Modernizing Main Street

Reviewed by: Modernizing Main Street: Architecture and Consumer Culture in the New Deal Vicki Howard (bio) Modernizing Main Street: Architecture and Consumer Culture in the New Deal. By Gabrielle Esperdy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. x+307. $35. Between 1934 and 1943, American retailers modernized their storefronts with the help of $4 to $6 billion in low-interest loans and cash payments from federally secured private lenders. In this book, architectural historian Gabrielle Esperdy takes a close look at the Modernization Credit Plan [End Page 694] (MCP) authorized by Title I of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), showing how it transformed both the physical appearance and the cultural meaning of commercial buildings on Main Streets across the country, from Anaconda, Montana, to Reading, Pennsylvania. Placing this piece of New Deal legislation at the center of her story, she draws attention to the active role the state has played in the development and proliferation of consumer capitalism. As Esperdy notes, discrete aspects of the modernized storefront have been well studied. What sets her book apart is its ambitious attempt to tie the architectural, economic, social, and political dimensions of this phenomenon together. Setting storefront modernization in the context of the psychological blow dealt by the Great Depression, she argues that it was the architectural equivalent of other important artifacts of New Deal visual culture such as the WPA mural. Manufacturers of plate glass and plastics, designers, and architects all allied with the FHA to promote streamlined styles and modern materials to Main Street retailers. A chapter titled “Marketing Modernization” explores how promoters of the Modernization Credit Plan from government and the private sector drew on the advertising innovations of their era, including the tie-in, competitions, product exhibitions, door-to-door canvassers, parades, and before-and-after models, to convince independent retailers that their storefronts were in need of updating if they were ever to recapture their customers’ dwindling purchasing power. Although there were many critics of the MCP, boosterism and need prevailed and retailers flocked to the program to borrow funds to update their buildings and better compete with chain stores, which had themselves long been engaged in modernization. Esperdy explores the way in which this modernization took shape in a manner that will appeal to historians of technology. Of particular interest will be her detailed discussion of the materials and architectural styles behind the evolution of this “modern vernacular.” The transformation was achieved by stripping buildings of past architectural styles—cast-iron facades, heavy molding, jutting dormers, pronounced cornices, and elaborate masonry—and replacing or covering them with materials deemed modern, such as Carrara and Vitrolite structural glass, Enduro and Veribrite enameled steel, and Formica and Micarta laminated plastic. The book’s many wonderful photographs of 1930s cocktail lounges, restaurants, beauty parlors, shoe stores, and grocery markets, as well as its vivid descriptions of storefronts, reveal characteristic and ubiquitous streamlined structures, with their curved bulkheads, portholes and shadowboxes and off center entrances, deep vestibules, and towering signboards. Working with the archives of different manufacturers, Esperdy has gone behind the scenes to uncover the role that technology played in shaping architectural style. For a time, manufacturing realities—the lack of proper furnaces and a [End Page 695] glass-bending department at the Libby-Owens-Ford corporation—led to faceted bulkheads and windows that stepped back in right angles toward recessed entrances, rather than the more popular curved styles of the era. But eventually the firm remedied the problem and developed the necessary technology to fit consumer demand. Readers interested in cultural issues will also appreciate Esperdy’s critical readings of individual buildings, the modernist aesthetic, and the “streamlined decade.” In an especially good chapter titled “The Architecture of Consumption,” she argues that it was in the 1930s, largely through building modernization, that “architecture began to respond to consumer culture in explicit and deliberate ways by assimilating its aims, its practices, and its products” (p. 144). Streamlined storefronts were advertisements in themselves, promoting a store’s merchandise as well as a “promise of prosperity, progress, and modernity” (p. 151). Marketed implicitly to women, the concept of modernization drew on contemporary understandings of “obsolescence.” Storefronts became like automobiles, subject to

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