Levittown Historical Society And Museum

One of my favorite American historical figures, Benjamin Franklin, was born on this day in 1706. I suspect that of all the Founding Fathers who would have been most at ease with life in the 21st Century, it would have been he. No Founding Father had a better grasp of the relationships between politics, commerce, and technology than Franklin. This is odd because, having been born in 1706, he was one of the oldest Founding Fathers.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It is all-too-easy for many people today to forget why we had a civil rights movement in this country and the significance of someone like Martin Luther King in addressing it. Prior to the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Shelley vs. Kraemer case, many banks, mortgage lending companies, and zoning boards throughout the country would not even do business with real estate developers who failed to place racially discriminatory conv...ents in their housing contracts. This was, after 1934, the policy of the Federal Housing Administration as well. Had Levitt & Sons and scores of other post-WWII real estate developers not complied with these requirements, they would have been unable to obtain the kind of financial backing needed to mass-produce vast working class suburbs. Many, like Levitt & Sons, would have continued doing what they were doing before the War - building custom-designed homes for upscale clients (a limited niche market that would doubtless have become less profitable with time). Persons interested in learning more about these discriminatory housing polices ought read Rothstein's 2017 book "The Color of the Law". -PM

Levittown's 75th Anniversary takes place this year. Check out the upcoming events and mark your calendars.

Paul Manton, Gordon Gray III, and Nikolaos Nantis of the American Chestnut Foundation discuss the plight of the American chestnut tree and endeavors to restore this majestic forest giant - and wonderful suburban sidewalk tree - to its former glory.

FIRST PEOPLE. The first two hundred years of the history of what is now Levittown and the surrounding communities is a history of land deeds, wills, marriages, registered livestock "earmarks", burials, Meeting memberships (as Quaker congregations were thusly called), militia mustering, and public office holdings amongst the Seaman, Jackson, Hicks, Willits, Williams, Carmen, Powell, Frost, Strickland, Cole, Wright, and Fordham clans. Most of these First Families were...Continue reading

What an astonishing historical, cultural, and scientific heritage Long Island enjoys. Civic visionaries like William Levitt, Valentine Hicks, Alexander Stewart, Ward Melville, and Robert Moses who fundamentally changed not merely the way Long Islanders live but the way scores of millions of people throughout America live. Creative geniuses like Walt Whitman, William Cullen Bryant, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edwin Way Teale, William Sidney Mount and other writers, artists, ... musicians, and scholars, too numerous to list here. The exuberance of Theodore Roosevelt and daring-do of Charles Lindbergh and other aviators. Land of Indians, explorers, pioneers, pious Puritan and Quaker folk, farmers, herdsmen, baymen, whalers, scientists, tycoons, philanthropists, religious leaders, railroad workers, laborers, suburbanites, abolitionists, labor reformers, temperance reformers, entertainers and sportsmen. Land instrumental in the Revolutionary War. Land where Grumman built the fighter planes that won the war in the Pacific and the spacecraft that landed on the Moon. Land where DNA is studied at Cold Spring Harbor and the atom at Brookhaven, Land where the aircraft came of its own on the Hempstead Plains and the automobile at the Vanderbilt Cup Races. This extraordinary historical, cultural, and scientific heritage reduced in this meme to an ode to foul language, gluttony, reckless driving and rudeness. Museums, historical societies, and preservationist groups are not simply up against greedy people with bulldozers finding to demolish some landmark. They are up against certain prevailing cultural and social attitudes as well. And that is a tougher enemy to fight. PM

In 1988, members of an auto racing club met at the Maine Maid Inn in Jericho to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the 1908 Vanderbilt Cup Race. This gathering has some symbolic significance anent our local history. The October 24, 1908 Vanderbilt Cup Race was the fourth Cup race and the first to be held on the newly-constructed Long Island Motor Parkway. The extravaganza brought out the "who's who?" of the Gilded Age including Henry Ford who, earlier that month, intr...oduced his first Model T. Many of this theories of mass-production would be adopted by Levitt & Sons a few decades later. The 1908 Race's Grandstand and Start/Finish Line was located at present-day Skimmer Lane and Orchid Road in Levittown and was built upon by a real estate developer in 2020 after a series of endless court battles dating back to 1986. The Maine Maid Inn was original the home of Valentine Hicks. He was the Quaker businessman, landowner, ship owner, and one of the founders of the Long Island Rail Road in 1834 was well as the LIRR's President in 1836 when he, along with several other business associates, established the Hicksville Association. It's objective was to oversee the LIRR crossing over the Hempstead Plains through land holdings that today constitute Hicksville. He is thus, the founding father of Hicksville. Rail service began on March 1, 1837. Hicks was also an active abolitionist who hid escaped slaves in his home. In the early 2010's owners gutted much of the Maine Maid Inn including the secret passage and room where the slaves were hidden from authorities who, by law, were obligated to return them to their owners in the South (even though New York State had outlawed slavery on July 4, 1827). The destruction of both sites of historical significance occurred with little public outcry as many people have never heard of the Vanderbilt Cup Race or Valentine Hicks. This is what historical societies, museums, and preservationist organizations are up against on a daily basis. -PM

TAKE NOTICE Due to weather-related safety concerns, the Levittown Museum will not be open this evening. We will return to our normally scheduled hours on Wednesday. -PM

Listen to "Back 2 Levittown" podcast with special guests...Levittown Historical Society's own Paul Manton and Bob Koenig!!

Our own Paul Manton and Bob Koenig will be interviewed by Danny tonight! Look for this on facebook!

This evening, President Paul Manton and Vice President Bob Koenig will be interviewed.

The Levittown Historical Society & Museum would like to take the opportunity to wish everyone of the Jewish faith a very happy Hanukkah. -PM

Of the many world maps I have in my collection, this one from 1962, which appeared as the inner cover to the ten-volume children's encyclopedia series "The New Wonder World Cultural Library" is one of my favorites. Much about the ideals of the post-World War Two era is embodied in this map: An allusion to the traditional cultures of newly-emerging nations, the emphasis on new technologies and discoveries (rockets and jet planes), and the prominent figure of the United Nations headquarters. Note too that the map is centered not around the Atlantic as in many traditional Mercator Projections, but around the Pacific suggesting a more "global" perspective. (Too, the choice of a Yankee clipper ship to represent maritime travel and trade). -PM

BRIEF NOTES ON THE CONSPIRACY. The Conspiracy: The popular belief in the post-War years and beyond that FDR had advance knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor but ignored/suppressed it to facilitate U.S. entry into World War Two. A few observations thereof: 1. In the weeks leading up to the Japanese attack, thousands of communiques between military and diplomatic sources of various nationalities made the rounds offering complex and oftentimes contradictory in...Continue reading