Process Paper

Eisen-Houses: Urban and Suburban Housing on Long Island

Jonathan Fisher and Robert Berman Senior Division Group Website

Originally, we were planning a project on possible outcomes of the Revolutionary War had Great Britain won the war. However, we eventually decided that a counter-factual topic would not provide enough scholarly research for this to be an appropriate project. Due to us residing not only on Long Island but even in an original Levitt House, we decided our topic should be Eisen-Houses: Suburban and Urban Housing on Long Island. This topic provide a great example of the reform in the housing market, and affords us the luxury of interviewing an inhabitant of an original Levitt House. Once we chose our new topic, we began to brainstorm all of the possible housingrelated areas. We soon realized that our best way of organizing this project was by types of house, and their location. We heavily relied on the Gale databases in finding articles and books for the basis of our main pages. Magazine articles and our interview were also the basis for our text. Music and images helped transform our website from just plain text into a visual website. We also had the pleasure in interviewing Polly Dwyer, President of the Levittown Historical Society as a primary source. When we were considering our original project, we decided to use a website in order to simulate our old topic. Once we changed our topic, we still believed a website would be the best way to house our research and present it in an organized manner. We used Garageband (for Mac) to edit our music. Our connection to this year s theme relates to all three of its aspects. The economic boost was a reaction to America entering World War I. The production of many war goods and the creation of many jobs in battle and in factories resulted in one of the lowest unemployment rates ever at the time. Construction standards were reformed with the addition of prefabricated materials. Never before had houses ever been built with the model of efficiency that came with Levitt houses. This model of efficiency allowed for mass production due to the extremely low cost of each house. Levittown sparked a suburban revolution that led to the existing housing conditions of a majority of modern-day America. When it first came into existence, a great majority of America was rural, with cities few and far between. With the industrial revolution, however, the urbanization movement became extremely popular and with it came the dominance of cities. However, since the early 1950s, suburbs are probably the fastest growing areas in America.