Places

Original Topography and Ecotomes

Starting just across the East River from Manhattan, Long Island juts out into the Atlantic some ninety miles, due westward. It is engulfed by the Long Island Sound on the north and on the south, by a string of barrier islands, bays and inlets. Its topography, like that many other parts of New England and the northern parts of the U.S., dates back to the glacial retreat from the last ice age, starting some 20,000 years ago. Departing glaciers left two converging strings of hilly deposits, along Long Island’s hilly northern edge and more directly eastward, to point up its south fork.. The woods along its northerly spine, like those across other parts of the northeast, had begun to recover stands of oak, hickory, beech, walnut, and surviving chestnuts early in the twentieth century, as farmland lay fallow or was turned into estates or upper-end subdivisions. The same could not be said of some hundred square miles of grassland that covered the island’s interior into central Nassau County. The only native prairie east of the Alleghenies, known as the Hempstead Plains, it was used as common pasture into the late nineteenth century. Then it was converted, some of it into the ornamental landscaping of Alexander Stewart’s Garden City, but mostly into potato farms. By 1940, only 1% of the original prairie remained in tact. While postwar suburbanizing would bring more housing and residents to the shore line settlements, former Hempstead prairies lands would bear the biggest early brunt, including Levittown itself.

Original Topography and Ecotomes

By the time the first humans had arrived, an expanse of flat land, coated with alluvial wash and periodically shaken by earthquakes, stretched for twenty miles out to the shoreline, bordered on its other sides by mountains far higher than any within hundreds of miles of New York. Long Island’s highest point was four hundred feet about sea level; visible from Los Angeles’ beaches were precipices topping the Adirondacks and Katahdin, and not much further inland, ten thousand-foot peaks, higher than anything east of the Mississippi. What this loftily rimmed basin shared with other sites that would become southwestern cities, and not with northeastern counterparts, was its exposure to the sun. The weather was consistently warm and dry. Whereas New York enjoyed 44 inches of rain every year, Angelenos were lucky if they got 16. Los Angeles climate stood out by combining infrequent, if sometimes prodigious, rainfall, with year-round temperate-ness. ...

Prior to humans’ arrival, the area’s plant life adapted to these variations of height, climate and soil. Unlike in much of east, forests made up only a small share of Los Angeles’ floral cover. The basin flats sprouted a California version of prairie, with low-growing grasses and other non-woody plants and wild-flowers. Resembling those of Long Island’s Hempstead Plains in general appearance, they nevertheless belonged to quite different species. Along the basin’s elevated edges, the prairie shaded into chaparral, a diverse scrubby growth with no such eastern counterparts, dominated by species such as the needle-leaved chamise (Adenostema fasciculatum) and the manzanita (Arctostaphylos), with striking red and orange branches, along with the California lilac or Ceanothus, purple and fragrant in bloom. Along coastal foothills that became known as the Santa Monica Mountains, the chaparral thinned out into a scruffier, thinner vegetation, the sage coastal scrub. Valleys like that around the San Gabriel River sprouted plant cover more familiar to eastern eyes: gallery forests, or along neighboring hills, savannas interspersed with mature oaks, sumac, and other smaller evergreens, and further up, yellow pines and incense cedar dotting the mountain canyons and craigs. Isolated from other parts of the continent to a degree Long Island was not, by mountains and desert, the basin along with the rest of Southern California evolved an unusual number and range of native plants and animals that were found nowhere else. Small wonder that its less tended lands stirred eastern reportage of a “delightful strangeness on every side.” Later twentieth-century biologists would declare it a continental “hot spot” of bio-diversity. 

In 1950, after Levittown had nearly reached its full size, another family building firm, the Romano Brothers purchased farmland on the edge of North Amityville, a few miles further east. Building some 500 houses, they, too, folded all stages of suburban conversion into a single operation, to offer a final price of $6990, slightly cheaper than Levittown houses. What distinguished their new development of “Ronek Park” operation from that of the Levitts and most others in this price bracket was that most of their customers were black. African-Americans, long kept out of Long Island subdivisions via restrictive covenants up to 1948, faced more informal practices of realtors thereafter that kept the color line in housing alive and well. Across the nation, rates of black home-ownership nevertheless rose dramatically; though starting at 20% in 1940–much lower than whites–home-ownership among African Americans had doubled some twenty years later, by 1960. On Long Island as in other suburban areas where they moved, the new black migrants could nevertheless only buy houses in a few locations, where the natural as well as other amenities were fewer than in white counterparts.

Though hailed by the FHA upon the opening of their development in1950, the Romanos showed less consideration to their customers than did Levitt and Sons. Water tables went insufficiently measured, with the result that some lots were prone to flooding. The smaller size of individual lots-- 50' x 90' to 100' for lots in Ronek Park versus 60' x 100' in Levittown could exacerbate the drainage problem. Levitt and Sons’ planting around each lot, especially, was lavish compared with that in Ronek Park. The Romano Brothers only put in front and side lawns, and in each home lot, planted a single tree. Also, in contrast to Levittown’s fully planted and provisioned “Village Greens,” with their ball-fields and swimming pools as well as shopping centers, parks or other public areas were only “contemplated” in Ronek Park, not developed.

In these differences with Levittown, Ronek Park was actually more typical than Levittown of those developments targeting less well-off whites, as well as African-Americans.

Among the new suburban industrial plants to open up in these years was Wham-O Manufacturing, soon to become famous as maker of the hula hoop and frisbee. In 1955, when it was still a small, fledgling sports-goods firm, Wham-O’s young executives bought land in San Gabriel, a suburb next to Pasadena. This property, site of their first factory, did not exactly accomplish a leap-frogging into rural land. Rather it filled in a suburban “light” manufacturing zone, designated by town officials a decade earlier, in what was already one of the most built parts of town. Just north of its railroad tracks and east of its old Mission, this industrial zone also lay next to the town’s Mexican barrio. It consisted, as yet, of mostly weed-strewn vacant lots. Not considerations of climate but of emptied, cheap, and available, land, as well as labor, drew Wham-O’s decision-makers there. As the factory owners also were likely aware, in this barrio “not only incomes [were] lower but seasonal and chronic unemployment is more common...than among other residents of San Gabriel.” Siting its new factory in this poorer corner of greater Los Angeles, Wham-O brought jobs within walking distance of a ready-made workforce. 

As more such factories as well as subdivisions arose, as basin agriculture retreated or industrialized, suburban migrants confronted very different faces of the large-scale ecological change that was afoot. Some, such as those in the suburban barrio of San Gabriel, witnessed urban concentration, a conversion of unbuilt lots that planners called “in-fill.”

Over the late forties and early fifties, the Levitts helped lead the way in cut-rate prices for new single-family homes on Long Island, to below $8000. They thereby opened an avenue into the wallets of potential home-buyers that FHA analysts in 1948 could only dream about: “the production worker in manufacturing and other industrial lines.” For this reason, also because of the sheer size of what they accomplished, Levitt and Sons, far more so than outfits like Daniel and Newall’s, were featured in the coverage about a new “mass-produced” suburbia.

What distinguished the Levitt’s first such operation from the many others that would arise in these “affordable” housing brackets, locally and across the country, was not only its scale but its timing. When other of the nation’s largest cities, notably Los Angeles and Chicago, acquired housing developments of 17,000+ houses, in the early 1950's, Levitt and Sons’s first such operation was nearly half a decade old. Levitt’s initial penetration of the lower end housing market owed much pent-up demand and government programs of this historical moment. Famously, they also adapted Ford’s mass production methods for cars to house-building. Folding into their operation of supply chains of building materials, such as a California lumber mill, they also borrow techniques of the assembly line to bring costs down. They splintered up the work involved, heavily relying on machines as well as a simplification of the tasks involved, “the most minute breakdown of operations.” They did so to such an extent that skilled workers comprised only 20% of the workforce. In actuality, their innovations had greater kinship with what American economists of the 1980's would term “flexible specialization” than with Henry Ford’s assembly line at River Rouge. Theirs was a company with only about 400 employees. It relied on subcontractors for most of its work. Also de-emphasized in the news coverage, what made possible that their factory-style of house production so successful was not just the cheapness of the nematode-infested farms where it happened, but their natural flatness.

As with Long Island, their most dramatic and publicized contributions to sprawl’s anti-naturalist imagery came along the lower ranks of the housing market, where houses before the war had often been self-built. Largest of them all was Lakewood Park, started in 1950 just north of Long Beach, three years after Levittown opened. No subdivision better exemplified Angeleno builders’ mammoth capacity to, construct and sell houses, on a scale unmatched in almost every other part of the country. Unlike the Levitts, financier Mark Taper and his collaborators Ben Weingart and Louis Boyar did have to turn eastward for financing; area lenders either could not or would not supply this kind of capital, eventually totaling $135 million. Prairie remnants as well as old bean and sugar beet farms fell under the assault of bulldozers to make way for the 17,000 homes they in three years, at least equaling the number in the first Levittown. Coverage of its “mass production” techniques closely paralleled that of Levittown: the countryside as blank and malleable slate, utterly reshaped by assembly-line house-building.

And yet, the advertising of Los Angeles’ prototype of mass suburbs contrasted with its New York area counterpart especially in the minor role it reserved for planting. Abraham Levitt had sought to pitch Levittown as a “garden community,” a break from the strictly built. But the Lakewood builders promised a community that was fully an extension of Los Angeles itself, an exercise in city building. They pitched Lakewood as “completely new” “and thoroughly “planned,” the “City as New as Tomorrow,” with fully “urban conveniences.” Landscaping, so fore-grounded in the ads for Levittown, earned only minimal attention in Lakewood ads, and in the final product, considerably less care. They planted only a single sapling per house, as opposed to the Levitts’ seven, and prepared a lawn only in the front yard rather than all around. Emphasis fell, more exclusively than for Levittown, on what was “modern,” “convenient,” sanitary.

Hardly ever did postwar zoning advocates speak of protecting a nature nearby, yet tacitly, viewed from the perspective of ecology, that was often an important component of what they sought. Local elites hoped to “protect” and “stabilize” existing configurations of land use especially in the better off neighborhoods, precisely where landscaping and water front views figured most robustly into real estate and home sales. Small, wealthy towns and villages like Old Field even zoned most or all land into “residential A” districts. Over the 1940's and 50's, overarching townships and even counties gained the authority to zone, more and more zoning boards were set up, and new expertise increasingly attempted to ally zoning with planning. ...

In the northeast and north central regions of the nation, the most aggressively restrictive zoning came in townships or incorporated villages like those on Long Island’s north shore, where wealthy New York based businessmen and their families had settled in previous decades. By 1940, Old Field out in Suffolk already had “rigidly” enforced codes requiring plots to be at least 10,000 square feet, and building “footprints” to cover no more than a quarter of that area. Overlooking the Long Island Sound, it had zoned itself exclusively for “residence” soon after incorporating during the 1920's. In 1948, “after long deliberation with a planning expert,” its board of trustees decided to increase its minimum lot size nine-fold, to two acres. Old Field residents fretted about the intrusion of developments with “a lot of small houses” or “a bunch of shacks,” which threatened to “lower the property values.” Moreover, “the class of people that comes in with a bunch of shacks doesn’t add to the community welfare.” Yet at least as pervasive a rationale, given at a village public hearing held that October in a private mansion owned by shoe magnate Ward Melville, had less to do with people or houses than with the less built part of the landscape: “to keep Old Field as near a rural community as is possible...“we don’t want a suburban community.” Precisely through such efforts, the rustic ambience of Old Field was sustained, and its “nature” stayed easy to see.

Less troubled by the prospect of countryside slums, builders in upper-end Los Angeles housing markets honed a nature pitch that leveraged the basin’s abundant hills and slopes. Luxury homes of $20,000 or more--by the mid-1950's some 15% of Los Angeles’ new houses–celebrated the “view” to be had from inclines and hill-tops, more so than the “wooded” or “tree-studded” lots so valued around New York. With forests fewer and further between, John Muir’s “mountains and hills” enticed luxury home-builders and their customers into the heights. Among the early movers was the Bel-Air Land Company, which in 1946 it erected a hundred new houses in the Santa Monica mountains. Taking the new excavating tool of the bull-dozer to peaks that had never borne a cow or an orange tree, they swept away the native chaparral, lopped off hills, and toted away some 400,000 cubic feet of earth. On the resulting plateau, some 1300 feet above the nearby ocean, they charged $5500 for the land alone (nearly as much as a Lakewood house), $26,500 for the addition of a customized home. Unlike with Lakewood, sanitation and appliances went un-noted in their ads. One for a 1951 Bel-Air “Highlander” dwelt instead upon the “panoramic view of the landscape from Mt. Wilson to Catalina,” ensured by “rigid” restrictive covenants. Another summed up a promise of “country living within the city” (the area lay with Los Angeles’ city limits).