The Tekula's was this innovative Cape, with its slightly larger windows. It turned on when you let out the cover with a chain from the inside. Viewers unused to the Levittown house might easily mistake this to be the back of the house, because the windows were small, high, and relatively few. It was open land because Levitt required it. Here we see it complete with the inflatable pool and, behind it, the pressed-metal lawn chairs that graced many Levittown backyards.
Architects also note the use of windows at the top that opened out to provide ventilation.
The common space which began at the edge of the picture window and extended back to the opposite neighbor's, had a strange quality of variable ownership and variable privacy. It belonged to the democracy of children and dogs. Because so many families bought their Levittown houses as young adults, the neighborhoods tended to be populated by roving gangs of very young children, and these children required a new form of flexible supervision, somewhere between the urban working-class tradition of mothers and grandmothers on the stoops of the flats, and the more upscale tendencies to direct children into supervised play and activity. And this was not a small space. That's me on the huge hill we had behind our house.