Levittown, Pennsylvania

The Levittown you are passing through was built by William Levitt, the same builder who had transformed a Long Island potato field into a suburb of seventeen thousand homes in the years just after the Second World War. Pennsylvania's Levittown went up faster and even larger. The first family moved in on June twenty-third, nineteen fifty-two. By the time construction finished in nineteen fifty-eight, the development contained seventeen thousand, three hundred eleven homes on fifty-seven hundred and fifty acres, designed to house seventy thousand people.

Levittown offered six distinct home styles and became a landmark in mass-produced American suburban life. It also carried forward the exclusionary practices of its New York predecessor: original sales contracts barred Black families from purchasing homes, a pattern challenged in court here in nineteen fifty-seven when William and Daisy Myers became the first Black family to move in, facing months of harassment that drew national attention.