“Have you heard the [phrase] ‘the end of suburbia’?” Mullan asked me. “If that’s a barometer," he said, motioning toward the turnpike, "then [the end is] here.”

He talked about hearing car accidents and fire-engine sirens, and said Levittown has become a suburban town with urban problems.

“It’s congested, it’s crowded," he said. "That’s not just Levittown -- that’s everywhere.”

Mullan knows this more intimately than others. He runs LevitStyle, a home-remodeling business that works exclusively on houses in what he calls Levitville: Levittown and the surrounding communities of Wantagh, Westbury, and Hicksville, where Levitt & Sons also put up homes. Like William Levitt, Mullan, 51, works alongside both his father and his son.

Mullan grew up in a Levittown ranch home that his father purchased in 1957 for $11,000, though the family eventually moved to nearby East Meadow, since no Levittown ranch was big enough to hold the Mullans' 16 children.

Today, Levittown remains a working-class community, but local home prices grew so high a few years ago that blue-collar workers could no longer afford them. Mullan said houses tripled in price from 1996 to 2006, to about $420,000. In 2006, nearly 70% of home sales involved financing of 85% or more -- in other words, for little to no money down.

Not surprisingly, the crash has hit Levittown hard: By recent estimates, it’s in the top 15% of foreclosures among communities in Nassau County -- which is itself one of the hardest hit areas in New York State. The foreclosure rate last year was one in 284 households. Mullan said his own business has been halved during the recession.