Coming Home.

As World War II ended, more than ten million soldiers were discharged from the U.S. armed forces. Where were they going to live? The answer, it turned out, was suburbia — 1950s style.

House Builder Levitt.

There were suburbs in America before the 1950s, but these were nothing like Levittown and its imitators. On 3 July 1950 developer William J. Levitt appeared on the cover of Time magazine, standing in front of a row of identical boxlike houses on newly bulldozed land. The caption read: "HOUSE BUILDER LEVITT: For Sale: a new way of life." First on Long Island, then near Philadelphia, and finally in New Jersey, Levitt built his dream houses and in the process created the suburbia of the 1950s.

The Levitt Design.

Levitt and his sons, who had built houses for the navy during World War II, brought massproduction techniques to...