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

The subject of Esperdy’s book is the New Deal program that encouraged merchants to replace outdated commercial facades with modernist storefronts on Main Streets throughout America. These storefronts are tricky to analyze. As Esperdy notes, they existed “somewhere between full-fledged architecture and industrially designed consumer products,” and they functioned “as billboards or advertisements as much as . . . physical shopping spaces” (218). As such, they place Esperdy in a murky scholarly world somewhere between high-style modernist architecture and the presumably lower tastes of mass commercial culture. Yet it is the ambiguity of these storefronts’ status that allows her to approach them from multiple perspectives; the resulting analysis is the richer for it.

Over the course of the book, Esperdy discusses the economic incentive behind the modernization trend; the logistics of how building materials such as plate glass, extruded metal, and structural glass were manufactured and marketed to prospective merchants; and the cultural symbolism of modernism as a style of youth, progress, and individuality. The touchstone throughout the book is the social significance of Main Street, the thoroughfare common to mid-sized America that represented local identity and civic wealth. The Great Depression challenged the wealth of Main Streets across the country, and thus their identity; any attempt to modernize them was wrapped up in how communities wanted to see themselves and be seen by others.

“Modernize Main Street” was actually a slogan used by the Better Housing Program (bhp) in 1935 to advertise its interest in stimulating building and lending for commercial properties. As Esperdy explains in her detailed opening chapters, although the federal government wanted to stimulate the building industry, it did not in itself provide the funds to do so. Instead, through the Modernization Credit Plan (mcp), it agreed to insure private loans issued for building modernization. Thus, the goal of the “Modernize Main Street” movement was to stimulate both building and lending—bringing both jobs and money into the economy via the private sector.

In one of the most compelling sections of the book, Esperdy retraces how major building industries lined up to support bhp and mcp, hoping to reap profits in a newly energized building market. Two major glass companies, Pittsburgh Plate Glass and Libbey-Owens-Ford, not only provided materials to the building market. In response to the Main Street initiative, each also developed packages of building materials that a merchant (with the help of an architect) could purchase as an ensemble. The effect was one-stop shopping for your new store facade.

That the building industry so closely mimicked the marketing tactics of consumer goods is one of Esperdy’s thought-provoking discoveries. Later, as she analyzes the aesthetics and form of these new store-fronts, she argues that design was driven by the marketplace’s insistence on newness and by the modernized products sold within the stores. This is an instance of form following merchandise, though not necessarily function (166). Esperdy’s multifaceted approach to history—examining urbanism, economics, building materials, consumerism, and architecture—allows her to implicate these modernist forms with commercial culture thoroughly, thereby expanding our understanding of modernism’s place in modern society.