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

Most New Deal programs have captured a great deal of attention of scholars and government officials over the years. A few have escaped this attention, notably the Federal Housing Authority’s (FHA) “Modernize Main Street” initiative, which began in 1934 and lasted until 1943 when wartime exigencies ended it. Its primary objective was to update storefronts to provide economic and psychological jolts to the sick economy. To encourage financial institutions to make loans to storeowners, the FHA insured them; to entice businesses to upgrade their buildings and to coax consumers to spend money, the FHA embarked on an extensive marketing campaign.

Architectural historian Gabrielle Esperdy reconstructs this fascinating—and timely–study from materials uncovered in the National Archives, architectural and trade journals, select corporate records, and personal papers. More than an architectural history of storefronts, the book targets the intersection of consumer culture and retail establishments and “considers how marketing and advertising, gender and class, and the proliferation of corporate chains and automobiles have marked the constructed landscape, both social and physical, in the United States in the twentieth century” (p. 5).

By the early twentieth century “Main Street” emerged in the popular imagination—transmitted through literature and other media—“as an embodiment of an urbanistic cultural ideal (community-minded, progressive, and brimming with upstanding small businessmen), an iconic locale that was frequently at odds with its local reality by the 1930s” (p. 7). Main Street was buffeted by intense competition from more efficient chain stores, decentralization and suburbanization, and a devastating economic depression. Moreover, it showed outward signs of physical disrepair that contradicted its self-image as progressive, future-oriented, and modern.

The federal government also believed in the importance of Main Street to the nation’s psyche, viewed modernization as a “public symbol of recovery” (p. 51) and integral to propping up the moribund building industry. Underpinned by Keynesian economics, the FHA created both the Modernization Credit Plan (MCP) to ensure private loans to encourage lending, and the Better Housing Program that employed the latest in advertising and marketing techniques to entice consumers to purchase goods and services. Ward Canaday, head of the FHA’s public relations division, was well suited to this task given his experience as an advertising and car company executive and consumer credit pioneer. Efforts began in the earnest in the summer of 1934, first at the local level, and then as part of a national campaign. By the end of 1934, 3,822 local campaigns were underway combining elements of patriotism, civic boosterism, and commercialism.

The FHA recruited architects and building industry sales representatives to prod storeowners to update their buildings, and produced brochures, such as its “Modernize for Profit” (1935), as part of its wider—and successful—effort to win cooperation from building materials manufacturers. That unglamorous industry hired notable industrial designers, found new uses for materials such as glass and metals, offered loans directly to store owners, held design contests, and ran extensive and progressive advertising campaigns to sell their products and services to both the reluctant independent merchant and the corporate chain. Merchants were eligible for up to $50,000 in federally insured loans to modernize their structures.

Incorporating the International Style of architecture and the industrial design community’s streamlining concepts that were being applied to consumer goods, architects redesigned and repackaged storefronts using new and improved building materials. At its most basic level, according to Esperdy, the modernized storefront was an advertisement, selling both the store’s products and the promise of prosperity, progress, and modernity. Professionals created a “modern vernacular” that, she argues, “produced a storefront architecture fully charged with a progressive agenda, as it attempted, through the policies of the New Deal, to marshal the resources of the individualist capitalist economy for the collective public good of national recovery” (p. 220).

Esperdy contributes a gendered analysis to show how architects, designers, and advertisers...