Before Levittown: Massapequa Land, Potato Farms, and the Suburb That Changed America
Near Jones Beach, New York
The ground beneath Levittown was purchased from the Massapequa people in sixteen sixty-four in a deal Long Islanders called the Jerusalem Purchase. For the next three centuries it stayed in farm use, its sandy loam growing potatoes so reliably that Nassau County became one of New York's leading potato-producing districts. Then in the nineteen forties a microscopic worm called the golden nematode began wiping out the crop, and farmers were ready to sell.
In nineteen forty-seven William Levitt bought thousands of acres of those worn-out fields and applied assembly-line construction: crews moved from lot to lot nailing identical Cape Cods at a rate of thirty houses a day. By nineteen fifty-one, seventeen thousand four hundred forty-seven homes stood where potato rows had been, housing more than eighty thousand people. Levittown wrote the template for postwar suburbia nationwide, and almost no one remembered the Massapequa land deal or the nematode that made it possible.
