Levittown, New York, the epitomy of postwar suburbia, an icon of popular culture turns 60:

It was October 1947 when developer William Jaird Levitt opened the first of what became 17,544 Cape Cod and ranch houses rising from blighted potato fields 40 miles east of New York City, handing post-World War II GIs the keys to their American Dream.

It was an instant success, a prototype widely chronicled and duplicated nationwide.

Cape Cods originally sold for $6,990; ranches were slightly more expensive. Each house had four rooms, a bath, an unfinished attic and amenities _ steel kitchen cabinets, Bendix washer, GE refrigerator, Hotpoint electric range.

None had basements, since excavations would have slowed the almost assembly line construction.

Today, “you can’t get a house in Levittown for less than $400,000,” Cassano said almost incredulously.

As the Levittown Corporation website points out, Levittown’s mass production was envisioned as a solution to the postwar’s high demand for housing:

Near the end of World War II, while serving in the Seabees, the Navy’s construction unit, in the Pacific, William Levitt recognized that the United States would not have enough housing for the returning veterans. The depression of the 1930’s and World War II had discouraged developers from building many new homes. Levitt envisioned a tremendous pent-up demand for housing and, therefore, instructed to those administering the family building business to buy up as much land as they could from Long Island farmers. Even before the war he had acquired 200 acres from one potato farmer, with an option to buy 200 more each year The price of the first parcel was $225 an acre, with options calling for increases of 10 percent each year thereafter. The last acreage that was acquired for Levittown cost $3,500.

Levitt knew that he was not the only person to have anticipated this housing shortage, and he knew that he would have to devise a plan that would give his company a competitive advantage.

After his discharge as a lieutenant from the Seabees, the company came up with a design for a basic house, together with a way to reduce construction procedures to 26 steps. This process, together with the mechanical and technical innovations, they entailed, revolutionized the industry. Levitt actually created an assembly line to build houses on the site, using men and equipment much as they do in the auto industry. The essential difference between Detroit’s methods and Levitt’s was that the auto makers moved materials past a waiting line of men in a factory, whereas the Levitt system moved the workmen from house site to house site past a waiting line of material in the field. Thus, in an industry notorious for wasted time, motion and material, the company introduced previously unheard-of logistics, timing and efficiency.

Levittown’s mass production and its cultural implications is the subject of scorn in this 1960s classic, “Little Boxes.”