Pedestrian Modern: Shopping and American Architecture, 1925–1956

THREE: Park and Shop

To great fanfare, Milton Bradley proclaimed in 1954 in an advertisement for its new game Park & Shop that “every child will enjoy the hustle and bustle of parking and a trip to the stores.” The game mimicked a day’s errands in town, including library and post office visits, medical appointments , and bill paying, but mostly the game was organized around shopping (Figure 3.1). The game board was a diagrammatic map of a small gridded town or urban district: a four-block by five-block grid, with a main intersection plus a perimeter road dotted with ten identical singlefamily home icons and one chamfered corner making room for parking ticket cards and the game logo. Ten Park & Shop parking lots were sprinkled along or near the perimeter road, near such auto-centered if less glamorous programs as Auto Dealer, Hay Grain Feed, and Car Wash. Each player began with an automobile marker on a house and then moved the marker according to the rolls of a single die until he or she reached a Park & Shop parking lot. There the car was parked and the player switched to a pedestrian marker of the same color; the player then rolled two dice to “walk” to all the places on his or her shopping list and pay for purchases before returning to the car to drive home again. The player to arrive home first won. Moves were dictated by a combination of T H R E E PARK AND SHOP The parking problem will never be solved at the curb. —Eno Foundation, The Parking Problem, 1942 93 l dice rolls and chance cards drawn; the cards gave players extra errands (“Pick up a sack of chicken feed while you have the car.”), bonuses (“Traffic thinned out. Take an extra free turn!”), or penalties (“There’s a woman driver in front of you. Lose one turn.”). A player might move his or her car from one lot to another or try to do the assigned errands with the car left in the same lot; strategic car parking was key, and, more broadly, the very premise of the game was a demonstration of a shifting attitudes about the planning of cities and towns.1 Park & Shop was certainly not the first board game to utilize an urban map— Monopoly, the famed game of real estate, mortgages, and rent, goes back to the start of the twentieth century—but it was unique in representing the city core as a quasireal map and, more specifically, a core that was more than slightly dysfunctional. 94 PARK AND SHOP Figure 3.1. Game board for “Park & Shop,” Traffic Game, Inc., Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1951. Park & Shop also confirmed planners’ concerns about the “terminal problem” in many cities, that there were too many cars, too little street space, and too few places to put cars when not in use. The fun of Park & Shop revealed a major conflict in the use and perception of American cities across the middle decades of the twentieth century. However, Park & Shop did not come from the minds of Milton Bradley’s famous marketers or inventors; Milton Bradley bought the game from Traffic Game, Inc., which was formed by the Merchants Association of Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1951 and headed by the game’s inventor, Campe Euwer, artist and member of the photography and printing department at Allentown’s Call-Chronicle newspaper.2 Typical of planning efforts of the time, business and political leaders of the small city of Allentown, as described by John Jakle and Keith Sculle in Lots of Parking, saw traffic congestion and a lack of parking as a threat to the viability of the local shopping district, and they organized to address the problem.3 In 1947, store and landowners formed Park and Shop, Inc., to improve the perception and reality of parking downtown. By 1949, interested merchants and owners pooled their money, leased or bought vacant property within walking distance of the shopping district, advertised heavily, and gave free parking stamps to subscribing stores, which then distributed them to customers. This inventive program was praised among planners nationwide—and was profiled in Collier’s magazine—for improving the troubled “Main Street situation” in Allentown.4 This unique collective approach, one observer wrote, would show that urban stores were as accessible as suburban stores, and the district was “pleasing to the eye.”5 Together, Allentown officials, planners, and store owners had taken steps to address stores beyond...