THE 1950s AMERICAN HOME
Diane Boucher
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Hagen were awarded third prize in the Levittown interior design
competition for “a smart big city interior right in the center of the development.”
SHIRE PUBLICATIONS
“There are so many people that like the simple symmetrical lines of the little Cape Cod house.
Frankly quaint, cozy and unafraid, this little house sits behind its wall and picket fence giving
built-in privacy.” Illustration from Royal Barry Wills, Living on the Level: One Story Houses
(1954).
CONTENTS
A CLEAN BREAK: ACHIEVING THE AMERICAN DREAM
HOME SWEET HOME: DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURAL STYLES
HOW THEY LIVED: THE LIVING ROOM
THE WOMAN’S REALM: THE KITCHEN, FOOD AND ENTERTAINING
THE GOOD LIFE: 1950S AMERICAN STYLE
PLACES TO VISIT
FURTHER READING
Levittown was to be called “Island Trees,” but the development, which was built on flat
potato fields, had few surviving trees.
A CLEAN BREAK: ACHIEVING THE
AMERICAN DREAM
I
1950 Bernard Levey purchased a house in the new suburban community of Levittown – some 25
miles outside of New York City – for $7,950. For Mr. Levey, a veteran of World War II and a truck
supervisor, this was to be his third home in Levittown. Together with his wife and three young
children, he had rented a house in 1948 under the federal government’s Veteran Rental Project, “to see
if they liked it.” In 1949, the Leveys bought their first home, a “semi-modern,” with the help of a
generous loan from the US Department of Veteran Affairs. The family was now upgrading to the ’50s
model, a ranch-style, which came with the latest innovations, including a carport and a built-in
television.
America in the 1950s heralded a bright future for World War II veterans like Bernard Levey,
following years of economic uncertainty during the Great Depression and the war. Ironically, it was
the war itself that set the stage for the new age of prosperity. The United States had invested an
unprecedented $300 billion in military spending during the war years. American industry had merely
to retool the armament factories to produce cars and refrigerators rather than warplanes and
battleships. This gave industrial production an immense stimulus and resulted in the world’s richest
and most modern economy.
In 1944, the federal government introduced the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, popularly known
as the GI bill, which provided a range of benefits to the sixteen million returning World War II
veterans. It enabled 6.4 million newly demobilized soldiers to further their education, either at high
school, on vocational courses or in college. In addition, the veterans had access to loans to start a new
business or farm and they had recourse to the government’s mortgage program, which offered lowcost, zero-down home loans. Thanks to the GI bill, America began the postwar period with an
educated and stable workforce with access to cheap home financing and business loans. The result was
to fundamentally change the aspirations of the majority of the population, giving rise to a consumer
society that could afford a way of life Americans could only have dreamt of during the years of
economic depression and war.
N
According to Life magazine, which featured the Levey family posing in front of their three
homes, “Levittowners … could buy a new house every year as they would a new car” and
“when the 51s come along, they may buy again.”
Many of the newly returning soldiers, encouraged by a healthy job market and an optimistic sense
of the future, were eager to date, marry, and start a family. Couples married in record numbers. In
1940, 31 percent of the population was single; by 1950 the number had fallen to 23 percent. They also
married at a much younger age: during the 1950s, the median age of men when they married dropped
from 24.3 years to 22.6 and for women, from 21.5 to 20.4 years. By 1959, 47 percent of all brides were
married by the age of 19. Once married, most couples began their families almost immediately. The
average family had 3.2 children, with the most educated women leading the new trend. This had
enormous repercussions for the American birthrate: more children were born between 1948 and 1953
than had been born over the preceding thirty years, and 1954 saw the largest one-year population gain
in US history. In 1950, the US population was 151.7 million; by 1960 it has risen to 180.7 million. The
phenomenon became known as the “baby boom,” and Levittown was widely referred to as “fertility
valley” or “the Rabbit Hutch.”
These growing families needed places to live, but in the immediate postwar period homes were in
critically short supply. During the Depression and the war, housing starts had fallen drastically,
creating a situation where young couples and their children often lived with their parents and other
relatives in crowded urban apartments or sometimes in pre-fabricated housing known as Quoinset
huts.
The answer to the housing crisis was a mass migration from the cities to newly built developments.
Fortune magazine estimated that between 1944 and 1954, nine million people moved to the new
suburbs. They were typically built on cheap abundant farmland and underwritten by considerable
federal funding for new housing construction and the veterans’ access to inexpensive home mortgages.
In 1945, only 200,000 new houses were built nationwide; this rose to 1,154,000 in 1950. For the first
time in American history, home ownership became a reality for ordinary people. Traditionally,
suburban living had been the preserve of the wealthy, but in the newly built suburbs, the median price
of a house was $5,000, roughly equivalent to an average family’s wages for two years, and far more
affordable than property in most cities. From 1950, eighteen of the nation’s major cities saw a loss in
their population, with some sixty million people moving to the suburbs over the next thirty years.
In the early 1950s, the new suburbs were largely populated by young families with stay-athome mothers and fathers who spent long days away from the home, commuting to their
workplace in the cities.
For young couples, the main appeal of suburban life was that the suburbs provided a safe, pleasant
place to rear children at affordable prices. The air was clean and the sidewalks safe for bicycles. Many
of the developments included good local schools, playgrounds, parks, public swimming pools and
baseball fields. In his memoirs of growing up in 1950s Des Moines, Iowa, the writer Bill Bryson
recalled that “there were kids everywhere, all the time, in densities now unimaginable.”
The Levitt Company, run by Abraham Levitt and his two sons, William and Alfred, was by far the
most successful postwar suburban developer. They did not pioneer the idea of large-scale tract
housing, but they were particularly successful at exploiting the federal government’s mortgage
program. In March 1949, the first houses in Levittown I – a 6,000-acre site in Hempstead, Long Island
– were offered for sale exclusively to veterans. By 1951, 17,000 units had been built on the Long
Island site, housing some 82,000 people and making Levittown I the largest private housing project in
American history. The average income of a Levittown homeowner in 1952 was $80 to $100 a week
and his house cost him $61–68 per month.
Three thousand veterans lined up for three days to purchase houses in Levittown in 1949,
most of which had not yet been built.
Houses were organized into neighborhoods of between eighty and 300 homes, in complex
rectangular grid designs of cul-de-sacs, dead ends and curving streets. Each neighborhood was
grouped around community buildings and small shopping centers, with the main traffic confined to
the peripheral highways. To make the development child-oriented, the company built nine swimming
pools, sixty playgrounds, ten baseball diamonds, seven “village greens” and five schools.
Each detached single-family house consisted of 750–800 square feet, arranged on one floor with
two bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room of 12 by 16 feet with a large picture window overlooking the
back yard and a fireplace, a kitchen of 10 by 10 feet, and an unfinished attic. The house was heated
with radiant coils under the tiled floors. The initial price for the basic house was $7,990, which
included a fitted kitchen, a Bendix washing machine and a television set. Later a slightly larger house
was priced at $9,500. Each lot was 70 by 120 feet and planted with three fruit trees and a weeping
willow. At first, no fences or hedges were allowed and the company supervised the lawn cutting,
though later the owners were expected to cut their own lawns. Drying clothes was forbidden out of
doors, except on specially designed collapsible drying racks, which could only be used on weekdays.
Life magazine wrote in May 1950, “Last month Levitt and Sons, the country’s biggest housebuilders, unveiled their 1950 model house in an atmosphere suggesting an auto show combined with a
Christmas preview.” Life’s analogy of an auto show to describe the unveiling of Levitt’s new house
design is particularly apt since the company based their house-building methods on the assembly-line
procedures of American car production. Houses were constructed by teams of non-unionized, semiskilled workers, each team specializing in a particular aspect of the construction. As the team finished
its specified task, it moved on to the next house. Houses were simply constructed upon concrete slab
foundations on newly flattened lots. Many parts of the house, such as the sheet rock walls and the
nails, were made by the company offsite and the timber came from their own Californian lumber
mills. Following this formula, thirty-six houses were built each day, 180 a week.
Levittown II followed the first Levittown. It was an equally large project of 16,000 homes, built
near Philadelphia during the 1950s; and Levittown III in New Jersey was constructed in the 1960s.
Levitt’s speedy, efficient and cost-effective building practices were widely adopted and are considered
the archetype for postwar suburbia throughout the United States.
One of the main constraints on people’s ability to move out of the overcrowded cities immediately
after the war was access to and from the suburbs. Metal was rationed during World War II, except for
military production; the result was a severe shortage of cars. In 1945, American factories produced
just 70,000 new cars, but in 1950 production had risen to 6,665,000. Cheap gas fuelled the giant cars
of the 1950s, which came with all sorts of extraneous chrome decoration like fins and plated bumpers,
known as “gorp.” Often the cars were so big it was impossible to fit them into suburban garages or
under car porches. The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 provided some 41,000 miles of new highways
for these vehicles to travel on.
The flamboyant 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Ville featured copious amounts of chrome plating
and an aircraft-like tail with large vertical fins. The car’s futuristic design symbolized
American optimism.
New shopping centers were constructed throughout the country to keep pace with suburban
developments. The first planned retail shopping center was built in 1949 in Raleigh, North Carolina. It
was a mix of small retailers and department stores, with parking for 500 cars. The first enclosed
climate-controlled shopping center opened in 1956 just outside Minneapolis. These commercial
centers were usually located outside of the residential developments along outlying highways. This
made it almost impossible to live in the suburbs without possessing a second car for weekday use by
wives for shopping.
For the majority of families, suburban life was a new paradigm. Situated far from their extended
intergenerational families and crowded urban existence, the suburban population was composed
mainly of young couples with small children, earning comparable incomes and from similar social
groups. During the week, suburban life was the province of women who were separated from work
opportunities and isolated in a world of other women and children. During the war, women had been
an essential part of the workforce, but most were pressured to vacate their jobs in favor of the
returning GIs, with some two million women leaving employment in the two years following the war.
Women’s magazines, educational establishments and television programs idealized the suburban
lifestyle. Full-time motherhood was promoted as essential to the new economy, an idea reinforced in
countless sunlit sit-coms and cheery advertisements, all of which helped change the cultural
expectations about a woman’s role. In April 1952, Life Magazine ran an article entitled “The Making
of a Home: Cornell Girls study for their Big Job.” The article explained that Cornell’s degree course
in home economics was one of the best of 480 similar courses run throughout the country. The article
acknowledged that there were career opportunities associated with the course such as hospital
nutritionist, test kitchen supervisor or home economics teacher, but essentially “making a home is
likely to be the biggest part of a woman’s life.” College education for girls was mostly considered a
fallback position in case life did not work out as planned; this was true for even the most highly
educated women. W. K. Jordan, the male president of Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
in the 1950s, frequently greeted the young women undergraduates by telling them that “their
education would prepare them to be splendid wives and mothers, and their reward might be to marry a
Harvard man.”
Car manufacturers designed cars to appeal to the lady driver. Their features included pale
colors, deep-pile upholstery and built-in cosmetic cases.
Students studying for the home economics degree course at Cornell practiced their mothering
skills with a five-month-old baby boy lent by a welfare agency. The students “christened” the
baby Denny Domecon (for domestic economy) since they weren’t given his name.
Advertisements such as this one for Maxwell House coffee idealized suburban life.
This San Francisco house by developer Joseph Eichler had a low-pitched gable roof which
created a high ceiling in the living room. According to an article in Life magazine, it
displayed “fine details and workmanship … features once found in homes designed for
wealthy individuals.”
HOME SWEET HOME: DOMESTIC
ARCHITECTURAL STYLES
Newness is often associated with perfection in American culture.
Herbert J. Gans, sociologist
L
AKEWOOD PARK ,
Elmwood, Park Forest, Deer Park—the names of the new suburban communities
evoked images of bucolic idylls. In reality, they usually consisted of grids of small, tidy houses
on grassy plots. Following World War II, Europe’s response to a similar acute shortage of housing
was to build large apartment blocks. In the United States, a detached single-family house, however
small, with its own backyard, was an essential ingredient of the American Dream. Developers, despite
the constraints of cost, did manage to build these homes in distinctive architectural styles.
THE CAPE COD
From an isolated seaside setting of sand dunes and fish flakes, this small white shuttered box has invaded the entire country.
Architectural Forum, March 1949
The first houses offered at Levittown I were Cape Cod cottages, which Alfred Levitt, the architect for
the Levitt Company, described as “the most efficient house ever developed in America.” These small
one-and-a-half-storey homes with no eaves and steeply pitched roofs owed their origin to seventeenthcentury fishermen’s cottages found along the shores of the northeast states. Developers revived the
style for the mass house-building market as it could be easily and cheaply assembled out of stock
parts, and “it dresses up the one-storey rectangle.” For the homeowner, they evoked nostalgia and
quaintness with the added advantage of room to expand into the attic. House magazines heavily
promoted the design and the Cape Cod was “approved” by the Federal Housing Association, which
considered it an excellent example of a small house design.
The ranch house, the Cape Cod, the “conservative modern” and the “radical modern” as
depicted in Architectural Forum, 1949.
The Levittown Cape Cod had its front door in the center and a shuttered window on either side, and
was painted in a variety of colors, presumably to help the owners identify their home. In 1949, the
company, which believed in “giving the public what they want,” introduced an enlarged Cape Cod
with a redesigned floor plan. The living room was placed at the back of the house, with a wall-size
double-glazed window overlooking the yard. The kitchen was moved to the front of the house, with the
front door opening straight into the kitchen area. As Alfred Levitt explained, the front door would be
used by both “the milkman and the boss coming to dinner … in a little house you don’t want the
milkman going around to the back, past the bedrooms; it interferes with privacy.”
The Cape Cod style held its attraction throughout the 1950s, even for architect-commissioned
houses. The architect Royal Barry Wills included Cape Cod designs in his 1954 book Living on the
Level: One Story Houses, as he recognized that “there are so many people who like the simple
symmetrical lines of the little Cape Cod house.” The book was “a practical guide for the general
public seeking to commission a house.”
In 1949, Architectural Forum published a two-part article titled “The Cape Cod Cottage” in which it
pointed out the paradox of an architectural design that combined the latest gadgetry with nostalgia:
… a little white cottage equipped with a vine covered wall – and a television aerial. It has quaint green shutters decorated with
flowerpot cut-outs – and the latest in radiant heating. Tiny dormer windows poke in old fashioned charm from the pitch roof –
and behind them fluorescent tubing illuminates the bobby-soxer’s dressing table.
THE RANCH HOUSE
… the true ranch house was generally one room deep and rambled all over the place.
Royal Barry Wills, 1954
Like the Cape Cod, the ranch house was quintessentially an American style. But where the Cape Cod
style embodied tradition and the New England coast, the ranch house of the early 1950s was
considered cutting edge, progressive, informal and Californian. This distinction between the two
styles did not stop architects and developers from building both styles throughout the country and
sometimes even merging the two.
The ranch house owed its origins to the vernacular architecture of the Spanish colonial adobe
buildings of the southwest, the sprawling cattle ranch houses of the west and, more recently, to the
architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. His Prairie homes featured low-pitched roofs, rough-hewn stone
and timber, pronounced horizontal lines and deep eaves, all of which were incorporated into ranch
house exteriors; and on the inside, the open-plan interiors of Wright’s small, one-storey Usonian
houses of the 1930s anticipated the affordable family house of the 1950s.
The appeal of the ranch house was universal: from the suburbs of the Midwest to the homes of
Hollywood stars. For the developer, the ranch house was simple to build and easy to replicate. Like the
Cape Cod, the ranch had its detractors. In a 1953 article in the NewYork Times, John McAndrew wrote:
“speculative builders cut so many corners that their styleless ‘ranch-house-type houses’ come into the
world and proliferate without benefit of any architect at all.”
A marriage between a Cape Cod and a ranch house from Living on the Level (1954).
Defining a ranch house has its difficulties, as there are so many variations, some of which are due to
climate or regional tastes and others to personal preference. For instance, in the southwest, ranch
houses were often unadorned block-like buildings, whereas in the Midwest and on the east coast, they
regularly incorporated features of Cape Cod homes. They do, however, have some common features:
• A low, rambling, asymmetrical profile.
• The use of informal or rustic materials and details, such as board and batten siding, vaulted
ceilings with exposed rafters, and high brick foundations.
• Sparse interior and exterior decoration.
• An open-plan interior which blends the functional living spaces.
• The living area separated from the bedroom area.
• An attached garage or carport.
• A U- or L-shaped floor plan, which surrounds an interior courtyard or patio.
• Large plate-glass windows and doors that let in the light and open onto an intimate informal space
at the rear of the building.
A 1950s ranch house on a street in Charlottesville, Virginia. One of several, they all have one
storey with a low-pitched roof and a horizontal emphasis. However, each is different,
reflecting the individual owner’s tastes. This house has a traditional brick finish with a
mullioned front window.
This 1950s Charlottesville house is an amalgam of a ranch style and a Cape Cod.
This 1950s Charlottesville house uses traditional brick.
This 1950s Charlottesville house has large plate-glass windows, weatherboard exterior and a
carport to create a more contemporary design.
Levitt’s 1949 version of a ranch house.
Ranch houses of the 1950s often turn their back on the street. Small windows are set high up in the
walls of the front facade and there are no traditional welcoming porches. This reflects the search for
privacy by the occupants, many of whom had grown up in overcrowded urban housing where family
and neighbors were constantly present. Children played in the backyards of ranch houses rather than in
the city streets, and only invited guests were entertained on the backyard patio.
In 1949 Levitt included “the ranch” among his latest offerings. It was the same basic box as the
Levitt Cape Cod, but the form was longer and lower. High horizontal windows replaced the shuttered
double-hung casements, and the roofline was flattened to accommodate angled decorative supports on
the front facade. The living room had wall-sized windows and a doorway onto the patio. The 1950
model was somewhat larger than the previous design and included a carport. In 1951, a finished attic
was added to the design.
MID-CENTURY MODERNISM
Modernist architecture had its roots in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century. During the
1920s and 1930s, several influential European architects emigrated to the United States, bringing their
version of modernism with them. Two of the most distinguished, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and
Walter Gropius, had been directors of the Bauhaus in Germany, one of the most prestigious schools of
modern architecture and design in Europe.
The Bauhaus school was dedicated to the idea of reconciling the latest technology and engineering
with traditional craftsmanship. In essence, the modernist movement, which grew out of its teachings,
redefined the way in which houses were built and lived in. By employing the latest technology, it
created a post and beam architecture, which eliminated the need for load-bearing walls, substituting
them with walls seemingly made of glass. The result was light and airy interior spaces, which
incorporated the outdoors. Ornament, both in and outside the building, was created by the structural
elements.
Many Americans found the European style—or “radical modernist” architecture—to be cold and
clinical. It proved antithetical to their taste for the cozy and quaint. Royal Barry Wills described
modernism as a “Teutonic onslaught.” Some critics went even further, and under the influence of the
Red Scare of the 1950s insinuated a communist plot at the heart of the movement, intended to usurp
traditional American styles and values. In 1953 Elizabeth Gordon, editor of House Beautiful
magazine, vehemently attacked the designs of both Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and Philip
Johnson’s Glass House, now widely recognized as masterpieces of mid-century modernist
architecture:
Something is rotten in the state of design—and it is spoiling some of our best efforts in modern living … two ways of life stretch
before us. One leads to the richness of variety, to comfort and beauty. The other, the one we want fully to expose you to, retreats
to poverty and unlivability. Worst of all, it contains the threat of cultural dictatorship ... for if the mind of man can be
manipulated in one great phase of life to be made willing to accept less, it would be possible to go on and get him to accept less
in all phases of life.
The Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois (1951), designed by Mies van der Rohe. A simple
elongated cube with an elevated porch and living platform situated close to a river and
surrounded by majestic trees. The house is clearly distinguishable from its natural site by its
gleaming white sculptural shape.
John McAndrew took a more balanced position in his New York Times article of January 1952,
writing that there were two opposing points of view in modern architecture: “The classic, intellectual
or predominantly formal one,” of which the best examples in his view were the Farnsworth House and
the Glass House, “and the romantic, instinctive or informal one (which finds it happiest expression in
many of the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright).”
Wright, who used the term “Usonian” in place of “American” to refer to his vision for a new
architecture for the United States, considered his work to be rooted in the idea of an American style.
He disliked being categorized as a modernist, claiming that they had copied his ideas. This was
despite the fact that both Gropius and Mies van der Rohe were enthusiastic supporters and
acknowledged Wright’s influence on their work, in particular his sense of the house as a natural
earthbound form.
McAndrew concluded his article by saying that “most good modern houses … lie somewhere
between these poles… They often manage to achieve a classic simplicity of form and to imbue it with
warm and even romantic feeling.” His list of successful architects who achieved this middle way,
which is sometimes referred to as “conservative modernism,” included Marcel Breuer. Breuer had
studied and taught at the Bauhaus and, following his arrival in America, taught with Gropius at
Harvard.
In 1949, Breuer was invited by his former student, Philip Johnson—then director of the Department
of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York—to design “a
moderately priced house for a man who works in a large city and commutes to a so-called ‘dormitory
town’ on its outskirts where he lives with his family.” The exhibit, which was part of the museum’s
mission to promote modernist design, was built in the museum’s sculpture garden. It received an
enthusiastic review from Architectural Forum:
…the house (which will be acclaimed by many for its fine design, but criticized by the unthinking as arty) … has one of the most
logical, thoughtful plans to be found in any home.
Breuer’s house had cedar siding with bluestone on the floors and patio. The roof was composed of two
opposing surfaces, the longer one over the living area and a shorter one over the bedrooms; the two
sloped towards one another. As well as being an attractive visual feature and creating room for the
parents’ private suite above the garage, the design eliminated the need for gutters and drains. All the
rainwater collected into a single drain, which passed into the bathroom plumbing, thereby reducing the
likelihood of frozen pipes. Breuer’s “butterfly” roof design became part of the modernist architectural
vocabulary.
A house with a “slightly butterflied roof… Most criticisms of contemporary houses are that
they are clinical, stripped and dull-looking. This house demonstrates just the opposite. It’s
light, graceful and imaginative.” Living on the Level, Royal Barry Wills (1954).
Another attempt to introduce the general public to modern architecture was the Case Study House
project initiated by the editor of Arts and Architecture magazine in 1945. The idea was to encourage
leading architects to experiment with inexpensive industrial materials to help solve the housing crisis.
The project, which ran into the 1960s, produced some outstanding contemporary buildings by
architects, including Charles Eames, Richard Neutra and Eero Saarinen, but the designs ultimately
proved too expensive and avant-garde for the average house buyer.
Exterior of Marcel Breuer’s “House in the Garden” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York, May 1949.
Charles Eames’s house with adjoining studio near Santa Monica, California. The adjoining
article explained that architects Ray and Charles Eames liked to live “without servants or
cocktail parties,” their main concerns being “simplicity, functionalism and economy.” Life
magazine, 1950.
An article titled “Best Houses Under Fifteen Thousand Dollars” (Life magazine, September 10,
1951) included a house built by Joseph Eichler, one of the few mass-developers who incorporated
mid-century modern designs into his sub-divisions. He followed the building conventions of the
Levitts, producing some 15,000 houses, many of them in the San Francisco Bay area. He was,
however, always committed to modernism and his housing had a crisp, modern feel achieved with post
and beam construction, large areas of glass and unornamented exteriors. To appeal to American taste,
he replaced the steel used by many modernist architects for construction and decoration with an ample
use of redwood. The house featured in Life was designed by San Francisco architects Anschen and