Levittown’s Eighth Section: Myth or Reality?

Ask on any corner of Levittown and the answer comes out on its own: “The eighth? That’s an old folks’ tale.” Addresses reach the seventh section, the signs too, and no one — no one — has ever given an address that reads “Eighth Section, Levittown.” The myth seemed settled. Until you take a look at the plans.

In 1963, Levitt & Sons — the company of Abraham Levitt and his sons William and Alfred, the same one that built the Levittowns of New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey — began building, on the drained marshlands of Toa Baja, the largest planned community in Puerto Rico. The plan was ambitious: thousands of homes, an artificial lake, shopping centers spread across the community, and a sky-blue water tower that still serves as a landmark for pilots today. And it was divided, as the community’s own geographic record states, into eight sections.

Eight. Not seven.

What happened to the eighth? It did not sink into the lake or get swallowed by the marsh. Something more Puerto Rican happened: the municipal line. When that last section was built, the land ended up on the other side of the line, in Bayamón. And since a section of Levittown could not keep calling itself Levittown while living in another town, they changed its name. The eighth section came to be called Fronteras de Bayamón.

That is where the myth is born. For Toa Baja, the count was always seven: seven sections in the addresses, seven in memory, seven in the family stories. The eighth fell outside the mental map of Levittown’s people, even though its streets were raised with the same plan and the same model homes. On the other side of the line there are families who grew up in the lost section without almost anyone ever telling them its true name.

Verdict: it was real. Levittown’s eighth section exists. It simply goes by another name today — Fronteras de Bayamón — and pays its taxes in another municipality. The myth was not that it never existed; the myth was that it had disappeared.

Photo: Aerial view of Levittown, Toa Baja.