive suburban development, population growth and commercial expansion was a quantum leap in automobile traffic that converged down Newbridge, Broadway, and Jerusalem into downtown Hicksville with its railroad station that belonged to another era. The bumper-to-bumper traffic tie-ups were extraordinary. Indeed, by 1959, traffic backed-up as far south on Broadway as Old Country Road when the crossing gates were down and at peak volume might cause a motorist thusly situated to wait two crossings. What had at first brought new customers to local business quickly became a perpetual nightmare traffic jam that was costing business.

As inconvenient as this situation might have been in the early fifties, it had become dangerous by the Kennedy years. Between 1949 and 1963, there were 110 mishaps in Hicksville involving trains and automobiles, with thirteen motorists left dead and more than a score injured. Most of these mishaps occurred after 1955.

The result of all of this was, ultimately, the elevation of the LIRR, relocation of the Hicksville Station to the Newbridge Road crossing and the widening and rezoning of Broadway which tore down the businesses on the west side of the street. Due to cost overruns and bureaucratic delays, this left Hicksville with a gash of brownfield urban blight that lasted nearly a decade.    

By 1965, Hicksville's character was nearly as different from its pre-1950 character as the Jerusalem/Island Trees area had been. The explosive impact of the Levitt development, and subsequent suburban boom throughout the rest of Long Island, had been so great that in 1962, when Setauket naturalist and historian Robert Cushman Murphy wrote his Fish-Shaped Paumanok, he described the book as a history of Long Island "from the Wisconsin Ice Sheet to the building of Levittown."

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