The Legends of an Apostle

On some level, I've been researching this post for over twenty-five years. For at least the past five or so, it's been a dream of mine to finally put it together. At around twelve years old, I moved into a house less than about 500 feet from this one. I was instantly fascinated by it. Over the next five years after that, I gradually heard more and more of the legends surrounding the house. Then I became fairly good friends with a niece of the family who owned it. While she was staying with them for a short time, I got to see the inside of it. It's possibly one of the most magnificent places I've ever been. The Victorian mansion at 40 Hilton Avenue in Garden City, New York, was designed by architect John Kellum and was likely completed shortly after Kellum's death in 1871.

The antique music box is at bottom left.

Helping the integrity of the house enormously is a wonderful collection of antique furnishings, more or less from the correct era, that the family has found to decorate it. My host told me they'd always loved antiques and scoured shops all over for just the right pieces. One of the period pieces they found is a huge antique music box. It's the size of a small cabinet and plays enormous notched metal disks, maybe around a foot and a half (half a meter) in diameter. When I first saw this thing, having always been fascinated by elaborate mechanical devices, I thought it truly was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen. Of course I'd seen nickelodeons, but I'd never seen anything quite like this before. I was excited to see that it's still there in their hall.

Speaking of music, I did something in preparation for this story that I've been thinking about doing for my more historical posts for a while. I had an added incentive for putting it together more seriously this time. I presented it to the owners on a CD as a gift of thanks for their hospitality. The question I wanted to answer was, when the house was finished and the first family moved in, if they were to have a housewarming party, what would the music have sounded like? I went back one year for compositions to travel around Europe gaining popularity, then another two years for that music to cross the Atlantic and gain popularity in the United States. I sought out particularly Chamber Music from the years 1868-1871, what could realistically be performed by a pianist, a quartet of musicians, and/or a small group of singers in the house's drawing room.

This proved a bit too limiting, especially where the dance music was concerned, so I allowed for performances by larger ensembles which presumably any halfway decent professional quartet could have distilled down into a chamber orchestration. Another exception is Von Weber's "Invitation to the Dance" from 1819 which remained popular throughout the middle of the nineteenth century. Hector Berlioz' orchestration of it in 1841 would have kept its popularity surging further. The songs are divided into sections of the evening: the arrival of the guests, dinner for close friends, the young lady of the house sings a song, the remaining guests arrive for dancing, singers arrive, more dancing, and the guests departing. I wasn't able to find a few of the more obscure selections, but the ones I could I've compiled into a YouTube playlist, which you're welcome to listen to while reading the rest of this post to get in the mood.

The Victorians were very serious about their parties. Every household throwing a party was determined theirs would be bigger, more elaborate, and more spectacular than the previous house party in town. There was a whole litany of behavioral rules and regulations and protocols. 

The architecture reflects this regulation of behaviors. Everything in the Victorian home had its own particular place. The people occupying them did, also. Unlike smaller homes which don't have the luxury of size, in a larger house like this one, everything and everyone could be sequestered by gender or class into specific spaces to enforce those protocols. It was just not thought appropriate for certain members of society to interact with others in a manner that wasn't tightly controlled. The front parlor, for instance, was often considered a female space and would have been decorated as such. Men were free to enter whenever they wished. The billiard room, smoking room, or study was considered a male domain, and it was seriously frowned upon for women to enter unless for very specific reasons.

In comparison to the open plans of suburban homes in the 1950s and 1960s, the spatial division in Victorian houses reflects the highly regulated, socially formalized period during which they were built. So while the family residing in the house would use the main staircase in the hall, servants were delegated to a service staircase leading up from the pantry at the back of the house. I say "pantry" because my host told me that originally, the kitchen had been in the basement. From what I've learned, this was not unusual, in fact in a lot of homes especially prior to when this one was built, the kitchen would often have been located behind the main house in a separate structure altogether. Kitchens were smoky, smelly, and painfully hot in the summertime, but most importantly had a terrible knack for regularly burning down to the ground.

In a way, it's odd to contrast the Victorian era's strict division of interior space with the open plan of the 1950s, because as discussed earlier, both periods shared a highly formalized social structure. Although the open plan was pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright many years earlier, it wasn't adopted in huge numbers for suburban homes until the social protocols started to fracture in the late-1950s. Its wide-spread adoption was also in part a result of, and incorporated, a lot of psychology and (occasionally quasi-)scientific examinations of efficiency in house designs carried out through the 1930s, particularly where it concerned the kitchen. 

Furthermore, 40 Hilton is larger in scale than most middle-income suburban houses that would have utilized the open plan. Many larger houses even in the 1960s, especially ones built to both require and accommodate domestic help, would have worked from a noticeably different model. The 1950s housewife was the center of domestic life in her home, responsible for its maintenance and operations whether she wanted to be or not. The upper-class Victorian housewife, on the other hand, was more of a mere ornament in her residence. She would very rarely even have set foot in the kitchen for anything other than to give orders to staff, whereas that same space would be the center of command (and/or imprisonment) for her mid-twentieth-century middle-class counterpart.

The first Main Line of the Long Island Railroad (LIRR) to Hicksville--including the Mineola train station--was in full service by 1837. Two years later, the first branch off the Main Line led from Mineola through what would become the town of Garden City into Hempstead, a line which no longer exists (roughly following the path of Franklin Avenue, parallel to Hilton immediately to the east). In 1869, a multimillionaire named Alexander T. Stewart purchased a huge plot of grassy land in Hempstead Plains bounded by Mineola to the north and Hempstead to the south, Floral Park to the west and Bethpage to the east. In the middle of this he founded the village of Garden City and opened up a train station with the same name on the LIRR Main Line.

It was the single largest land purchase of the century in the United States, a plot of land about two-thirds the size of the entire island of Manhattan, by a man calculated by today's standards to have been the sixth or seventh wealthiest man ever to have lived in this country. His town would be the first planned community here based on the garden city movement championed in England by Ebenezer Howard. The same movement, coincidentally, would be employed in my own neighborhood of Sunnyside, Queens, in the 1930s. In 1872, Stewart completed his Central Rail Road branch from Flushing, stopping at a new Garden City station at the center of the village, and on out to Farmingdale. One small branch from this line led from Bethpage Junction to Bethpage, where Stewart had a brickworks that would supply building material for all the community buildings in his new village. The original Garden City station on the Main Line was then renamed the Merillon Avenue station.

Most of the first houses to be built in Garden City were by John Kellum. He'd designed Stewart's cast-iron department store at Broadway and Tenth Street (1862)--the country's first department store and the largest retail store in the world at the time--and his palatial residence on Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street (1869). 

There were ten of these large Victorian houses built, all of them identical aside from their porches which were always oriented to the south. Two of them remained under the ownership of nearby schools, St. Mary's and St. Paul's, into the 1970s. For a short time they housed students of the schools, who nicked-named them the "Apostles." There are six Apostle houses left, of which 40 Hilton is one. A number of smaller houses to follow were nick-named the "Disciple" houses. Not much of Kellum's work appears to still stand in Manhattan aside from one notable structure, the Tweed New York County Courthouse (1861). He was evidently a huge fan and also something of a master of Victorian architecture.

In a way, it's ironic that I am a fan of this style, too, since what I tend to discuss most here is the movement that arose specifically out of intense distaste for the Victorian age architecture and its rampant eclecticism. But I'd also like to say that I think the subject of this post is an impeccable example of Victorian architecture, mostly because it is most certainly grand and ornamental, but not in the overblown ways some mansions of the era were, as if every lathe within hundreds of miles had to be employed to finish the job. Its proportions and detailing are stately and refined. It also doesn't hurt at all that the current owners (my school friend's relatives) have done an admirable job of restoring the house as sensitively as was possible and diligently maintaining its splendor.

Perhaps it would have been different had I been a total stranger. My strikeouts at the Libeskind house and also attempts to see Wallace Harrison's beautiful Modernist estate in Huntington are two great examples of the difficulties involved in looking at privately-owned homes. It was still relatively rough working out the logistics with the current owners and hoping that the weather reports would be accurate. But I'll have to say that the family could not have been more welcoming and hospitable. Many, many thanks to them for their warm reception, accommodations, and shared information. I'd also like to thank Garden City historian John Ellis Kordes, who spoke to me on the phone and was incredibly forthcoming and helpful.

In 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibited the sale of alcohol. This, the loosening of morality of the early twentieth century, the rise of Hollywood cinema as the dominant art form, and the spread of organized crime surrounding the homespun manufacture, bootlegging, and sale of alcohol gave birth to an entire underground subculture in this country. The prime focus of nightlife during this era was often quite literally under ground, the Speakeasy. Saloon owner Kate Hester continued to run her establishment in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, without a liquor license after the cost of them was raised exorbitantly in 1888. In order to not draw attention to the unlicensed saloon, she would tell patrons who got boisterous to "speak easy, boys! speak easy!" 

In New York City, Speakeasies were also in part responsible for the spreading popularity of Jazz and the birth of the Charleston. Their most visible character was the free-wheeling Flapper. The quintessential Flapper, in my opinion, will always be Louise Brooks. Prior to Prohibition, mixing good spirits with anything else had typically been considered bad form, but since the neat liquor during Prohibition was often of such low quality and questionable taste, cocktails became a new fad.

During this time, the owner of 40 Hilton was also the manager of the majestic Garden City Hotel nearby. The rumor goes that since it was no longer legal to serve alcohol at the hotel, sometime probably around 1923-25, he decided the best solution was to build a Speakeasy in the basement of his own home. 

The irony of installing a Speakeasy in a Victorian house cannot be easily overstated. Speakeasies, Jazz, and the Flappers who enjoyed them were rejecting anything and everything Victorian society had held dear. The Flappers were wild and sexually liberated; they referred to a wedding ring as a "handcuff." They followed Coco Chanel's lead and cast off the formal (and uncomfortable) bustles, corsets, pantaloons, and petticoats that restricted their movement for the freedom of short, slinky dresses amounting to not much more than a short satiny slip held up by spaghetti straps with maybe some fringe at the bottom. They smoked, drove cars, cropped their hair short, and rebelled against all the gender protocols of earlier eras. Jazz itself was sort of the Hip-Hop of its day. It was all very Punk Rock in its way, and quite badass. Certainly many Speakeasies were high-class establishments requiring black tie and tails and employing less controversial musicians. Perhaps this was more the vibe in the basement of 40 Hilton, but the historical conflict remains, in principle.

The bar room proper is actually incredibly small. No more than about five drinkers could comfortably occupy it at one time. This small room has a door with the requisite peephole on the door, through which the proprietor could see who was requesting admittance and demand the secret password. Outside this is a larger room with the billiard table and a working fireplace. I only asked if it were functional because it seemed strange to me that there would have been a fireplace in the basement at all, until I learned that it originally contained the kitchen. The house has three flues, impressively; this is one. Due to the diminutive size of these two rooms, presumably it was really enjoyed only by personal friends of the hotel's manager and V.I.P. guests at the hotel personally invited to it by him.

Whether or not the owners of the house at the time had connections to organized crime, I'll not speculate, but for sure an illegal bar could never have lasted long without that, an insider connection with the local police department, or at the very least, enough money to bribe constables to look the other way (although there were only two of them). There is still something in the basement that may very well have served as an alarm. In a small nook near the ceiling in a corner of the billiard room, there's this old-timey looking siren. My host said they never quite knew what it was or what it was for. My best guess is that there was a button somewhere on the first floor near the entrance that could set off this siren when the police arrived to bust up the merriment. Oddly, I'd think something as loud as a siren would be heard all through the house, including at the front door, so who knows?

It's incredible enough that there's a Speakeasy there at all, but another piece of the legend makes it all the more fantastic. The rumor was that there was a tunnel dug from the Garden City Hotel two rather long blocks away to the basement of this house so guests could visit the Speakeasy privately. When I visited the house with my friend all those years ago, she showed me this arched cement portal (now containing bookshelves) in the basement that faces the direction of the hotel. At the time, we both agreed this must certainly be the entrance to the infamous tunnel. 

On this more recent visit, my host assured me that behind this arch, an alleged tunnel would have had to cut through the extant coal chute, rendering it impossible. He also said that a village historian visiting the house had scoffed at the idea that any such thing ever existed, to his knowledge. With all respect to my host and appreciation for realistic skepticism, I have far too wild and romantic an imagination to ever fully believe there was no tunnel and that that cement arch isn't what remains of it. I'd have gotten a photo of it so you could decide for yourself, but the current family uses their basement for storage as many of us do, and one of my top priorities was to not intrude on their privacy.

Another argument for this story being mere legend is that it would seem an outrageous waste of resources to construct such a tunnel. But Garden City is, and no doubt was then, a conspicuously conservative town. Add to this what is the only four star hotel on Long Island (according to them). Vanderbilts stayed there, Astors, Morgans, Guggenheims, Theodor Roosevelt, John and Jackie Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, Sarah Ferguson, Hillary Clinton, and Prince Khaled of Saudi Arabia. Perhaps most famously, due to the hotel's close proximity to Roosevelt Field Airport (now a huge shopping mall), Charles Lindberg stayed at this hotel the night before his transatlantic flight in 1927. The point is, these are the type of folks who would not want to be seen strolling down the street from their hotel to what everyone suspects is an illegal drinking hole, especially in a heavily religious community. They'd want to be far more discreet. A suburban residential neighborhood typically doesn't have dark back alleys for slinking into a Speakeasy unnoticed.

The village had a population of only around 2000 at that time, most of them devout Episcopalians forming a congregation for the enormous and majestic Cathedral of the Incarnation (Henry G. Harrison, 1885) a few blocks away. The cathedral and bishop's residence, the schools, and other public buildings were all served by large underground pipes from a centralized heating plant near to the present location of the town's middle school (typically years six, seven, and eight). Oddly, I still remember there being random manhole covers in the school's sports field, but never knew that's what they were. It was also rumored that these pipes were used by boys at St. Paul's to sneak over to visit the girls at St. Mary's, but this was also nothing more than legend. But this may have been what evolved into the legend of the Speakeasy tunnel. Moral of the story, this particular tunnel may never have existed, but I would just really love to believe that it did. Someday perhaps an archeological excavation will reveal the truth.

I'd also much rather believe that Lindberg actually did stop off for a Gin Rickey or two at this Speakeasy than to think he preferred to "get a good night's rest," although it's unlikely the eve of his historic trip was his first or last time at Roosevelt Field or staying at the hotel. He may have been a regular, in fact. My host did tell me that evidently the president of Ford Motors drank at the little basement bar some time in the 1950s, when holding that post was Henry Ford II. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to make of this synchronicity, but there is actually an old photograph showing Henry and Edsel Ford, subject of a relatively recent post here, with Lindberg, who appears in this post.

It is possible that the basement bar remained in use as a modest nightspot into the mid-1930s--although I rather doubt the owners at the time would have wanted anyone other than close friends in their private home once it was no longer a social and legal necessity. Without question, if there ever were a tunnel, it would have been sealed off shortly after Prohibition was repealed in 1933. 

Photo courtesy Huffington Post.

The first Garden City Hotel was designed by John Kellum in the Victorian style and built by Alexander Stewart in 1874. In 1895, a much larger shell was wrapped around the earlier structure with white-trimmed, red-brick Georgian Revival architecture by McKim, Mead, & White (MM&W). This one burned down after only four years, and the most famous of the buildings on the site, a much larger Georgian masterpiece also by MM&W, opened in 1901 with a cupola based almost precisely on the one on top of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Stamford White was married to Bessie Smith, who was Stewart's wife's grandniece. The firm of Ford, Butler, & Oliver matched MM&W's style to expand the two wings in 1911, but other than that, this is the structure which was rumored to have had a secret tunnel to 40 Hilton.

The hotel quite tragically went bankrupt and this incredible structure was demolished in 1973. From 1973 until 1980, it was an unassuming one-room building by an unknown architect. It was then rebuilt and reopened at a larger size again. The interiors, with antiques personally selected in Europe by the owner's daughter, Cathy Nelkin, are appropriately luxurious, but the exterior is entirely forgettable, especially compared to its earlier manifestations. In fact, no one anywhere seems to have any idea of the identity of the architect or architectural firm responsible for its present design.

Sometime before the current owners purchased 40 Hilton in around 1986 or so, an owner of the house had removed the staircase leading from the third floor to the cupola or "widow's watch" on the roof, replacing it with a closet. That term, by the way, comes from the tale that the widow would use a cupola like this to go up and watch for her husband lost at sea returning home again. 

The cupolas on the Apostle houses had a tendency to easily rot. As a result, most of them were removed. That along with the refacing of exteriors on some of them and other alterations over the years makes it almost impossible now to see that they were all once identical. Since their cupola was rotting as well, the former owners of this house just sealed up the opening in the ceiling. I suppose I'd like to blame the 1970s for this, a decade relatively unkind to architecture. But in fairness, before the advent of double-glazed windows, the cupola likely sucked all the warm air right up out of the house in the wintertime, even with the door closed.

My host told me that, thankfully, they needed to make very little structural improvements to the house. He said the previous owners had chosen relatively accurately Victorian wallpapers and decor, but that a lot of the colors were rather dark (as Victorian rooms often were). They lived with it for a while before deciding it was time to brighten up the house a bit. He also said they might have gone a bit further in their restoration, but could find absolutely no original floor plans for this house anywhere. One of the more involved restorations they undertook was to open up the cupola again, install a fold-down stair as you'd see accessing an attic, repair the rotted cupola itself, and create a roof deck surrounding it. It was really quite stunning up there--this house is one of the tallest buildings around. I was sort of hoping to see the hotel from the roof, but the hundred-year-old trees in the neighborhood are taller than anything else, including this house.

If there'd been a ghost in this picture, I'd have been SO excited.

For some unknown reason, after the cupola was reopened, the house began to experience some strange phenomena. My friend from school told me that she'd be coming down the main grand staircase and see the door to the powder room under the stairs opening or closing in the reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall. But everyone in the house would be in the kitchen or dining room, none of them using the powder room. Oooooooooo... The toilet in there would be heard randomly flushing, as well, even though no one was in there. I'm not saying I necessarily believe in these sorts of things or not, but if I did, it wouldn't surprise me to learn of it happening in a house like this, with such an incredibly rich history.

That the strange occurrences seemed to coincide with the opening of the rooftop cupola is a bit odd, because I'd think the characters to be found in the Speakeasy downstairs would have been a lot more colorful than some demure Victorian girl. Speakeasy patrons could use a restroom in the basement, however. My friend had also shown me that in one of the bedroom closets, there's a small, maybe four-foot-high door (a little over a meter high) leading to some kind of secret passageway. Where it led, she'd never known. My host said it merely leads to one of the other bedrooms, but just the idea that there would be a secret passageway in this house is so delightfully perfect.

My friend and I were somewhat Goth at the time (my excuse is that we were seventeen), so the whole experience was a bit like hanging out with Lydia, Winona Ryder's character in Beetlejuice. Granted, my friend was considerably more upbeat and fun than Lydia Deetz, so I mean that in a very, very good way. I think the enthusiasm of this post proves that well enough. The current owner seemed to suggest that there hasn't been too much mysterious toilet flushing for a while, but he told me that when it does happen, it always seems to be right around this time of the year.

While I would be pleased to present this story to you at any time, I'm especially elated that it worked out in such a way that I could post it now, just as we near Halloween 2012. For readers who may live in other parts of the world, Halloween is the festival in the United States celebrating the deceased, although it's sort of evolved into something very different now. As a matter of fact, this story was completed a couple weeks ago. On the recommendation of a good friend to whom I told some of this story, I decided to wait and publish it much closer to the holiday. Not that the house at 40 Hilton is spooky in any way, mind you. In my opinion it's absolutely beautiful. If I were a ghost, I'd probably want to stick around, also.

All text and 40 Hilton photos ©2012, Ryan Witte.

The Original Suburban American House

This post is dedicated to one of the most important structures in the entire United States. In a way, the numbing banality of what's in these photographs should, ironically, make it less shocking that I say that. In other words, saying that this is the most important structure in the United States is too easy, and also could be easily debated. It would be a rather interesting debate, in fact.

But the subject of this post is possibly among the top ten most important buildings in the country for the very reason that it looks like nothing, or...everything. It's the last remaining unaltered Cape Cod House in Levittown, Long Island. It was financed by Abraham Levitt, designed by his son Alfred Levitt, and built and sold by Abe's other son William Levitt. It was likely completed around 1947 or 1948. Alfred had actually apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright, although whether that stamp of legitimacy would stick to this is questionable.

In order to explain why this utterly forgettable little house is so terribly important, I'd like to tell a story, beginning with an imaginary person named John Smith.  

John is born to a Polish father and Italian mother on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1923, when "John" is the most popular American name for baby boys. He barely remembers the crash of the stock market, being only six years old at the time. But the initial panic could be felt by just about everyone, at any age. From that point onward, the slow, excruciating advance of sadness, desperation, frustration, and anger among the adults around him becomes a part of his daily life. Dealing so much with the failing economy robs his childhood of many of its innocent joys. While his parents insist on keeping him in school, most of his free time is spent working at a local cleaners to bring in whatever miniscule coins he can to help his family keep food on the table.

Following a brief romantic career of sordid hand-holding and a few stolen kisses, John meets a girl who makes him positively flip his wig. Her name is Mary--the most popular name for girls his age, seventeen. He'd known her from the neighborhood, but they start going steady. A sinister rumble can be faintly heard from that far off, distant land called "Europe." But here the new cars and trains are shiny and streamlined, this guy called Buckminster Fuller is doing some wacky new stuff, all the new technology is terribly exciting. Women are joining the work force like never before. The Works Progress Administration has a whole lot of projects running; John's uncle is working on one of them, paving roads. There's a light appearing at the end of the Depression Tunnel. Things look hopeful for John and Mary, their young love affair blossoming.

Then, at the tender age of eighteen and still his mama's boy, John is drafted into the war and shipped off to France. At first, he's mostly so terrified all the time that his adrenaline-soaked brain simply goes onto autopilot. As time goes by, his shell hardens and he learns to cope with the horrors of every new day. Thinking about his home life is a powerful coping mechanism, a "safe place." As the real memories of struggling through the Great Depression fade, they're slowly replaced by an idealized version of what home life had been like, full of hot apple pies, stick-ball on the street on late summer afternoons, and mom's hugs. Sitting in a trench freezing and crusted with mud, one bombshell away from having no arms or legs, it's a version much more comforting than the real memories were.

Growing into his early-twenties, he gets more used to the mature but crass conversations about love and sex, girls and women with his fellow soldiers (some of them older and wiser). A nervous trip to a French brothel awkwardly shoves him one step further into adulthood. Mary writes him at least once a week like always, but their correspondence has matured accordingly. She tells him about her work at the factory making wheel struts for bomber planes and the girls she's befriended there. She tells him the neighborhood gossip and which boys have come home wounded. She ends every letter with "I'm true to you always and count the days until you return home."

As the war appears to be nearing its bloody conclusion, slowly the figure of Mom in John's fantasy home life becomes replaced by Mary. He's no longer looking back to his past life in the States, but toward the future he'll find when he goes home again. Aside from that appearance by Betty Grable at the United Service Organization show--leading to the Military Masturbation Epidemic of April 1944--John thinks only of Mary. Increasingly, the only thing keeping him going--keeping him alive, even--is thoughts of her and the tears of joy she'll shed when he first throws his arms around her. After one uncommonly honest and sincere conversation with a close army buddy about their sweethearts back in the States, John decides that as soon as he's again on home soil, he is going to ask Mary to marry him.

Finally, V-Day. On the one hand, John is now an adult man with the cruel, real-life experiences of someone twice his age. He's killed. He's been forced to be self-sufficient both practically and emotionally. He's endured hunger and cold and hardships he never could have imagined. On the other hand, and in a way because this has been his way of life for the past four years, he's still just a child. The time normally spent to smoothly, healthily grow into adulthood has been completely arrested by the war. Behind his sometimes cold, steely eyes and manly, stoic, hardened demeanor lies the heart of a fragile, hopeful, idealistic little boy.

Mary looks different, but more beautiful than ever. She says "YES!" A year later, they're hitched. A few months after that, she's in the family way. The Lower East Side is appearing to be less and less a place one would want to raise a child. There are few trees and practically no grass. It's dirty, smelly, and dangerous. The schools are not great. "If we're going to set up house and home," Mary says, "we should do it right."

They buy this little house in Levittown, Long Island for around $8000. It's got a yard with real grass. It's a nice, friendly neighborhood where everyone looks like everyone else (white) and everyone knows everyone else. Not only do all the people look the same, but all their houses look the same. It's the very portrait of conformity, normality, consistency, and safety, and in sharp contrast to the sudden deployment of an army regiment in a firestorm of whizzing bullets, whistling bombshells, and growling German tanks.

Floor plan courtesy of Peter Bacon Hales

A sign of how childlike and idealistic this picture was is to be found in the architectural character of the house. If you asked a three-year-old to draw a picture of a house, this is exactly what she or he would give you. The cute little chimney sticking up out of the middle of the pitched roof, the door in the middle with a window on each side, the teeny-tiny little lantern fixture above the door--it's almost like a cartoon simplification of a real house. The odd little rectangular frames just under the roof line appear to have been additional windows. Although it would be difficult to argue the benefit of more light, and they must have been great for regulating temperature, most of the houses have them boarded over. It's possible they were difficult to keep clean and/ or wouldn't accommodate screens.

To put the $8000 price tag into perspective, one of the most expensive regular-production automobiles, the Cadillac Coupe DeVille convertible, sold for just under $3500 in 1949. The Levitts were able to drastically reduce costs by employing techniques used to build barracks during the war. The houses were built as if on an assembly line, so characteristic of U.S. industry. Sadly, the provision that no Levittown house could be owned or occupied by a person of color was written (IN UPPERCASE, no less) right into the lease.

This IS Leave it to Beaver. This IS The Donna Reed Show. No country in the world has suburbs like the United States. Certainly it would never have been possible at this time in the economic devastation and war-torn land surrounding Europe's great cities, where nazi occupation was felt so much more acutely, not to mention the psychological repercussions of entire families murdered off and orphaned children everywhere. And no American city has suburbs like New York. The flight out of urban centers was endemic, but New York was and is the largest urban center from which to fly. Here it was also exacerbated by Robert Moses, who made the suburban exodus not only easier, but virtually unstoppable.

The house shown here, the Ranch House, is right around the corner from the unaltered Cape Cod. It's extremely close to being intact. According to the person I spoke to at the Levittown Historical Society, the kitchens were extremely small, so almost immediately, most of them had extensions added to double the size of their kitchens. This Levittown Ranch has an extension at the rear on the left (likely expanding the living room) and a covered porch on the right. The man who rents it with his wife and kids said of altering what was an almost intact original house, "I need a home, not a museum."

Yes, I know one can make the suburb argument easily for Los Angeles. But L.A. is one big suburb. L.A. really has no urban to subordinate the suburban. New York in 1950 far better characterizes the true American urban/ suburban dichotomy because of the fact that the city is still vibrant, crowded, commercial, fast-paced, dirty, smoky, and diverse. Its suburbs therefore can truly be its opposite: quiet, sparsely populated, leisurely, clean, pastoral, and demographically homogeneous. John and his (male) neighbors work in New York City. They settle in Levittown.

In 1949, John and Mary's first daughter is born and named the most common name for baby girls in that year (strangely), Linda. Her brother would be named James.

Over the first seven or eight years of Linda's life, a new paradigm of American society is firmly cemented into place. Morals, protocol, ethics, manners, fashions, gender and race relations, child-rearing practices, the nature of marriage, everything becomes codified, agreed upon by a new white suburban middle-class. Commercial consumption of highly branded products becomes synonymous with personal identity to be manipulated by media, advertising, and the television and automobile culture. It's a naïve, idealized, at times almost Victorian simulation of what Community is supposed to be. These communities created the myth of the American Dream (which does not exist, by the way, for any readers who have never been here for any extended period of time). This house is the very epicenter of the American Dream's emergence.

The first cracks in the pretty picture start to show in 1955. The Douglas Sirk melodrama All That Heaven Allows, Picnic, Rebel Without a Cause, and The Seven Year Itch and public consciousness of the marital problem its title describe all appear in 1955. Even The Trouble With Harry from that year would seem an apt metaphor for the ways that a community's dark, scandalous truths are hidden beneath a thin pretense of conservative social conventions.

John's secretary is possibly too flirtatious for his mid-life crisis to withstand. Mary, alone all day and under the influence of "mother's little helper," might find the new young, fit mailman's smile a bit too irresistible. But outward appearances usurp anything else in the white middle-class suburb, because its foundation had rested so heavily on appearances from the very beginning. "They seemed so happy--the perfect family, really," friends would later say of John and Mary Smith.

By the time Linda reaches her eighteenth birthday in 1966, the world is an entirely different place. It's no longer possible to ignore hard reality like her parents had. First of all, the world is just moving far too fast. And why would you want to, anyway? There's about to be an exhiliarating revolution in science and technology, plastics and chemistry, information processing, space travel, medicine, and of course society, itself. What's more, it would be entirely irresponsible to ignore it and not try to change it, as she and her friends discuss more and more, considering the way their parents messed everything up.

Fueling the fires, they're at the age where all people in any era must, for their own growth and development, question and reject what they've been brought up to believe. They have to forge their own way. For the first time in history, the millions of them are becoming a very real demographic, identified (mostly by marketing executives bent on exploiting it for profit) as a "youth culture." Linda and her parents can barely understand one another anymore. Linda, at least, is losing interest in trying to make them understand.

The Levittowns of this country--John and Mary's white middle-class suburban American Dream of the 1950s--had been the soil. Into that soil was planted a new generation, Linda's, which began to bear fruit around 1967. In art, music, film, theater, design, architecture, commerce, technology, politics, religion, philosophy, theoretical methodologies, social mores, gender relations, sexuality, parenting, race relations, the very nature of human identity, the entire western cultural landscape undergoes one of the most important revolutions in human history. From that point forward, some vague moment in 1968 or 1969, nothing would ever be the same again. One look at the upheavals of the early-1970s and we might be tempted to suggest the world that gave birth to the Cape Cod House in Levittown had been completely turned upside-down.

Looked at in this way, this charming little house represents so much more than it could ever hope to handle. In some bizarre way, I consider it a monument in the strictest sense to some elusive quality instrumental to the evolution of our culture. In the interests of completion, Linda's hypothetical son, most commonly named Michael in the early 1970s, is of the generation that produced writers like myself who would write about the last unaltered Levittown house in these terms. Obviously, I didn't live through any of the events described here. My perspective is a chronologically outsider's one. Social anthropologists live their subjects, however, historians very seldom do.

All text and images ©2011, Ryan Witte except where noted.

The Odyssey--Part 4

The way I'd originally planned it, I'd still have been traveling out to Long Island during rush hour--the wrong direction, but there'd still have been trains. By the time I got to Woodside, there was not another train on the line I needed for another forty minutes. When I got that news, a clock started ticking loudly in my head. I went to get a bagel and coffee from the Dunkin Donuts across the street. When I did board the train, you could almost hear the William Tell Overture in the background.

I jumped in the car, and risked the opportunity to use the powder room at my mother's house--I figured if I were going to miss the house arriving, that two minutes wasn't going to make any difference. I got on the road. I made an anxiety-producing wrong turn at a tiny little road that had no sign and looked like a driveway, had to double back, but otherwise I didn't have too much difficulty. Having memorized the route on Google Maps was extremely helpful because it wasn't too long before I just knew I was going the wrong way.

The property is on a small island on the North Shore that was once owned entirely by J. P. Morgan and was therefore named Morgan Island. The property is absolutely insane. It's its own shark-fin shaped peninsula jutting out into the Long Island Sound with 270° views. Check out the satellite image from Google:

Completely out of control.

When I drove up it was immediately clear that I hadn't missed it, and I heaved a sigh of relief. I introduced myself to Andrew Sarnoff and his friend, both of whom were very nice and welcoming. Here's the VSBA house that had always been on the site, simply called the House in Glen Cove (1985):

And the little matching pool house:

Andrew had told me that Robert Venturi was there, as well as a lot of other people, gathered in the tent off to the side which was, gratefully, heated. First, though, I recognized Fred Adelson (he doesn't look like a Magritte painting in person). He'd been introduced at the Storefront event as the historian who really took notice of Lieb House and wrote a good deal about it while it was still "under the radar," as well as a number of VSBA's other buildings around New Jersey, where he lives and teaches. Adelson was a particularly nice, interesting guy, and he and I chatted on and off for much of the day.

Then around came the man himself, Robert Venturi. I grabbed the opportunity to introduce myself, shake his hand, and tell him what a profound influence his work has had on me. He asked if I were an architect, and when I told him no, that I'm a writer, he seemed to immediately lose any and all interest in talking to me. Oddly enough, I've gotten that reaction from artists before, but not architects, who are often impressed that I actually know what I'm talking about. Anyway, it was not a big deal and I'm sure he had far more important things on his mind. I'm also sure at that point he was sick to death of all the reporters harassing him nonstop.

It was around this time that the barge first appeared on the horizon off to the west:

Click that.

This ended up taking a remarkably long time, because they had to bring it around to the eastern side of the peninsula where the house would end up on the site. 

Jim Venturi, I think I mentioned before, is making a documentary about his parents. His timing couldn't have been any better, and no doubt this whole event will be in the film. You can look for me when it comes out; I must have stumbled in front of his cameras at some point. The crew had these miniature remote-controlled electric helicopters specially designed to hold cameras and fly around for about twenty minutes on their battery power.

They're totally silent, so I didn't even hear them take off or land, but you can see one of them in the sky in one of the later photos. I was impressed by how rock steady it was in the air; it appeared to just hover without moving an inch. I was talking to the guy about them for a while, I think he said he's from one of the Carolinas. He makes the helicopters totally from scratch by hand and tunes them to have practically no vibrations or shimmy. He was telling me that HD video is relatively unforgiving of vibration making most miniatures unusable. I suspect he's one of the only people in the country building things like this, a good position to be in. They have their limits, and it complicated things that it was somewhat windy, but for a small documentary film, they're considerably less expensive than renting a full size helicopter. 

The new site:

The suspense built for a while, but the house's arrival almost took a little too long to sustain it. I'd like to go through some of the nuts and bolts of how they did this, because I found it really fascinating. It had to be done at high tide, which gave them maybe a four hour window, but the water level was still quite a bit lower than the land. You can see it's not beach, either, but a small rocky cliff maybe ten to twelve feet high. They had sort of a scout boat that came in first to set things up.

Here's Deborah Sarnoff (in the earmuffs) talking to Venturi as the house approached:

You can see the miniature helicopter in this one:

They had to secure the barge far better than any anchor could do, so they had steel cables attached to the two front corners of it. On land, the cables were hooked onto two of their front-end loaders, which backed up pulling the cables taught with the barge pulled up against the rocks.

It was around this time that I started to realize that, as I said before, this was one of the most incredible things I have ever witnessed in my lifetime. It's really something to see a house being moved (which I have). It's another thing altogether to see a house being moved on a barge over large bodies of water. That would have been an experience, anyway, even if this hadn't been a terribly important structure designed by one of the most important American architects of the twentieth century. This was all three. I can't even tell you how grateful I was to have been there to see it.

It was also around this time that Fred Adelson pointed out Inga Saffron to me--I don't think I'd have recognized her otherwise. I went to say hello. It was very nice meeting her, since I'd emailed back and forth with her a few times about the Lieb House and other things. I told her how talented I think she is as a writer, and that's true: I highly recommend her column in the Philadelphia Inquirer. She just has a very smooth, eloquent way of putting sentences together and has a ton of intelligent things to say about the architecture of that city.

To get the house up onto land from the barge, they pulled these four steel girders out and lined them up with the wheels.

Then at the top, they dumped a bunch of dirt, patted it down, and laid these big sheets of what appeared to be industrial-strength plastic tread.

By "they" of course I mean Wolfe House & Building Movers (they've obviously gotten extremely popular: at the time of this post their website has exceeded its bandwidth). When I saw a couple of their wives and daughters on my way in, I thought maybe Hasidic Jews, but Adelson suggested they're Mennonites, which seemed more accurate. So you can see they all have wide-brimmed hats and/or big old ZZ Top beards. Someone, Adelson probably, I can't remember who, mused that since Jim Venturi was filming it all for the documentary, they chose house movers with a lot of character.

Then it rolled up the girders, apparently powered by a motor on the house platform, rather than being pulled by winch or something similar. 

It was completely steady, so I'm sure no one was all that nervous. But there was this one tense point where it was out over the water. 

One little wrong move and it would have fallen crashing onto the rocky shore, impossible to save. I also can't help but wonder how a house can withstand these changes of orientation without at least a window pane cracking or other minor damage. At long last the Lieb House rolled out onto solid ground, they gave the horn four or five long celebratory blasts, and the crowd cheered.

Here's Venturi watching as it rolled out, surrounded by TV reporters:

Robert Gotkin and Deborah Sarnoff being interviewed:

I went up to her later, after the furor had died down. I thanked her for saving this house, which she seemed to appreciate. I asked her how much it'd cost to do this. She said they bought the house for $1, no doubt just to have a dollar amount on paper, and the move had cost $100,000. It was actually a lot less than I was expecting after seeing everything they went through. Furthermore, building a new guest house on their property would probably have cost four times that much if it cost a dime.

Venturi had said something at the Storefront talk about how they don't like to invest too much of their own personality into their projects. I understood that to mean that it's the nature of the individual client that should be realized in the architecture, not their own. But along those lines I wondered how emotionally invested he got, and asked him if he was relieved that somebody had wanted to save this house. "And how, yes" he said. I walked around a little bit more, said my goodbyes, and left. I had just enough time for a quick bite of sushi before I had to return to Manhattan for an appointment. The day really couldn't have worked out any more perfectly, and I'll not soon forget it. 

If there ever is a Part 5, it won't be until late in the summer. If they're kind enough to let me stop by to take some photos, I'd like to go to see it on a nice summer day after it's sited and the landscaping has all grown back in. Until then, I hope you've enjoyed the tale.

©2009, Ryan Witte