Fifties (24 page)

Levitt became aware that his reputation as the builder of the cheapest housing available was turning into a liability as the society became increasingly affluent. If he upgraded his house, he thought, he would upgrade his customers, and thus his reputation as well. In Long Island he had built primarily for young veterans; his second development, in Bucks County, was primarily for blue-collar buyers; in the third Levittown he decided to reach for a somewhat more affluent group, thereby increasing his profit margin as well.

In the new subdivision, the schools would be built by Levitt and included in the price of the house. He asked two prominent architects to submit plans for the new houses, but was thoroughly disgusted when they submitted plans for houses costing about $50,000. With
that, Levitt quickly returned to his own architects. Instead of only one model of house, there were now three, a “Cape Cod,” with four bedrooms, selling for $11,500; a three-bedroom one-story “Rancher” for $13,000; and a two-story “Colonial,” with three or four bedrooms, costing $14,000 for three bedrooms and $14,500 for four.

Even if the price was going up, he kept the down payment low, because he did not want to scare away young middle-class families with incomes of $6,000 and $7,000 a year. But a conscious effort was made to find a slightly more affluent buyer. One potential customer showed up wearing shabby clothes and with the beginnings of a beard and was turned down; a few days later, the same buyer returned clean-shaven and wearing a suit and was welcomed. Herbert Gans has pointed out that Levitt deliberately had his salesmen wear dark suits, like bankers, instead of the flashier clothes often associated with salesmen. They were not to pressure the buyer, and some even took lessons from a speech teacher.

There was a sense of adventure and excitement among his neighbors in Levittown, Gans thought. Everyone, he noted, “was looking forward to occupying his new home and this engendered a spirit of optimism and the trust that other purchasers shared this spirit. After all, Levittown would be a new community, and newness is often identified with perfection in American culture.”

What was taking place was nothing less than the beginning of a massive migration from the cities, to the farmland that surrounded them. Starting in 1950 and continuing for the next thirty years, eighteen of the nation’s twenty-five top cities lost population. At the same time, the suburbs gained 60 million people. Some 83 percent of the nation’s growth was to take place in the suburbs. By 1970, for the first time there were more people living in suburbs than in cities. Bill Levitt had helped begin a revolution—that of the new, mass suburban developments; 10 percent of the builders were soon putting up 70 percent of the houses. By 1955 Levitt-type subdivisions represented 75 percent of the new housing starts. All over America, subdivisions were advertising that buyers could come in for no down payment and others were asking, “one dollar down.” Row houses became a thing of the past; as Kenneth Jackson pointed out, the new auto-connected suburb was only half as densely populated as the older suburbs, which had been connected to cities by streetcars. It would change the very nature of American society; families often became less connected to their relatives and seldom shared living
space with them as they had in the past. The move to the suburbs also temporarily interrupted the progress women had been making before the war in the workplace; for the new suburbs separated women physically from the workplace, leaving them, at least for a while, isolated in a world of other mothers, children, and station wagons.

TEN

A
S MORE AND MORE
people were moving to the suburbs, a need was created for new places and ways in which to shop—and also for new things to buy to fill these thousands of new houses. This was no small phenomenon in itself—shopping and buying were to become major American pastimes as the ripple effect of the new affluence started to be felt throughout the economy. In the summer of 1953, Eugene Ferkauf was driving through rural Long Island when he passed through an area of pretty farmland. The area—Westbury—was as yet untouched by the vast migration that Bill Levitt had initiated and which was continuing to sweep across Long Island, but Ferkauf knew it was just a matter of time before the heavy equipment of the developers would replace the farmers’ tractors. All around, farmers were being bought out by developers. Some developers even called such regions “fertile acres” because of the rush of young families to settle here.

Ferkauf was already the principal owner of five wildly successful discount stores in the greater New York City area. Two of them were in the suburbs—one in White Plains and one in Hempstead, Long Island—but Ferkauf was not satisfied with them. The Hempstead site was fairly typical for him, chosen by the take-whatever-was-available method. This generally resulted in locations and buildings that were less than ideal. Ferkauf personally considered the Hempstead store a dump—it occupied a failed former Grand Union grocery store and faced a cemetery. Despite that, the store had prospered, thanks to Ferkauf’s amazing discounts and the seemingly unquenchable desire of his young customers for ever more appliances. In fact, all of Ferkauf’s stores had been phenomenal successes. The first had opened in 1948 and its sales had exploded from the very first day. The customers had found the stores not through advertising (for in the beginning there was none) but by word of mouth.

Ferkauf understood his new customers—and how they were different from prewar customers—for in many ways he was just like them. They were young and hungry to buy, because they owned virtually nothing. They were prosperous but not rich. Above all they were confident in themselves and their futures in a way that Ferkauf, growing up in harder times and poorer neighborhoods, found striking. They did not fear debt, as their parents had. Their grandparents—Italian, Irish, Jewish—had been immigrants who lived in tenements on the Lower East Side, and their parents had eventually moved to better apartments in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. Now they were striking out on their own, going after their share of the American dream by moving to the suburbs. They differed from their parents not just in how much they made and what they owned but in their belief that the future had already arrived. As the first homeowners in their families, they brought a new excitement and pride with them to the store as they bought furniture or appliances—in other times young couples might have exhibited such feelings as they bought clothes for their first baby. It was as if the very accomplishment of owning a home reflected such an immense breakthrough that nothing was too good to buy for it. Ferkauf knew their migratory patterns well: The people from the Bronx went to Westchester and, sometimes, New Jersey; those from Brooklyn and Queens moved out to the Island. Thanks to his early success, Ferkauf himself had left his tiny $75-a-month apartment in Brooklyn and bought a huge house in Jamaica, Queens—a “mansion,” in his somewhat ironic words—for $75,000.

Ferkauf was among the first to realize the commercial possibilities
of catering to this new middle class. He liked dealing with them: They were smart, they knew what they wanted, they appreciated his bargains, and they rarely argued. They did not waste his time, and he did not waste theirs. Dealing with them was not, as it had been in his father’s day, about the art of selling, which involved elaborate rituals: a lengthy give-and-take, and making a shrewd reading of what the customer really wanted. In that process selling was almost an end in itself.

As Ferkauf looked at the potato fields of Westbury, he experienced a great vision of the new suburbia: a sparkling, huge new store with vast parking facilities. It would be 90,000 square feet and contain an endless variety of sub-stores: an appliance store, a supermarket, a toy store, a men’s clothing store, and perhaps others as well. There would be no more taking whatever real estate agents gave him and adapting buildings that could never be made to fit his needs. In fact, he had always wanted a store that was not merely successful but also beautiful—like Lord & Taylor, a showplace the customer would also admire. Westbury would be the site for that store; there was plenty of space, easy access to the highways that connected Long Island to New York City, and best of all, it was only ten minutes from Levittown.

Ferkauf pushed everyone—architects, contractors, and painters—to build the new store quickly. He was in a rush, for time was money, and he wanted to catch the 1953 Christmas season. Miraculously, the builders met Ferkauf’s deranged schedules and the store was finished in ninety days. Despite his usual confidence, Ferkauf wondered this time whether he was reaching a bit too high and his operation was getting too big for its own good. He was terrified, in fact, that he would open this, his greatest store, and it would fail. If there was one thing Ferkauf hated it was an empty store; he thought it resembled nothing so much as a corpse.

Ferkauf still smarted from the fact that traditional retailers in New York City had initially made fun of him and his discount stores. There was a manic quality to his first stores. Even as his stores grew in size and number, they were run as ma-and-pa operations. There were no amenities and only minimal service. His philosophy was to sell as much merchandise as possible in the shortest period of time possible with a minimal markup. If a manufacturer’s representative dared peer inside his store, Ferkauf, never turning from the sale at hand, would scream at him: “One hundred washing machines, and now get lost ...” or “Two hundred toasters, and get out already and drop dead.”

Even the smallest transaction in the first Korvettes, on East 46th Street, was conducted with a certain frenzy: The salesman seemed desperate to get on to the next customer, the customer eager to be gone from this overcrowded, noisy little space. In the beginning no one had a title, including Ferkauf. Eventually, as the company grew, his friends insisted he take one: chairman of the executive committee of E. J. Korvettes. Most assuredly, though, he did not have an office or a secretary. He never wore a jacket and tie, preferring instead sports shirts and sweatshirts. If he
had
to arrange a meeting with a lawyer or an investment banker, he would set it up in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel. There, in a posh armchair, he would conduct his business—one did not have to stay at the Plaza to be a man of the Plaza.

As his business expanded, Ferkauf kept hiring his old buddies from Brooklyn. They were mostly from Samuel Tilden High School and retained their street nicknames: Ferkauf was Euje, and there were Schmaltzy, Kuzzy, Lobster, Leaky, and Gimp. Ferkauf, his friends joked, had emptied all the poolrooms of Brooklyn to staff his store. The atmosphere of the store was not far from that of the open street stalls of the old Jewish peddlers on Orchard Street on New York City’s Lower East Side. In fact, one of Ferkauf’s salesmen, Willie Shapiro, would sometimes cry out the traditional wail of Orchard Street, “Ladies, ladies, come over, come over, we’ve got the merchandise, we’ve got the merchandise.”

On occasion there were cultural tensions. Once Ferkauf turned to a well-dressed lady and said, “Can I help you, dear?” That was courtesy where he came from. “I should slap your face for calling me dear,” she said. People lined up and took a number as they came into the store. “This is the lowest form of merchandising I’ve ever seen,” Ferkauf once heard a customer say. He felt as if someone had slapped
his
face. The strain on everyone’s vocal cords was considerable. Ferkauf popped cough drops all day to protect his throat; at night his mouth would be so sour from their flavor that he could not taste dinner. Eventually, he was operated on several times for the removal of polyps from his vocal cords.

The Tilden men were known as Gene’s Boys, or the Boys. “It was like a kibbutz,” Ferkauf noted years later. They had known each other forever. Some were related, and those who came aboard in the beginning soon brought their friends and relatives. A bunch of them would drive to work together from Brooklyn every morning. Eventually, quite a few of the Boys became rich. Ferkauf paid everyone—including himself—modest base salaries, but he rewarded
exceptional performance generously with bonuses and later, after the company went public, with stock. But there was an unwritten agreement that the stock was never to be sold—Ferkauf regarded it as a breach of faith similar to telling the secret rules of a boys’ club to outsiders. Ferkauf always found out if anyone sold the stock; then he would be finished at Korvettes. If one of the Boys had a problem or needed something, he was to come directly to Ferkauf. Once, several of them talked to each other and realized they had a common problem. After several years of working for relatively little, they still had cramped apartments in Brooklyn; they were all married and several had kids or kids on the way. They wanted their own houses out on Long Island, so they went as a group to Ferkauf. He listened to them, then called his banker to ask for $1.5 million, which he distributed among them for the new houses.

Loyalty was placed above all else. Once the New York area was hit by a torrential downpour. Ferkauf called up the White Plains store to talk to one of his buddies. The man was not there. He had been called home by his wife because their basement was flooding. To Ferkauf that was nothing less than desertion. He was furious and withheld the man’s annual bonus. Of the boys he had known growing up, Ferkauf denied a job to only one. As a kid, that man had violated the honor code of their neighborhood softball game, erasing Ferkauf’s name from the chalkboard list of waiting players, writing his own name in.

The name—E. J. Korvettes—came from the names of (E)ugene, as in Ferkauf, and (J)oe, for his friend and partner Joe Swillenberg. Korvettes was a mutation of the World War Two Canadian subchaser the Corvette (there was already a line of clothes called Corvette). Because the spectacular growth of Ferkauf’s chain came right at the end of the Korean war and because all the young men running it were Jewish, it was believed, incorrectly, by many people who worked in the store, and even more by those who shopped there, that the name stood for (E)ight (J)ewish (Kor)ean War (Vet)erans.