According to the Herbert J. Gans' The Levittowners (1967), the inhabitants of the suburban communities established by William Levitt had a low threshold for excitement. Having endured the social and economic upheavals of the Depression and the hardships of the second World War, they came to associate "excitement" with deprivation and wished to spare their children the experience.

Indeed, what Levitt gave the people of Levittown was an oasis of serenity amid this stormy and chaotic century; an endeavor to recapture, if not the Edwardian optimism and feeling of domesticity of the early 1900's, than certainly a sense of the stability that had eluded the modern world since 1914. The task was not without its ironies. Levittown has been the harbinger of modernity. The Vanderbilt Cup races held here between 1908 and 1911 were showcases of the state-of-the art of the horseless carriage technology that would usher in the motoring age and make places like Levittown possible. Who better symbolized this new era than the races most famous attendee, Henry Ford? The rural airfields that operated here in the 1920s and 1930s - the Long Island Aviation Country Club in particular - likewise pointed the way to a future shaped by technological advance. And here, too, an often seen personage who embodied that future, Charles Lindbergh. The Levitt development itself, at the cutting edge of social transformation, revolutionized a settlement pattern now the norm for millions of people all over the globe.

The man who started this social revolution, and the fifth anniversary of whose death the Levittown Historical Society here commemorates, was a more complex man than many give credit. The excesses of his micromanagement may have given social critics cause to scorn - even spoiled baby boomers who had never seen Depression-era soup kitchens or Western Union men delivering "we regret to inform you...." telegrams felt obligated to sneer. Levitt's genius may have fallen short of the expectations of those who wished to see Levittown as a utopia and by those who wished to see in Levittown a dystopia. But William Levitt was a man who defied simplistic description. He was at once an ordinary man doing extraordinary things and an extraordinary man building ordinary things. He both decried the mid-20th century's collectivist leanings and embodied many aspects of its conformism at the same time. Such is the curious nature of great men that seemingly contradictory tendencies can arise out of the very complexity of the mind.

The fifth anniversary of William Levitt's death this month also coincides with a countdown to the 21st Century (OK, so it really begins Jan. 1, 2001). In an age of men and movements that promised to make the world anew, it is worth noting that Levitt's achievement has outlived them all. Could this have been otherwise? When the tides in the affairs of men have flowed and ebbed and states and dialects have come and gone (forgive me, William Shakespeare), it is man's most basic need for home and hearth and kith and kin that remains. Nobody in the 20th Century created anything more conducive to this need than William Levitt.