Ship Shape

I find it a bit amusing that I'm continually tempted to break the rules of what this blog was meant to cover--namely the visual arts with a concentration on architecture--since I was the one who made up those rules in the first place. I think the subject of this post has obvious parallels, but it's still somewhat out in the margins. I recently went to visit the U.S.S. Intrepid Aircraft Carrier, permanently docked in the Hudson River.

Over the many years I've been writing, I've learned that a surprising number of people really just love to hear the word "no" come out of their mouths. It's at least equal to the number who enthusiastically say "yes," and far greater in number than those who say "no" with reluctance. Whenever I encounter a person, organization, or institution that is accommodating with their information and resources, I often feel a kind of camaraderie with them. Here is a person who is as proud of what they're doing as I am, is happy to share it, and it only serves to boost my own enthusiasm for the subject. This was what I encountered at the Intrepid.

I had inquired ahead of time as to whether there might be a person on their staff who is particularly knowledgeable about the naval architecture of the ship. I had only hoped to show up at the right time to join a tour already scheduled that such a person would be conducting. My first point of contact, the tour supervisor, was extremely welcoming and told me that the person I'd want to speak with was a gentleman by the name of John Lyon. The supervisor asked that I let him know when I'd be coming by so that he could give Mr. Lyon a heads-up. I had a good day to visit about a week later.

I had had the idea in my head that this was a site more or less operated by the U.S. Navy. I sort of expected employees there to be on-leave, off-duty, or retired Navy officers. Instead I found it is much more simply a museum. It took me longer to walk over to the river than I had predicted, so instead of first going on a tour, right away I told the ticket desk agent that I was there to see Mr. Lyon. He sold me my ticket and directed me to where Lyon would be waiting, upstairs on board the ship.

I don't know if Lyon was still on the clock (I certainly hope he was), or what other duties he was neglecting by speaking with me, if any. I'd have been happy for whatever information he might have been able to share in fifteen or thirty minutes. Instead, he talked with me for at least an hour, if not an hour and a half. I was so fascinated and learning so much that I kind of lost track of the time. Basically I was treated to a private, one-on-one, ninety-minute educational session with their most knowledgeable guide on this subject. I couldn't have been more grateful.

Perhaps ironically, considering the subject matter, Lyon's accent was from New Zealand. On the other hand, his nationality may contribute to a certain level of objectivity with his subject matter. It's possible that their regular tours are peppered with a little bit of nationalist propagandizing (and perhaps that's what their American visitors want and expect), but I'll not speculate one way or another. The normal Intrepid tours are described as concentrating on the lives of the men and women who served on the ship. Although that's no doubt just as fascinating, it wasn't the reason for my visit. Being a history lover, I don't particularly need facts and figures to have personalities attached for me to find them interesting.

I first explained to him that my knowledge is greatest in land-based architecture so he would know something about my background. Since I'm not a stranger to at least many of the fundamental principles of engineering, I hoped he wouldn't be scared to hit me with the serious technical stuff. Besides, I have the greatest epiphanies when I'm being intellectually challenged. I was excited to see that he'd brought schematic drawings to show me.

We started out discussing the history of aircraft carriers in general and how they came to be the preferred warship for the world's navies. He mentioned something quite interesting about why the carriers were so crucial in World War II. It had nothing to do with Europe. It was because of Japan. Britain had not been defeated by the time the United States entered the war. The British still had plenty of airfields from which to launch air attacks on Germany or Italy. Japan had already been at war for years and years before their attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan had locked down pretty much all the islands in the western Pacific: Micronesia, Mariana, Guam, The Philippines. This meant that there would be nowhere for U.S. planes to land for maintenance or refueling after traversing the long stretch of ocean from Hawaii. To wage war in Asia, essentially the United States needed floating airports.

Yamato.

The most powerful Japanese guns were on the battleship Yamato. The Yamato's biggest guns could hit a target around twenty-five miles away (40km). The fighter planes on aircraft carriers, in contrast, had a combat radius of around 400-500 miles (640-805km). In other words, the fighter planes could reach and attack battleships well before those battleships could ever be a threat to the aircraft carrier. The carriers are typically the centerpiece in "carrier battle group" of warships, including battleships to defend it and cruisers that circle around the perimeter.

Intrepid is in the Essex Class of carriers, named for the first of them, the USS Essex, launched in 1942. The Essex Class evolved from the design of its predecessor, the Yorktown Class. It's probably inaccurate to attempt to attribute the design of Intrepid to any one person. However, an Admiral James S. Russell may have been more heavily involved with its design than others on the Navy design team. Some sources say 1940, but I'm going to trust that Lyon knows his business. According to him, they were ordered in 1939. Intrepid was built at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia and launched in 1943. I'm not sure why, but I was sort of surprised that the ship is so old. I guess I sort of expected it to have been built in the mid-1970s or something. Fully loaded, it displaces around 36,000 tons of water. At 872-feet long (266m), if stood on its end, it would be around the same size as the Chrysler Building. We spent the majority of my remaining time there discussing the design of the ship.

Exploring this branch of architecture was extremely illuminating for me, and I suspect the experience will only serve to enhance my readings of land-based architecture. All the elements are essentially the same, architecturally speaking, but they're completely shifted around. There's a sense of balance, but it's literal balance rather than compositional. There's structure and enclosure, but their arrangement and purpose are entirely different. As far as the concert halls that I have studied at such great length, there's the concern for the movement of waves in a medium. With the Intrepid, it's the hydrodynamics of water around the hull rather than the acoustic containment of sound waves in the air. Hydrodynamics give rise to the overall profile of the structure, rather than to the forms of its interior. It's like architecture spoken in a different language. Since I've broached the subject, here's a fascinating video illustrating my main point of reference:


Culturally speaking, I don't think it can be overemphasized what enormous impact WWII had on every aspect of life in the United States once it was over. Every aspect of the capitalist production and consumption cycle and the way consumers approached material objects would be entirely transformed as a result of the war. Automobiles are a great example because while the stylistic changes were at times merely symbolic and in most cases driven forward by planned obsolescence, the evolutions in engineering and mechanical innovations were so radical that they couldn't help but strongly affect matters of design. The entire nature of the relationship between automobiles and their drivers changed from the 1930s to the 1950s, as a result of industrial design and engineering influenced by the war.

Much the same could be seen in architecture. It's relevant to note that it was a $60-million military housing project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee that helped to make the mostly mid-sized firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill such a colossus. I've already discussed how wartime building processes influenced Levittown. Of course new suburban communities were built into the form of traditionalist clichés, but the processes used to build them would have been so significantly different after the war that they'd produce a slightly but noticeably altered version of the homestead caricature. The transformation of the skyscraper form from prewar to post-war--from brick and stone to steel and glass--is impossible to ignore. One might be inclined to suggest that the enormous output of the steel industry during wartime had to be channeled somewhere in peacetime or risk totally falling into economic chaos. Hence, the very prevalence of the steel and glass skyscraper could be said on some level or another to be a result of the United States' involvement in the war.

It may be argued that the primary goal of a work of land-based architecture is to protect its occupants. Mostly this concerns temperature, weather, and usually some degree of privacy or another. One might add that it should stay standing as long as realistically possible, but the main reason for this is that a structurally unsound building is dangerous for its occupants. Furthermore, if we include here the design of tents and other temporary housing, we see that structural permanence is not only a secondary consideration, it can even be undesirable in some cases. In the design of the Intrepid, in contrast, we discover the primary goal is to keep the structure standing. In other words, everything is designed to keep the vessel afloat and operational, even at the expense of its occupants, if necessary.

Ultimately you want everything safe, the ship and all of its contents. A lot of design decisions are not going give mutually exclusive results. Many others, however, require asking a serious either/or question: do you protect the crew at the expense of the ship's integrity, or do you protect the ship even though it may threaten the lives of crew members? The second choice seems heartless at first glance, but it really isn't if you think about it. If the ship is hit by a weapon, some people are likely to be (fatally) wounded. But if the ship itself is still viable, the remaining crew have the chance to survive. If the ship sinks, all bets are off. If it sinks, you'll likely lose the entire crew, or at least the great majority of them. Lyon repeated this principle a number of times. It wasn't for the sake of being redundant. It truly did explain a great number of things about the way the aircraft carriers were built.

Every measure was taken to protect, above all else, the inner core of chambers containing the boilers and the steam turbines they powered, at the very bottom of the ship. Everything around and above this core was more or less expendable.

These diagrams are the general Essex design, not specifically Intrepid's.

The core is divided into fifteen impermeable, separate chambers. From bow to stern: chain lockers, incendiaries, fore gasoline tank, fuel oil, magazines, fore auxiliary machine room, two fore boiler rooms, fore turbine room, two aft boiler rooms, aft turbine room, aft auxiliary machine room, aft gasoline tank, steering room. None of these rooms can be accessed from the adjacent ones. Instead, one has to climb a ladder several decks up through tubes, then climb back down a different ladder. If the fore tank explodes, you might lose the first two boilers also, but the fire will be as isolated as possible to only one or two chambers. More than likely you'll still have the two aft boilers and two aft turbines perfectly operational. It was truly a stroke of genius to locate some of the boilers and some of the turbines in completely different parts of the ship from the others.

Surrounding this core are layers of chambers, two on the bottom and four on both sides. The two outermost chambers are filled with fuel oil, which I was surprised to learn is not terribly combustible. The inside ones are left empty. Even if a torpedo or other explosive penetrates the outermost chambers, the ship will remain viable.

The next deck up from the core, the fourth deck, is also divided into impermeable chambers that can only be accessed from the third deck above it. Even if the fourth deck is immersed in flame, crew can still escape the boiler and turbine chambers through the tubes. The second and third decks containing crew quarters are more open, but are sealed up during battle. In a battle, the crew goes on lockdown; every crew member has her or his station where s/he must remain throughout the fight, and every hatch is closed and locked. It's forbidden for any of these to be opened until the battle is over and the all-clear is sounded. All these measures are taken to prevent the possibility of fires or explosions spreading from one part of the ship to another. An isolated fire may claim a lot of lives, but it won't threaten the survival of the ship as a whole.

The second deck is the hangar deck. Between the second and third decks is a floor of armor plating around two-and-a-half inches thick (6.3cm). Everything above that is relatively lightweight and therefore provides very little protection. The flight deck is, a little surprisingly, made of wooden planks about two-inches thick. Although the wooden deck is easier to repair in an emergency, at first I found this a bit confusing. It seemed much more logical to me to have the hangar protected by the armor above it, rather than locating the armor underneath where all this valuable aircraft is stored. Basically, if a bomb hits the top deck, it's going to blast right through it. You're going to lose a lot of the planes in that hangar as a result. But there are a few reasons for this.

One reason is to keep the center of gravity lower. I'm sure these ships are very seldom at risk of capsizing. One still has to take precautions for terribly rough seas and whatever might occur after the ship has sustained heavy damage. The armor plating itself is obviously quite heavy, but beyond that is all the many tons of steel girders that would be required to build it up another deck higher. 

Of much more concern are the elevators that take planes from the hangar up to the flight deck. The elevators are one of the most vulnerable parts of an aircraft carrier, because when lowered, they allowed bombs and kamikaze bombers to more easily and directly enter the hangar deck. They could also be damaged and rendered inoperable in their lowered position during battle, creating a semi-permanent Achilles Heel. As an improvement over the Yorktown carriers, Intrepid has an external lift which cantilevers out over its port side, so that planes could be brought up without lowering the central elevators and putting the hangar at as much risk. Presumably this doesn't preclude completely the need to use the central elevators. In the 1950s, an outboard lift on the starboard side replaced another of the central elevators. The last thing you want is enormous gaping holes in the armored deck, so the aircraft is stored on top of it. The armor has very few openings, and they're kept extremely small.

When the first aircraft carriers were put into use, the airplanes were the small, lightweight prop planes that didn't need much speed or runway length to get off the ground. In fact, they could lift off at around eighty miles per hour (128kph). Lyon explained that they would always turn the ship to head into the wind, both for take-offs and for landings. Assuming the ship would be traveling at the equivalent of thirty miles per hour into a twenty mile-per-hour headwind, the planes would only need to achieve around thirty miles per hour relative to the deck to get airborne. The planes used during WWII were far heavier, especially when they switched to jet engines. This required catapults to shoot the planes off the carriers.

Intrepid's original flight deck was one long runway that matched the long axis of the ship. As many readers will no doubt be aware, a plane landing on this abbreviated runway is caught--or "trapped"--by a cable on the deck. The cable is rigged to an arresting engine, basically a giant hydraulic cylinder, so it can catch and stop the incoming planes at a short distance.

During a busy landing session, there could be recently-landed planes still at the bow end of the flight deck. This means that if an incoming plane misses the cable, it's going to careen right into those other planes, destroying all of them and likely killing a few people. In response to this problem, a later innovation was to turn the landing runway at an angle facing off the port side at about the midpoint of the ship. The pilot lands at full throttle, and if the plane misses the trap, it flies right back off the end of the runway, ascends again, and comes around for another attempt. Here's a great video by Golden Zah showing a number of successful and unsuccessful traps: 


While looking at one of the scale models, I was intrigued by how it was painted. I asked Mr. Lyon if that had been the original paint scheme, and I'm glad that I did. At one point, it was painted with a very peculiar geometric pattern in black and various shades of gray. He said it was designed to confuse enemy ships trying to identify its type. In profile, many of the ships look somewhat similar from very far away. But if you can't tell what type of ship it is, then you don't know what its length might be. If you don't know how large the ship is, then you also can't tell how far away it is. If you don't know how far away it is, it's very difficult to aim a weapon at it.

Intrepid did sustain somewhat heavy damage. During its first battle at the Marshall Islands, a torpedo hit the stern. The rudder was locked into a turn, so Intrepid limped back to Pearl Harbor running only its port side engines to counteract the stuck rudder. A couple of days later wind got so strong that it turned the ship back around to face Tokyo. Captain Thomas Sprague, in command at the time, said, "Right then I wasn't interested in going in that direction." The crew fashioned a makeshift sail at the bow of the ship to help keep it on course for home. Twenty-six Essex Class carriers were ordered, twenty-four of them were completed and launched, and not a single one of them sank.

As much as I was enjoying all the great information Mr. Lyon had to share, we'd been speaking for a long time, and he needed to leave. Much more and I probably would have been exhausted, as well. I asked him if there were anything else he recommended that I look at in the short time I had before the museum closed for the evening. He said I should climb up a staircase off to the side where some control, operations, and navigation rooms could be found, and then continue on up into the bridge.

The operations rooms were really quite spooky. I don't think many visitors realize they're there or that they can be accessed by the general public. I was the only person in this entire section of the ship. The light was dim. Everything looks almost exactly as it did in 1943, with perhaps a few trappings here and there that were added until Intrepid was decommissioned in 1974. Recordings on a loop of haunting, scratchy radio transmissions echo through the metal corridors. Then there were the rumblings of some distant, unidentifiable machinery. I wouldn't have been surprised if I'd spotted a ghost. Lyon said he'd not heard any good ghost stories on Intrepid, but he also admitted to being a skeptic.

The bridge was absolutely fantastic. To stand at the helm of such an enormous vessel is quite an experience (for anyone with an imagination), even if it isn't traveling anywhere. The rather odd thing you'll notice here is that, when you're standing at the main controls, you can barely see anything at all in front of you. The only view out is through that tiny porthole, and then there's a second window in front of that. I assume a ship this large can't really be properly steered simply by looking out the windshield and turning the steering wheel.

In a way, it's a shame the ship faces Manhattan rather than the river. Turned around, it might be easier to imagine you're headed out to sea.

Everything was all shiny brass, clearly polished regularly, and looked very much 1940s and so cool. I asked the attendant up there where the ignition was to start 'er up, which I thought was very, very funny and clever. Evidently I was the 197th person to ask that exact same question since she'd been sitting there. How she resists the urge to roll her eyes every time she hears it I have no idea.

She encouraged me to speak into the communication tubes to see if anyone would answer. I did, and I don't remember what I said, but it was something in mangled faux-military Navy-speak that probably amused me more than anyone who might have been listening. No one answered my orders.

I had a little more time to walk around the flight deck and look at the various aircraft. At the very foremost end of the deck is the holy-crap-that's-awesome 1962 Lockheed A-12 Blackbird. Its frame is made of titanium and it has a top speed of 2269 miles per hour (3651kph). I can't even begin to imagine how much the government spent making this thing. At that point the museum closed, attendants were aggressively ushering visitors out, and I was quickly losing sunlight, anyway. So I headed for home. At some point, I'll really need to go back to see the Concorde (I never got the chance to fly in one), and the USS Growler Submarine they have there.

All text and current Intrepid Museum photos ©2012, Ryan Witte. All archival images presumed to be in the public domain.

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.

Out of the Frying Pan...

I'm seriously conflicted as to how I feel about this.

On the one hand, the tri-state area doesn't really need as many of those uber-tacky 1950s-60s ranch houses as it has.  Still, I was a little bit uncomfortable to learn how very few of the Levittown houses have remained in their original state.

--Photo AP

Photo courtesy Redwood Coast.

On the other hand, everything is looked upon with disdain once its heyday is over.  I'm sure even the overwrought pomposity of a Victorian was seen as disgusting by someone or another.

At one time, somebody loved that little ranch house.  Selling their grimy old townhouse in Brooklyn where they grew up, they loved the clean, new, plastic, aluminum-sided illusion of suburban homeyness it provided them for the first time in their lives.  They had a lawn to plant flowers and barbecue!

There's also the argument that very few houses don't have good enough bones that they couldn't be rehabilitated to preserve their charm without having to tear them down.  And I'd be very surprised to learn many of those homeowners are recycling any of the materials from these teardowns.

--Photos Christine Fontana, Douglas Healey

But the point is, really, look at what they're putting up in its place! Every once in a while I see a McMansion that I actually do think is done well.  Oddly, a neighborhood development I had the opportunity to visit in Columbia, SC surprised me with the overall quality of its architecture.

But this one (above)?  That is some of the most pathetic, disgusting "architecture" I've seen (if you can even call it that--since I'd bet you 3.5 million dollars they got the floorplan out of one of those stupid floorplan books).  Do you really need all those damn gables?  I mean, really?  And just how many different sizes and types of window do you need on the front of one house?  Seriously, who buys these pieces of crap for 3.5 million dollars?  

I'm actually of the opinion that very few human beings don't have some innate aesthetic sense.  There are some qualities that are so primary: order, symmetry, proportion, that they must be ingrained.  The grandmother of a friend lives on a street where the neighbors complained about the exterior color of one of the houses, so in defiance, the owners painted it the most awful shade of blue, like a periwinkle, but way too dark.  These people aren't necessarily artists or designers, but everyone just knows it's ugly.  If the house in that photo had columns sized for the Parthenon slapped onto the front of it, people would just know they were way too large.

So why do people buy these things, and not only that, but pay SO much money for them?  Has the symbolism of that "suburban homeyness" become that valuable of a commodity?  Has the gaudy, overblown use of those symbols become that much of a measure of status?  Perhaps the specifically unsophisticated use of architectural forms has, itself, become codified.  In other words, wearing blue-jeans with your suit jacket, rather than the pretentious (alienating) "tuxedo" of a well-designed (especially if Modern) architectural marvel.

To be fair, the new home pictured lower down in the article is really quite nice, but I'm pessimistic that it's merely the exception to the rule:

--Photo Kirk Condyles

Perhaps the Green Movement, as it gains momentum and popularity, will have further-reaching affects on aesthetics.  For one thing, I don't think you can take a floorplan out of a book and really do much that's ecologically sound with it.  You need an architect to prescribe something unique to your individual household requirements and site.  We can only hope.

©2007, Ryan Witte