![]() ![]() Levittown homes come with a television set already installed. ![]() The same month Levittown opens its gates to the public, the Voice of America starts broadcasting to the Soviet Union for the very first time.Īn ever-expanding, subdivided tract of land, the suburbs constitute the location for a project that will connect humanity directly with outer space, with the future, and with its own emergent inner self. What the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine both have at their core is the concept that there is just one world, a single sphere of influence. William Levitt’s new suburban grid and the existing global one are becoming superimposed. A dispersed population is so much harder to find. As a result, the politics of Total War, in which the entire resources of one nation are pitched against those of another, don’t just call for proliferation but diffusion as well. The masses are defined and affirmed to the point of their own destruction. A future conflict in which whole cities might be obliterated does more than demoralize the enemy: it demoralizes everyone. The Atomic Bomb has done its job too well. Levitt developed the basic models and techniques for preparing low-cost suburban homesteads out of prefabricated units while fulfilling military housing contracts during the closing years of World War II when storage facilities, dormitories, and administrative buildings had to be built quickly, cheaply, and in vast numbers.įrom the start Levittown constitutes a strategic response to modern warfare. For ease of orientation, the identical housing units that make up Oak Ridge are arranged along a series of precise grids and identified by numbers and colors. Levittown’s original inspiration is the planned community created in secret at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to house the technicians and scientists of the “Manhattan Project” busily engaged in developing the first atomic weapon. A white picket fence, a front lawn, and a backyard to call your own, far from the crowded urban squalor of the streets, and all at such low, low prices: how can William Levitt and Sons afford to do it? To thousands of returning servicemen, most of whom are young and raised in the big cities, this represents a sweet deal for both them and their families. To help his community grow, he presents it as a new form of American life: one that offers the comfortable ideals of middle-class existence, with no money down. Levitt trades in myth as much as in real estate. Constructed from prefabricated sections and components, Suburbia has at last begun to extend its grand conformity into space.Īn accomplished publicist, William J. A planned community of six thousand households offering affordable housing in the form of small, detached single-family units, this new conurbation quickly expands to embrace a further eleven thousand homes, each situated sixty feet apart on their own patch of ground. Located on what was once an expanse of potato fields, midway between New York City and the munitions plants of Long Island, the first Levittown, formerly known as “Island Trees,” is opened to the public in February 1947. Levittown- You can imagine how it will look from space: the houses and roads and backyards arranged in neatly ordered rows, a framework of streetlights and driveways in a perfectly arranged grid at night. ![]() Nothing personal – it’s just the predator’s lunch time.Excerpted from "Welcome to Mars: Politics, Pop Culture, and Weird Science in 1950s America" What is he? An alien? An awakened prehistoric predator? Genetic monster? It is really not important for those unfortunate who have sunk into oblivion in his giant poisonous throat. It’s time to take the mind-boggling underground Monster under your control.
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