Modernizing Main Street: Architecture and Consumer Culture in the New Deal (review)

Gabrielle Esperdy, an architect on the faculty of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, has produced a true gem of a book, one exceptionally well written, and one exceptionally well researched. The book deals with an important topic heretofore largely overlooked by scholars—the Roosevelt Administration's depression-fighting, economic pump-priming programs to upgrade retail business districts through storefront modernization. But the book does more. It carefully places in historical context that modernization effort vis-a-vis all the other changes coming to "Main Street"America during the 1930s, especially the automobile's impact on landscape and place. The book has broad reach both as an architectural history and as a social history. It will remain an authoritative voice for many years to come.

The book contains a short introduction followed by six chapters, each of which is fully self-standing, and yet carefully linked in persuasive lines of argumentation anchored by insightful conclusions. All are sustained through the author's careful reading of a broad secondary literature (including period trade journals), but, most importantly, through careful use of selected archival materials, including federal documents (especially those the Federal Housing Administration and various housing and home finance agencies) and corporate records.

Chapter One ("Main Street, U.S.A") sketches the rise of American central business districts through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the new competition they faced from outlying business districts, especially the new auto-oriented commercial strips aborning in the 1930s. Emphasis is placed on retail chains and their embrace of "modern" architectural styling in storefront design, something which stood in contrast to older design motifs, especially in traditional retail districts increasingly in decline and thus blighted. Chapter Two ("The New Deal on Main Street") outlines the federal response, particularly through the 1934 National Housing Act and its Modernization Credit Plan that offered low-interest, federally insured loans to repair or improve business properties. Thus was modernization "repositioned as a central building industry activity" (55). Chapter Three ("Marketing Modernization") details the nationwide campaign to upgrade the nation's "Main Streets," one collectively orchestrated by government agencies, industry trade organizations, and individual corporations, especially the manufacturers of structural glass. Case studies focus on the activities of Pittsburgh Plate Glass (with its Carrara glass brand) and Libbey-Owens-Ford (with its Vitrolite brand). Influence of the International Style of European modernism was clearly at the forefront—storefronts with "flattened planes and poster-like facades, often highly colored, asymmetrical compositions with strongly defined horizontals and verticals, curved bulkheads, and signage expressed in bold graphics with contemporary typefaces" (125).

Chapter Four ("The Architecture of Consumption") provides the core of the book's argument—discussion of planned obsolescence as a means of economic pump-priming (through what the author terms "facadism") (163). Chapter Five ("Modernism on Main Street") explores more the metaphorical implications of the packaged "modern" facade in creating a new "iconography of prosperity" (203). Although the work of specific designers (including Walter Teague and Raymond Lowe) and specific architects (including Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) is discussed, emphasis is actually placed on the rise of a new architectural "vernacular"—something rather anonymous in its creation. The word "vernacular," the author writes, designates "widespread occurrence and everydayness" and a "hierarchical position at the low end of the architectural spectrum (219)." It is something fully commonplace. Chapter Six ("Conclusion: A Main Street Modernized") offers synthesis by way of a case study focused on Reading, Pennsylvania. Discussion turns on today's need to preserve surviving examples of 1930s retail modernism—what once symbolized a better future or, in the author's terms, "an optimistic glimpse of a progressive tomorrow, one seemingly guaranteed by the machine-age luster of chrome, neon, and glass" (244).