The history of the suburbs is invariably and inextricably connected to great leaps forward in transportation technology. As an avid bicyclist, I can attest to the fact that non-motorized conveyances can travel effortlessly on paved surfaces compared to non-paved surfaces which is one of the reason bicycles didn't appear until the 1830's and only gained widespread use in the 80's as urbanization created more accommodating roads and, in either case, by then the automobile was making its debut. Paved roads also allowed ancient Roman suburbs to grow.
In 1807, Robert Fulton tested his steamboat Clermont whilst his business associate Hezekiah Beers Pierpont created Brooklyn Heights with the notion that residents could commute across the East River to work. It was a curious turn-of-events because whilst the suburbs preceded cities, this first suburb in New York City formed the nucleus of what would become the City of Brooklyn in 1834. It was in 1834, too, that the Long Island Rail Road was chartered - just five years after the world's first rail line between Liverpool and Manchester - to create an alternative New York-to-Boston route.
The LIRR then inspired Valentine Hicks in 1837 and Alexander Stewart in 1869 to, respectively, create Hicksville and Garden City; the latter carefully planned with the Cathedral of the Incarnation as its crown jewel and the former, a somewhat more impromptu endeavor attracting droves of German immigrants. The Hicksville Chamber of Commerce' logo features the M.W. Baldwin-built Ariel, the first locomotive to operate on the LIRR whilst in 2007, the CofC president Jim Pavone unveiled a full-sized replica of the 1831John Bull in John F. Kennedy Memorial Park. (The original has been owned by the Smithsonian Institution since 1884).
Pavone chose it because, as LIRR historian David D. Morrison wrote in the Fall 2007 issue of The Freeholder, he "decided that a more appropriate image would be one that more closely resembled the people's expectation of a steam locomotive".
The automobile age arrived to the future Levittown in 1908 with the Vanderbilt Cup Race. From the first patented automobile in 1886, motor cars had largely been seen as a hobby of the mechanically-inclined with plenty of discretionary income to spare. But on October 24, 1908, tens of thousands of spectators lined the fencing of the old speedway as George Robertson of Garden City reached a record-breaking sixty-four miles per hour. Up in the grandstand, now the corner of Orchid Road and Skimmer Lane in Levittown, sat Henry Ford, impressed by this showcasing of state-of-the-art in horseless carriage technology.
Within 20 years, Robert Moses would be building his highway-and-park system with the leg of the Wantagh State Parkway arriving at Hempstead Turnpike in 1936. Real estate companies leaped at the opportunity but most floundered in the economy of the Great Depression. The most successful was William Levitt who purchased his first two-hundred acres along North Bellmore Road and environs in 1943. Contrary to the often-repeated rumor, he had not plans to revive the defunct Stewart Line (1871-1926) because he'd already appreciated the fact that, unlike the 19th Century, future suburban development would cluster along highways rather than rail lines or steamboat landings.
Levitt's appreciation of the supremacy of the automobile in determining future suburban patters was not merely an appreciation that Robert Moses was the greatest road-builder since the Roman Empire and that Henry Ford's Model-T put a car in the hands of the working man. It was that, in emulating Ford's mass-production techniques, he could put a house in the hands of every working man as well. And the combination of the two created a world few people before Levitt would have imagined.
Want to learn more about the history of Levittown and the surrounding communities? Visit www.levittownhistoricalsociety.org
