Review: Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania, by Dianne Harris, ed. and High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century, by Matthew Gordon Lasner

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Dianne Harris, ed. Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010, 448 pp., 160 b/w illus. $50 (cloth), ISBN 9780822943891; $30 (paper), ISBN 9780822962816 Matthew Gordon Lasner High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012, 336 pp., 125 b/w illus. $45 (cloth), ISBN 9780300164084 > As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. > > — Ralph Waldo Emerson , “Napoleon; or, The Man of the World” The American single-family house is more an image than a collection of built artifacts, a resilient and malleable representation for which many claims have been made and many actions have been justified, and about which many stories have been told. In the classic image of the Levitt house, to take a specific example, the little building is merely a background for its young owners, a white nuclear family posing in aspirational Sunday best on the still-bare front lawn. The “real” background comprises an invisible, historically specific, complex intersection of legal, financial, land-use and planning policies, social mores, and design choices. Many scholars, including Kenneth Jackson and Dolores Hayden, have charted variations of this compound packaging, showing how access to ownership of a detached, suburban single-family home was as circumscribed as it was successful. The complexities of suburban growth have been further chronicled by Gwendolyn Wright, Robert Fishman, Richard Harris, Robert Beauregard, John Archer, and scholars of the “new suburban history,” who together have foregrounded the intricate politics and policies that shaped single-family housing in the twentieth-century (North) American landscape.1 Dianne Harris’s collection Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania adds breadth and depth to the American suburban project while highlighting the historical specificity of Levittown, and it is a welcome addition to the literature. Its tight focus on the second of three Levittown developments (fifteen miles from Philadelphia, 1951–56) in essays by an interdisciplinary range of scholars results in a historical picture viewed through both ends of the telescope: a unique case study simultaneously relevant to and informing the ubiquitous suburban enterprise. Matthew Gordon Lasner’s High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century , in contrast, examines the vast metropolitan enterprise to …