Edward Berenson's "Perfect Communities"

Edward Berenson is a professor of history at New York University and director of its Institute of French Studies. His books include Heroes of Empire, Europe in the Modern World, The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story, and The Accusation. He lives in Tarrytown, NY.

Berenson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Perfect Communities is about deindustrialization, specifically the closure of U.S. Steel’s Fairless Works. In its heyday from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, this vast steel mill, one of the largest ever made, employed several thousand residents of Levittown, Pennsylvania. Dick Wilson, laid off in 1991 after working at Fairless for thirty-one years, said, “I thought it was my birthright—to be white, dumb, work in the mill, buy a Levittowner [the original Levittown, PA model].”

I doubt Wilson was dumb. What he meant was that, even without a college degree—or even a high school diploma—men could land well-paying union jobs in the Fairless Works and countless other factories nationwide. These jobs gave workers the income to buy a modest, though relatively comfortable tract home and raise a family there while giving their kids opportunities denied to them.

So, if a reader opened my book to page 99, he or she would get a decent, although incomplete, idea of what my book is about.

Perfect Communities pays due attention to the benefits provided by the five huge U.S. Levitt developments built in the suburbs of New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and San Juan, Puerto Rico between 1947 and 1978. These benefits included affordable houses ($6,690 in 1947; $25,000 in 1970) close to plentiful jobs, good schools, public pools, ball fields, and other recreational facilities. For working- and lower-middle-class people, Levittown was a dream come true.

But the dream wasn’t for everyone. William J. Levitt, the mastermind behind the Levittowns, refused to rent or sell his homes to African Americans. The theme of racial exclusion, which figures prominently in the book, appears only fleetingly on page 99—in Dick Wilson’s reference to himself as “white.” So, the issue of race is there, but readers who look no further than page 99 could miss it.

Readers of that single page would also miss the integration of two of the Levitt communities, Willingboro (formerly Levittown), New Jersey, and Bowie, Maryland. They’d also miss the existence of a huge Levittown of 11,000 single-family dwellings inhabited almost exclusively by Puerto Ricans, many having returned to the island after living on the mainland.

Another key element that would escape readers of that single page is the long chapter on the Levitt developments built in the suburbs of Paris. In the early 1960s, the American homebuilder conceived them as an antidote to the massive suburban housing blocks and towers, now known pejoratively as La banlieue, originally aimed at middle-class French families. Those families overwhelmingly preferred single-family houses, especially the ones sporting the Levitt name, and they fled the grands ensembles as soon as they could.

Finally, readers of page 99 would miss the book’s epilogue, which connects Levitt’s success in solving the massive post-World War Two housing shortage to our current dearth of affordable homes. The Levitt ideal of the detached house surrounded by an ample yard and then enshrined in zoning laws makes nearly impossible the denser homebuilding we so desperately need today.

Visit Edward Berenson's website.

The Page 99 Test: Heroes of Empire.

--Marshal Zeringue