99% Invisible - 440- La Brega in Levittown

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

On the show this week, we’re bringing you an episode of a new podcast called, La Brega. And to tell us all about the series is Alana Casanova-Burgess. Casanova-Burgess traces back the story of the boom and bust of Levittown, a massive suburb that was founded on the idea of bringing the American middle-class lifestyle to Puerto Rico during a time of great change on the island. Casanova-Burgess (herself the granddaughter of an early Levittown resident) explores what the presence of a Levittown in Puerto Rico tells us about the promises of the American Dream in Puerto Rico. La Brega in Levittown Subscribe to La Brega on Sitcher, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. On the show this week, we're bringing you an episode of a new podcast called La Brega. And to tell us about this series is Alana Casanova Burgess. Host and co-creator and producer of La Brega, stories of the Puerto Rican experience, co-production from WNYC Studios and Fuludo Studios. Say that in my dreams now. The name of the show, La Brega, is a word in Puerto Rican Spanish that doesn't really have a great English translation.

But to illustrate the concept, we're going to start with a cell phone video that was taken in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria when the people of Puerto Rico were living in the dark. Some Puerto Ricans were without electricity for months on end, and everyone had to find ways to cope. And in the video, two people are standing in a carport. And so a woman is recording her father,

and they're showing off this invention. Here we can find the neighborhood where we're going down the mountain, with the ceiling of a puppy. They've got like the body, the drum of a washing machine. And then in the middle, what do you call that? The like, spoke that comes out of the middle of the washing machine. The agitator, the spinner or something? The agitator, that is correct. I think I had googled that.

The agitator has bicycle handlebars attached to it. We've got a month lavando in the famous Visi lavadora. Visi Lavadora. Bisi Lavadora. And this woman's father is so excited to show off this Bisi Lavadora. So he's moving the handlebars back and forth and showing how it froths up, how you get a good lather in the soak. And they're just making like the most of this terrible situation. So they're exclaiming like, look, it washes so well. You don't have electricity, but you don't

need it. And you get a workout while you're doing it. And they're just like having a funny time, you know, Puerto Ricans are really creative. I know everybody says that about themselves. We're such a creative people. But you're all wrong is the thing. Look, low key flex, but we've been through a lot. And so there's this sort of celebration in the video. And then at the same time, I knew, like I knew from talking

to my own family members, how raw your hands get from like washing everything by hand in water, how like everybody just had to do the most for months. Like my aunt didn't have electricity for nine months. Wow. Right. So they can't get power back for themselves. They can't like reconnect the electricity because the infrastructure is so poor and the government

is failing them. But they find this workaround so that their hands don't have to crack after weeks and then what will become months of washing your laundry by hand. And so when I was thinking about how to describe the name of the series, La Brega, to listeners. One of the first things that popped up was this YouTube video that I watched like three years ago. So what is La Brega? Can you define it for us? Sure. It is a word that Puerto Ricans use all the time. It's this like catch all word for, I'm struggling with something, I'm in the hustle,

I'm in the situation that I can't solve, I can't actually like have any resolution to it, right? So for example, you can't solve the problem that you don't have electricity, but you can like attach some bicycle handlebars to the agitator of your washing machine and you can kind of make do Maybe you have a terrible boss. You can't fix that problem. You can't resolve it But you're like, all right. I'm just like I'm grappling with it. I think grappling is a good one

And but we use it all the time and I think I only really realized this after Maria, I was reporting for on the media. And I was able to actually make a montage of, I was asking people like, how are you doing though? Like, but how are you doing really? Which is a hard question to ask whenever, but like, nobody really wants to get into their feelings because how do you then crawl out of them? And people would say, like, oh, you know, you got to get used to it. I get a c'est, and I was like, wow, we get used

to things. Yeah. Like a lot. And that doesn't seem entirely healthy all the time. And there's this like celebration of resilience, like, oh, Puerto Ricans are so resilient, we're so resilient. But like, why are we resilient? And then comes that word, like, how are you doing? Well, a key en la brega, bregando. Why? You're also just coping and hustling and grappling with something instead of resolving, solving it.

I mean, this is evidence, and the fact that, you know, we have to talk for a long time to define this thing. That it's kind of hard to define in English. Like there isn't like an easy equivalent. What do you think that is? I don't know, but I would love to loan this word. Like what has the pandemic been, if not for like one long break up? But fair, yeah, totally. So you've made a whole podcast series called La Brega.

Tell us what motivated you to make it and what you wanted to accomplish with the series. We wanted to tell really rich, beautifully told stories about a place that really doesn't get talked about very often on our own terms. We hear about whether it should be a state, what the Democrats want, what the Republicans want. But very rarely are we talking about our own experience with, for example, austerity policy. You know, like, what does that look like?

What does our own history look like? Why do our suburbs look the way they do? Just like making everything about ourselves. And so, you know, we put together this team, we've got musicians and artists and reporters and producers and editors who are both from the diaspora and from the island because you know, it is a really complicated identity and so we wanted to marry those two parts of ourselves together and make like one team, like one avenger squad. one avenger squad. And at the same time, we wanted to talk to ourselves, obviously. And so early on in production, we realized like we've got to make these episodes in both English and Spanish, so that we don't leave anybody out. That's so cool. So like, if you go to the Lebrega

feed, you will find English language and Spanish language versions through their side-by-side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can pick the one you want to listen to. We've been hearing that a lot of people listen to both of them and then find like the Easter eggs, like the details that change. They're different between them. Yeah, or couples where one person speaks one language better than the other. They listen together and then discuss. Love it.

Yeah, I love it too. So we're going to feature one of the stories that you made for the series. And fittingly to 99% of us, it's the one about the Levittown in Puerto Rico, sort of the built environment to the story of the series. So to start, what is Levittown and what's your family's connection to the place? Well, we say Levittown, but it's spelled the same way as levitown in New York say on Long Island. Yes. And for people who don't know, levitowns were these mass-produced suburbs. They're like kind of the model suburbs, and there's one in New York, and there's one in Pennsylvania.

And it was news to me that there's one in Puerto Rico too. So... Built by the same company. Built by the same company. Can you tell us a little bit about the Levitones in general and what they were made, what the point of Levitones were in the US in Puerto Rico? I think that their purpose was slightly different in Puerto Rico, but in New York, their purpose was post-war cheap housing

for returning veterans, essentially. You know, you could take a new highway out to your new house that was going to be built in exactly the same way. You were going to have like a couple bedrooms, but you could add another one if you needed. You'd have brand new appliances, and you would have a new school for your kids, a water tower, a library, police, the whole thing. So they were just these plopped-down communities, basically. 5 years ago, this was a vast checkerboard of potato farms on New York's Long Island.

Today, a community of 60,000 persons living in 15,000 homes are built by one firm. This is Levittown. You know, one of the things about them beyond, like, their sort of cookie cutter manufacturing way that they existed is that they pioneered some restrictive housing covenants. You are not allowed to be a personal color or a black person in a love of town in the US. Correct. Yeah. And I think about this a little bit with the Levy Town

in Puerto Rico is that in a way, you had all these migrants coming from the island to New York. And you had a lot of white flight into the suburbs away from Puerto Ricans, away from people like my relatives, my family. And then when Puerto Ricans went back to the island in this wave of reverse migration in the late 60s and 70s, the company then sold us houses. the company then sold us houses. Mm-hmm. Um.

So it's like, uh, yeah, they made money twice. And, um, my grandparents moved there when they moved from the Bronx back to the island in the early 70s. They are from another part of the island called Sialis, which is up in the mountains. It is beautiful. The views are gorgeous.

There are streams. There are waterfalls. There are underground rivers. It's so beautiful. And my aunt lives there. And I could never understand as a kid why I would have to visit Levytown, which is a... Which is not that, I take it. Which is not that.

It is a lot of concrete. I mean, there's a beautiful mango tree in the front, but it's still, it's no siadis. And it is so hot and so flat, but at the same time, it's sort of like beautiful in its way. And what way is it beautiful? I mean, the houses all came in either like white or a cream color.

Like they had no color. And unlike the houses in the New York levitown, these are like all cement. So you can paint like every surface of them. And so they can sometimes be quite colorful. You get kind of get these like sherbert colors. And people also change them a lot, you know, like added a second story, added some Trinitattiat, which is a kind of book and vilia. Like they added, added personality to it.

So why does you want to make this story? Like what does the Leviton in Puerto Rico represent to you? Someone else says this in the piece but I'm gonna steal it but it's sort of Puerto Rico in a nutshell. Like you have this boom and bust story about this desire for modernity and for middle class success in the American dream middle-class success in the American dream. But also this bust, there's so many foreclosure, so many empty homes. It's so hard to find a job that pays enough to have a house. And so it sort of follows that boom and bust idea, but it also is about negotiating this desire for a kind of Puerto Rican success, like this nostalgia for the mountains and for having chickens in a farm. You know, you've got your backyard, but you also have this successful modernity that my family must have really craved, I think.

So that I just wanted to look into that and figure out why it exists and what it did for people, what it does for people. Okay, so we're going to play the piece now. This is the English version of episode two of La Brega. It's called Levitown, where the good life begins. And we're going to start a few minutes in, with the backstory of how the Levitown Company came to develop land in Puerto Rico. Instead of a potato field, in Puerto Rico, the company started out in 1962 by buying nearly 440 acres of flat swamp land in the town of Duabaha, about 20 minutes from San Juan. They built drainage canals to empty into an artificial lake, I've seen the engineering

diagrams, and they're impressive. They originally planned to build 3,000 homes, but by 1977 there would be over 11,000. And just a short walk from the beach, they sold out quickly. The first models offered were broche de oro, el cama feo, la de edema, la alaja, and la ismeralda, the one with two stories, which my grandparents purchased from friends when they decided to leave the Bronx in the early 70s and come back home. Or at least to a new home. Here in La Vita, the tagline was Donde la buena vida comienza,

where the good life begins. Sí, está casa la cama feo. Cama feo, OK. Cama feo. Il de Rodriguez lives in a Camapéo model with her daughter Paula. Il de was five when they moved in in 1964. Sí, es 64.

Nosotros fuimos como los segundo terceros modernos aquí en Evita. Perhaps just the second or third family there. Pionero, bien, pionero. They're not just pioneers, their story is entwined with levy thounds. Il de's parents started their family in the States before deciding to come back home to the island. Her uncle was working for the levied company and he offered Ylda's father a job building the

leviedown house in Puerto Rico. And the opportunity for him to own his own home. The houses are like so many others in Puerto Rican suburbs. Flat roofed cement rectangles with Miami windows. These had built-in planters and car ports, Marquezinas, framed and decorated cinder blocks. And the catalog really pushed the cinder blocks. Observe, usted lo atractivo de los bloques ornamentales que rescuardan el patio y las ardinerás bajo las ventanas.

Mire cómo enveyesen la fachada de esta maca enmífica residencia. All the homes came with new general electric appliances and were wired for telephones. In the 1960s, this was all a sleek, modern dream. This had been a mangrove swamp with lots of palm trees. When Ilda's mother opened the front door, the Marquecina, the carport, would be full of crabs. It's in the Marquecina, it's in the patio,

it's in the street, it's in the stairs. I was crazy, I was already told to be the car of the barro. I'm not sure how much I learned. Ilda's daughter, Paola, lives with her in Levytown. She's starting her career as a math teacher, and she remembers that her grandmother had even found crabs in the washing machine.

They'd get into the motor and rattle around if you turned it on. They were so many that people would collect them in metal buckets, clean them and cook them. I've never heard of it. What's with my little toy? She'll never forget how many crab legs they ate. The Marquessinas were also where Sunday service was held in the early days. Before Ilda's father, Dondonio, helped to found the local Catholic parish. Ilda was in the first graduating class of the elementary school, named for John F. Kennedy. There was a man made lake, which still exists, but back then there were paddle boats too.

In the US, Levitowns were famous for excluding black and Jewish home buyers, and there were rules about everything from lawn maintenance to line-drying clothes. But there was none of that in Doah-Bah-Hah. And in the late 70s, Ilda remembers a levy town that was totally lit. Mira, en tercerito hay un quinceñero, mira en tercerito hay una boda, mira en tercerito hay un aniversario. Pero eran en las maquecinas

porque los parijeras eran de maquecina. Scouts with cars would drive around the different sexionists and report back about what parties were happening on a Friday night, a wedding, an anniversary, a birthday. They'd arrive unannounced, get invited to join, and then they'd be the last to leave, dancing boleros all night long. I like imagining my grandparents in this landscape. and the past is very, very, very. Life in a modern suburb instead of a return to the lush but rustic countryside in Seattle is. And as it turns out, that appeal of Levitown, it helps tell a bigger story about how in the mid-20th century Puerto Rico's future ran headlong into the American dream.

That's Paula, Ilta's daughter again. Don Toneyo, her grandfather, knew a lot about Leviton's place in Puerto Rico's history. He was from that generation, she says, that went from being really poor. He grew up without shoes, to going on to get his high school degree later in life, and of course to own his own house. So Luis Muñoj Madín, the first elected governor of Puerto Rico, is well known for pushing the idea that the island's prosperity would come not from statehood and not by independence. Muñoj advocated for a third way. Silvia Álvaro Curuelo is a Puerto Rican historian. She's also the author of

un país del porvenir. Un país del porvenir, A land of the future. Can't grab the future. Porvenir is a beautiful word. Porvenir means the time that is going to happen, like a point on the horizon, some kind of future of possibility. And Puerto Rico has historically been eager,

striving for modernity, she says. Governor Munoz would promote a massive program, operación Mano Halauobra, also known as Operation Bootstrap, to transform the island and reach that bogey venir. Operation Bootstrap echoed the new deal in the United States. It was a massive remaking of the Puerto Rican economy, and actually of the whole island. Government programs gave tax breaks to U.S. companies

and engineered a shift from agriculture to manufacturing. And for Munoz, it was this path to modernity because our culture was for him like the symbol of backwardness. Of course, it was the agriculture of sugar on crop agriculture. So it was, it was no paradise, really? No. And industrialization was the thing of the future,

once again defines that already. To understand why levy town was such a dream, it's worth understanding what it wasn't. Have you seen photograph of how people used to live in the forties here in Puerto Rico? Jorge Luisardo de Polo is a professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Puerto Rico. For example, in this place called El Fanguito, it's a long built-over swamp. These were wooden houses and stilts, perched over water. In 1940, the average life expectancy in Puerto Rico was 46 years,

nearly 20 years shorter than it was in the States. A lot of people used to leave, we know running water, not electricity, no bath. Some 70% of people lived in the countryside, and housing was a key part of Operation Bootstrap. It was the way in which the government demonstrates that it was possible to murder a nice second tree and gain off the slums. Broad avenues in San Juan lead to residential districts where houses resemble those in Florida, California or Texas. Crinchworthy films like this one called Fiesta Island marketed Puerto Rico as a prospering

outpost that was looking more and more like the United States. Everybody grows and loves flowers in Puerto Rico. These are red ginger blossoms. Worms for everybody. Housing gets top priority in Puerto Rico's booming economy. Donya Fela, the mayor of San Juan during this period, looked back on it in a documentary in the 1980s. The miracle was that we created middle class, which was created from one day to the other.

And that newly minted middle class moving from the campo to the city needed homes. In 1960, roughly 40% of housing in Puerto Rican cities was considered substandard. In Washington, DC, the federal government was creating incentives for single family homes in highways, and Puerto Rico got them, too. Just following the promise about the good life in the US,

that everybody should have their own house, their own party, or their own card, we just follow that promise. So if I say levitam to you, what is the first thing that you think? The top of the media class. The top of the freedom. up until the Cold War, Washington cared very little for Puerto Rico, if at all. But as Cuba became the poster island for communism in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico became a capitalist counterpoint. When I think of Leviathan, I think on the Cold War, to be asked on the Cold War promises. And one way the US fought back against dictatorships and communism was by giving Puerto Ricans

the chance to own their own homes. So they will become owners. And owners won't reveal against their own property. They won't do that. This isn't only true of the Puerto Rican levy town. William Levy, of Levy and sons, once said, quote, no man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist, he has too much to do. Governor Munoz embraced levy town, and attended the ribbon cutting for it in September

of 1963. It was widely covered in US papers. These homes, with their gardens and their garages, for a car everyone was expected to have, would be the model for housing and Puerto Rico for the next 50 years. But there wasn't room for everybody, and this version of Munoz's vision of Porvenir. San Juan's mayor, Donya Fela, said the creation of a middle class overnight was a miracle. But actually, it was a very intentional miracle and one with extremely mixed results.

The part of this economic transformation that isn't talked about much is how many people supposedly had to leave in order to make it work. For local technocrats, the problem was that there was no way to create enough jobs to employ everyone. There were too many people on the island to create a middle class, and that idea led to some horrible policies.

Today we know more about the shameful project that sterilized roughly a third of Puerto Rican women and the birth control pill experiments. But it wasn't only that. In 1946, a government report estimated that around a million people would have to leave in order to make the island prosperous. And by the late 40s, the government would get involved, really involved. We'll be right back. of a Lana story, which explores how Levitown became the place for Puerto Ricans returning from the US right after this.

We're back with the second half of Levittown where the good life begins. Here's Alana Kustinov, a Burgess again. And we're back to Labriga. We've been talking about an American-style suburb whose story is, in many ways, the story of the island in the 20th century, at a time when Puerto Rico was being remade in America's image. The government was trying to transform Puerto Rico's economy, moving from agriculture to industry,

and making a middle class. The government realized that without the massive exodus of people, economic growth in Puerto Rico would be maybe hinder or slow down. If Guadalupe Lindis is the author of Migration, a book about Puerto Ricans moving to the US, he describes an engineered exodus, a quote, campaign to turn every Puerto Rican into a potential migrant. The Puerto Rican government would create levers and wedges and pulleys to make modernity work for those who stayed, but only by encouraging others to leave.

At the same time, the U.S. government wanted cheap labor in cities like New York and Chicago, and so encouraging migration was also in their interest. Puerto Ricans come here to New York and to elsewhere to find jobs to get better education opportunities and other opportunities for their children. The Puerto Rican government had positions like Director of the Migration Division of the Department of Labor, based in New York. Here he is on WNYC in 1955. They are now on the first rung of a ladder which many of our own fathers and grandfathers

began to climb just a generation ago. So, they created all these programs to help migrants get social services from local governments like New York, English classes, helping kids with their documents so they can move easily to schools in the US, all that sort of thing. There was an expectation that bodyquests would assimilate easily, but that didn't pan out. Prickens were being rejected in the United States even though there were citizens, right? And of course the cultural and linguistic differences. So there were members of Munoz's government who looked for another solution to what they saw as the problem of overpopulation.

That I give, well, for migrants it will be easier to incorporate on assimilate in Latin America because of the common culture and language. But even in the early 50s the government sent a representative to Brazil to consider creating a colony of broken migrants there. The US government next to this not only did they not want Puerto Rico negotiating with foreign governments but it would also get too messy to have a bunch of US citizens living in Venezuela or the Dominican Republic. And yes, they made sure there were plenty of flights to the US.

And that's what gets us to the first Eastern Airlines flight to San Juan in 1951, the one that broke Pan Am's monopoly. And that's what gets us to the first Eastern Airlines flight to San Juan in 1951, the one that broke Pan Am's monopoly. We consider it both a privilege and an obligation to offer Puerto Rico the kind of transport service upon which the continuing purpose and prosperity of this island depends. Governor Muñoz had lobbied for expanding airline access to make it easier for Puerto Ricans to leave the island. But when he made the argument, what he said

was that Puerto Ricans deserve to go looking for jobs as much as anyone else in the states. It stings when I think about all these machinations to get a million people to leave, to get families like mine to leave, that we were a sacrifice worth making for that shining Bovenid, but people wouldn't just leave for good, because of the island's relationship with the U.S., it was easier for Puerto Ricans to come and go. Many like my grandparents would decide to return, and for them and many others coming from relationship with the US, it was easier for Puerto Ricans to come and go. Many like my grandparents would decide to return, and for them and many others coming from

cramped and cold walk-up apartments, the dream of success looked a lot like Louis Thun. Now, the Louis Thun is an important phenomenon, because it's basically an area built by return migrant. The flow is no longer one way, as thousands of Puerto Ricans have decided to return home. In general, on the absence of a foreign foreign call, for service to San Juan, Puerto Rico. August 1971, CBS News. Some have saved enough money to buy small, trim homes in new suburbs, in developments like Levittown, for instance, where life has a distinctly American flavor as a suburb's name.

Levittown has a reputation for being a place settled by the returning diaspora. I think that is like an intermediate space. The historian Silvia Alvarez-Guruelos says levita was a bridge between the US and Puerto Rico. For returning Puerto Ricans, there was a nostalgia, as several people have told me, for a life in the countryside that existed before Puerto Rico's big transformation, before people left. Carport in the front, platanos in the back. You have to plant a guava tree, a lemon tree, and you know, like the staples of a garden Puerto Rico. And levitans' pateos had room for that. In levitan I think that many of the New Yorkers wanted to have a Puerto Rico that was already

banishing in some way. My grandfather, Nicolas Casanova, kept ducks and chicken and even geese in his suburban backyard. It's a detail I hadn't thought about until Sylvia described that longing, but it wasn't an easy fit for everyone returning from New York. One resident told me, not on tape, that she felt bullied by a teacher who scolded her for speaking English. It was a common story in the 70s, featured in news reports quoting teenagers in Puerto Rican high schools. People laughed at me because I didn't know Spanish.

They were, you know, you would say something wrong. They'd be trying to correct you, you know, but most of the time they were laughed. They make fun of you the way you talk Spanish. So, they say if you say about wrong words in Spanish, something like that. They start saying you can't speak Spanish right and things like that. And they start calling you gringo. Schools in Puerto Rico even started offering Spanish courses to the returning migrants to help them fit back in.

Unhappy with life in the States and slow to assimilate in a hostile Puerto Rico, the Neorecon say they're in limbo, not knowing where they belong. Neorecon's returning from the States not only struggled to fit in, they also struggled to find a job, and they weren't the only ones. Ilda, the resident we heard from earlier,

says her family had a hard time making ends meet after returning from the states. In Levitown, the mortgage payment on their house, the Camapéo model, was $62 a month. That was a lot for their family. When we moved here, the cost of the house was $12,500. Her father, Dontonio, had worked building the Levitown houses,

but when they had all been finished in the late 70s, his next job didn't pay enough to make the monthly payment. When the father arrived, the father was already at the back of the despair, and he had already spoken to mommy. There came a moment where he was on the verge of desperation, and her parents were deciding whether they'd give up the house and leave again for the United States, when something happened that changed their fortunes.

Yilda can see the scene in her memory. One day her father got home. He sits down at the dining room table and he opens the newspaper. Her mother, Dóñalúsi, is in the kitchen. Come here, he says. She looks over his shoulder. I was going to marry her and I was going to be in love. Ilde could hear her saying, no way, really, no way. De verdad, en vurte, she could see them both with huge smiles on their faces, full of happiness. Y pegando dos hay con la cara alegria,

pero yo estoy mirando lo no sé lo que pasa. Don Antonio had won the lottery, first prize. the lottery, first prize. Well, Papia had bought the lottery and it was the first prize. With that money, he paid off the house. A few streets away, his sister was also struggling to pay. He helped her out too. And thank you, as I always say, for the first time in my life,

especially for things. For this money, for the telling me about everything. It's my gift, it should be my gift. If not for the lottery, they would have gone back to the States. Maybe someday her parents would have returned to the island, but they wouldn't have kept the house. Definitely, I mean, I think we're not here. But here we are 55 years old, and... Instead, she's been in Levitam now are 55 years old, and she's been in Levita now for 55 years.

And despite all the good times, all the memories, and all the promises, I'll just go for a minute here. Ilda says that the way life is in Puerto Rico, she wants to leave. It's the crime, the shrinking pensions, the lack of opportunities. But also people used to say neighbors are your real family. Everyone would help each other, care for each other. Today, Ilda says, if you die, they find you by the smell. This is so dark, but the truth is that there are so many empty homes in Levitown now. Nearly 15 years of a fiscal recession has taken its toll and then came Maria.

According to figures from 2018, over 20% of the houses in Levitown are vacant. The elementary school, the one named for John F. Kennedy, was closed as part of an island wide shutdown of hundreds of schools. And now, it's not like before, I think of my mother, she had the best stage of life. Paula, Yilda's daughter, says her mother saw Leviton's best days. She lives at home, loves this place. But news, her and her friends have seen its decline. It wasn't just dancing in the streets. There were also walkways between the sections, and now they're all closed.

The people walking in all the pastures that are now basically closed, and it's dangerous to walk alone. And the beach that borders the north side of Levitown, Punta Salinas is contaminated. For example, the beach from there to the front that is now contaminated. And Ilda can't imagine late night chats outside with neighbors. Do you think I'm too much? Now.

No. In the original designs, Levitown's balconies were all open, but today they're caged with security bars. Levitown's lake, once in a minute, overflowed during Maria. The dam was opened without warning and houses and streets near it flooded. Ilda and Paola's home didn't flood,

but other people had to be rescued from their roofs or flee in the dark. Four people died. Every time I go to work, I take the 165 road, que la 1 o 165, that's the road that takes all Dorado, levitown, San Juan, and you could see how deteriorated levitown is actually post-maria and before maria. That's six to a secortice, a friend of baulas and long time levitown resident. After Maria, out of boredom, they made our podcast with some other friends.

And one of the episodes is about their home. They discussed the awful experience of the hurricane, and they talk about a book of short stories based in Leviton. And, over an hour into the episode, six deposes a huge question to the group. Did Levitown fail? And his answer, he told Paola and I recently, is yes. You could actually see how levitown could mirror perfectly the failed experiment of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

That's just my opinion. And how at the same time it could be mirrored as the failed experiment of the American dream. He sees it in the rundown baseball fields in the abandoned houses, in that drive to work every day on the 165. And that many people, you know, they left Puerto Rico, their own home, their own picket fence, their white picket fence with their dog and their family and their house. The financial crisis and austerity policy has blanketed the whole island.

More than angry, it makes me sad, you know, that we're in this time, but this is not only Levy Thong. This Puerto Rico in a nutshell. There was something about Levy Thong that required a winning lottery ticket to achieve. The promise wasn't a home, it was a house, and that suburban model of development was defined by sprawl that clutters the landscape, and by mortgages that have become foreclosures. It wasn't enough to build houses if you couldn't create an economy in which people could afford to stay in them.

The poor venerated governor Luis Muñoj Madín had promised, had already started to crumble with a recession in the 1970s. Silvia Alvarez-Curuelo told me about a diary that he kept for a couple of years during that time. And it was like he was surprised by the change. He spoke about the traffic surprise by the change. He spoke about the traffic about the people that were in a hurry. He spoke about the trouble with youth, juvenile, the linguine-seeing, and so on. He sounds like kind of a just a grumpy old man. People are rushing around too much these days, the kids. Right? He sounds a little... Yes, because the times accelerated too much, because too much progress, too much poor venice, too much poor venice, the wish poor venice and the unraveling of

the poor venice into many poor venice, it was not only one. It's as though the vision of having a house got tied up too closely with the American dream and with an unsustainable consumerism. So LaVitown can feel like a metaphor for the failures of Puerto Rico's economic experiment. But last time I was there, I saw it through new eyes. I took in the interesting things that were showing through the cracks. Cezán Cardona Morales is the author of a collection of short stories called, Ironically, Levitown Monamore,

the one Paola and Sixto discussed in their podcast. Cezán and I met under the rust-street belly of the Blue Water Tower a couple of weeks Pompas. Sí, torre de agua, pompas de agua. Lo cierto es que se ha convertido, además del ícono, es una marca dentro del mapa aéreo, es decir, los aviones que van a terrizar tienen que informar que están pasando por aquí. Es parte de la área de map, y he checked this out, y está en la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de la parte de they're passing it on their way into the airport. In other words, I'm not the only one. Prove leviton me si dando sorpresa como ciudad. Levitown keeps surprising him. Every time he comes here, despite the detritus and the decay,

he sees colors that call his attention. Cada vez que pasó por ella, apesar del detrito que veo, de lo que está se está cayendo veo colores que me llaman la atención. Writing about this place was his way of making a kind of peace with his country, with Puerto Rico through the fiscal crisis, the deterioration, the difficulty of making ends meet. To leave the resentment about what wasn't and appreciate what is.

Leave it behind, or that recall of what maybe wasn't and appreciate what it is and what it will be doing. I asked him after all this historical research, if I'm trying to see the beauty in La Vitaon, could he give me some pointers? If I'm trying to see the beauty in La Vitaon, I could give him some advice. What? Well, it depends on what you consider beauty. Look at what time has done to this place.

Look at the rest at the shuttered businesses. Talvez eso, miral... miral las cosas que el tiempo ha ha dado. Talvez miral la oxidación, los lugares cerrados. Looking at closed-door friends gave up. And now, I'm going to go to the next room. the time has passed, maybe the oxidation is looking at it, the places are closed. Looking at closed door fronts gave him the possibility to invent, to imagine businesses that maybe didn't actually exist,

and walk along the boulevard, which is called Avenue Boulevard, a redundant name that tickles the sun. Caminal, put the boulevard. Maybe the only avenue that a avenue is called Avenue Avenida. It tickles me now, too, and much more does as well. A few steps away from where we sat, the public high school is named for Dr. Pedro Albisu Campos, Puerto Rico's independence icon. Right there in Levittown, the American suburb, and then there's the water tower, which doesn't actually hold any water. Now we see if we observe there,

the water tower is totally inservable. It's a monument to uselessness, a symbol of a failure to have functional infrastructure, and yet it's still an icon, visible from the highway, from the streets, and from the sky. y por supuesto, es un icon visible de la gran parte de los estrellos y de la ciudad. No es muy toad, sino nuestra incapacidad de poder construir o de poder llevar agua a un lugar. empty and yet, but it has become the same in our own ideal. It's become like our own, I full tower, he says, appealing to Cicin precisely because it doesn't work.

I remember something Paula shared on her podcast about how she sometimes imagines that there's a mermaid in the water tower. It's a vision from Aqua Marine, a teen movie from 2006 that you should feel no rush to go see. In the movie, there's a mermaid in a water tower. I imagine mermaids up there now, too. I had hoped to end this journey in my grandparents' leviedown, but then the pandemic hit.

So instead, this summer, I drove from Brooklyn to Long Island and peered up at this other water tower in this other levy town. While the Puerto Rican won towers over a busy commercial strip, this one is quiet, tucked into some residential streets that curve into each other and are named for plants, like a zelia road and a iris lane. I could hear the drip, drip, drip of water falling from the tank. There's a baseball diamond there too and a basketball court and a group of teenagers were playing. Someone was walking their dog.

The lawns were tidy, but there were no guava trees, no lemon trees. This light blue water tower also says Levittown in big letters, although frankly it's not as impressive. Maybe not as tall as the Puerto Rican one. I imagine getting some bolt cutters for the chain link fence and getting to the circular door at the base of the tower. I could open the hatch, like the ones on a submarine, and instead of climbing whatever ladder lies on the other side, I could open another hatch and arrive at the other levitam,

as though the water towers were portals. I'd arrive by passing airplanes and airports and the danger of a COVID-19 transmission on Avenida Boulevard. I'd go to Panadarilla Lemmy and I'd order a box of quesito, then I'd walk to my cousin's house, the same one my grandparents moved to when they were looking for something between one dream and another. In the room where I sleep when I visit, there's a view of the water tower. La Vrega is a co-production of WNYC Studios and Futuro Studios. This episode is available in Spanish as well, and you can listen to either wherever you get your podcasts, through La Vrega's podcast feed.

This episode was produced by me, with help from Mark Pagan. It was edited by Luis Treyes, Marlon Bishop, and Mark Pagan, fact-checking by Istra Pacheco. Engineering is by Stephanie Lebow, Leah Shadamaran, Rosanna Caban, Gabriel Avais, and Alicia B. Ituk. Original music for LaVrega was composed by Balun, and our theme song is by Ife. Additional music from Franky Reyes. Art for this piece was done by Fernando Noreth.

Leadership Support for Laberega is provided by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, with additional support provided by Amy Lys. Deep gratitude to WN My C's Andy Lancet for his generosity with archival tape. Thanks also to Rebecca Ibarra and Yari Marbonilla for their ears and to Carmelo Estiric, Francisco Rodriguez Suarez, and Mirmari Graugonzales for their expertise. And special thanks to Sofia and Lucinda Bordali

and Olga Casanova Burgess. Thanks also to Esequel Rodriguez-Sandino. In the next episode, a very different story about the shadows of the Cold War in Puerto Rico and a dark legacy we're still dealing with. Hasta la próxima! Thanks to Alana Casanova Burgess in LeBrega for letting us share their story. Go listen to them all, they're fantastic. Our feature that wrapped around their story was produced by Emmett Fitzgerald and our senior producer Delaney Hall, music by our director of Sound Sean Rial, mixed by Amida

Kanatra. Cricklested is 99 P.I.'s digital director, Thorec Littin, is Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Joe Rosenberg, Lashemba Dawn, Chris Baroube, Katie Mingle, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. 99% of this world is a project of 91.7 KLW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is scattered about the North American continent right now, but is centered in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. We are a member of Radio Topia from PRX, an independent collective of the most innovative shows in all a podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.

You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars on the show at 99PI org, or on Instagram, and read it too. But our home for beautiful nerds is 99PI.org. Radio Tapia. From PRX.