Levittown, outside the box

When developer William J. Levitt built his third Levittown, sociologists doubted a sense of community could grow out of the Burlington County labyrinth of cookie-cutter houses.

But 50 years later, original resident Lee Isackson, 74, tutors immigrants in a public library started from boxes of books stacked in her garage. Her husband, Richard, also 74, has devoted 39 years to the town's Rotary Club.

Cliff and Dottie Anderson, charter members of the town's St. Paul Methodist Church, are planning their 60th wedding anniversary celebration at home in the first section Levitt built.

And Paul Krane, mayor and town councilman for 28 years, vows, "I'll stay here until the very end."

These 1958 pioneers still live in Willingboro, which shed the Levittown name after only four years. The town of 33,000 has matured into a leafy, inner-ring suburb radically more diverse than the white enclave Levitt planned.

As the town marks the development's golden anniversary, older residents talk of a wonderful place to raise children, of supportive neighbors, of more racial harmony than unrest. "A great place to live" is virtually a mantra.

Willingboro in 1958 "was like Disneyland for a 12-year-old," said Bernard Kashmer of Burlington Township, who moved with his parents and siblings from Northeast Philadelphia. "There was hunting, trapping and fishing."

The Quaker-settled town of about 850, once known as Wellingborough, was mostly farmland and orchards when Levitt quietly began to assemble 4,900 acres in 1954. Frustrated by dealing with four townships to create Levittown, Bucks County, the businessman wanted his next project in one municipality. The first home sale, to Leo and Joan Mount, was in October 1958.

Kashmer remembers tracking construction of his family's no-frills $13,990 Colonial.

"My mother wondered what color we'd get. She ended up with pink and gray. The first thing we did was paint," he said.

Levitt offered Cape Cods, ranchers and Colonials for $11,500 to $14,500, with $100 down. The self-described "General Motors of the housing industry" organized his town into a dozen neighborhoods, each with alliterative streets - Blueberry, Bradford and Buttercup in Buckingham Park - and its own pool, park and grade school.

"Everyone was in the same boat," Kashmer said. "Everyone had young kids and wondered how they were going to make those payments."

The Isacksons came to the Somerset Park section from Levittown, Pa. Richard Isackson was a pilot at nearby McGuire Air Force Base.

He was away a lot, said Lee Isackson, the town's first Avon lady: "I had a really good support system."

In 1959, she helped neighbor Cathy Costa - future county freeholder, state assemblywoman and state senator - collect books door to door for a library.

"We filled my garage," Isackson said.

The library began in St. Paul's Methodist Church and moved several times before getting its own building on Salem Road. Costa, now of Mount Laurel, solicited lumber for shelves.

That's how the new community grew, Kashmer said. "Someone wants a library: Go start one."

Unlike in New York and in Pennsylvania, the Levittown name didn't stick in Willingboro. Under pressure from Levitt, residents adopted it in 1959, but voted back Willingboro in part because of post office mix-ups with the Pennsylvania Levittown.

"People made a serious mistake," said Rabbi Richard Levine, who led Temple Emanu-El there from 1965 to 1997. " 'Wait until he's finished building,' I said."

A furious Levitt stopped funding school construction. "It cost the township millions of dollars," Levine said.

The town's footprint transformed, too. Only a couple of pools remain, and the Willingboro Plaza shopping center on Route 130, site of South Jersey's first suburban department store, is gone.

"The pools were great," said Carol Suplee, a resident of the second neighborhood built, Buckingham Park, from 1959 to 1987. "When kids got to be 10, they got their own tags and could go without a parent. You would say goodbye in the morning and wouldn't see them again."

Suplee, author of Stories of Willingboro Township, once counted 26 bikes in her neighbor's yard as children played nearby. "Nobody drove their kids anywhere," she said.

"That's all we had was kids," said 28-year councilman James Ayrer, 74, who raised five in Pennypacker Park. "Now a number of houses have no kids in them."

Children often gathered at Willingboro Plaza's pet store.

"The plaza was lovely," said Lillian Krane, Paul's wife, of Somerset Park. "We took the children to Woolworth's for lunch."

Jeffrey Lucas, who helped redevelop the plaza site, took his first "automobile date" to the Fox movie theater and ice cream parlor there in 1965.

But I-295 and indoor malls lured shoppers away. The last store, Boscov's, closed in the early 1990s. Vandalism and arson plagued the property until redevelopment began in 1999. Now known as Willingboro Town Center, the site has a mail-order-drug firm, a Burlington County College branch, apartments, stores and dining.

Nearly 50 years after starting the first library, Lee Isackson helped plan the 42,000-square-foot new one, which opened in 2003 and anchors the center.

"It's becoming everything we envisioned," she said.

Willingboro is a place for people to buy their first home, said Ayrer, who arrived in 1960.

That was all the Rev. W.R. James sought in 1958. But Levitt "told me he didn't sell houses to blacks," recalled James, now 88 and living in Edgewater Park.

The resulting antidiscrimination lawsuit went to the state Supreme Court, where James won. But Levitt had already relented.

"Let me be clear: I didn't find any joy in being the first or second black moving into Willingboro," said James, who arrived with his wife, Bernice, and four children. "I was trying to find a home."

Willingboro proved to be a good place, said James, who lived in Millcreek Park.

"My kids, to my knowledge, didn't face discrimination," said James, who had grown up in Louisiana and spent time in a segregated Army, rising after 20 years to chief warrant officer, grade three, at Fort Dix.

An active clergy paved the way for peaceful integration. The town also had a human-relations commission, which held kaffeeklatsches in white residents' homes to ease discomfort.

"It was normal for us to have friends of different races," said the Isacksons' daughter, Sue, 54, who graduated from John F. Kennedy High School in 1972.

However, in the 1970s, James said, fights and unrest came to the high school. He recalled complaining to the police chief about treatment of black suspects.

James left in 1974, the year Willingboro's population peaked at about 47,000. According to the 1970 census, it was 11 percent black.

Fearing white flight, the Township Council passed a law in 1974 banning "for sale" and "sold" signs outside houses. The goal was to stop blockbusting, in which a sales agent tried to panic whites into putting their homes on the market after being told that a black family had moved nearby. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the ban in 1977, citing First Amendment concerns.

"The difficulty we faced was not from the community," Levine said. "It was the real estate agents."

In the 1980s, the population continued to drop as families outgrew their houses, children moved away, and owners retired. In the 1990s, the population loss slowed.

The mostly middle-income town is now about 67 percent black and 25 percent white.

Karen Beck Pooley, executive director of the Allentown Redevelopment Authority, researched Willingboro in 2002 and 2003. Despite a public school system that experts say is wanting, Pooley found it to be a thriving place with educated residents, sturdy houses, and scores of churches to anchor neighborhoods.

Yet home prices had trailed those of nearby towns and other Levitt projects. Pooley attributed the disparity to the "segregation tax." "That a place like Willingboro might be considered anything but thriving reveals a persistent problem," she has written.

The Rev. Joseph Yundt of Parkway Baptist Church arrived in 1981, attracted by the town's diversity.

"We knew we were about the business of creating a unique community," said Yundt, 57, who is white and married to a Jamaican. "We wanted this place to succeed. There weren't very many mixed suburbs in the United States. Still aren't."

Yundt's congregation was 80 percent African American then. Now it's 90 percent African American, Caribbean or South American.

"We wanted to learn to enjoy and appreciate each other," he said. "There are a goodly amount of people who still feel the same way."

One of them is Sue Isackson. Lee and Richard's daughter never looked anywhere else seriously when she house-hunted nine years ago.

Isackson has lived happily in Willingboro since she was 4 - from picking blackberries as a child to working at Willingboro Plaza in high school to reminiscing these days with old neighbors in Hawthorne Park.

"I've just always liked this town," she said.

All events are at the Willingboro Public Library, 220 Willingboro Parkway. For information, call 609-877-6668.

Through December:

A rotating exhibit features photos, documents and memorabilia from the Levitt era.

Oct. 4, 2 p.m.: Pre-Levitt families discuss the town before developers arrived.

Oct. 18, 2 p.m.: Columbia University sociologist Herbert Gans talks about his 1967 book, The Levittowners.

Nov. 8, 2 p.m.: Some of Levittown's first African Americans, including the Rev. W.R. James, discuss integration of the community.

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