Abstract
In his classic novel Sister Carrie (1900), Theodore Dreiser portrayed the department store as a quintessentially urban phenomenon, an expression of the energy, ambition, and material longing amassing in American cities in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Following his protagonist Carrie Meeber, a recent migrant from small-town Wisconsin, into one of Chicago’s new commercial palaces, Dreiser wrote, “The nature of these vast retail combinations, should they ever permanently disappear, will form an interesting chapter in the commercial history of our nation.” 1 What Dreiser could not predict were the numerous chapters of urban history that scholars would derive from studying the fate of these very institutions. Indeed, urban historians have fruitfully mined the department store’s rise and fall for insight into the development, social relations, cultural evolution, and crises of American cities. Yet the works of architecture historians Joseph Siry and David Smiley and business historian Vicki Howard make clear that no aspect of the department store’s “life cycle” was inevitable, from its initial ascent to its eventual displacement by the suburban shopping center and big box store. This trajectory was an artificial creation, the result of deliberate choices, unintended consequences, and roads not taken.
Many histories of shopping and retail focus on women consumers. Siry, Smiley, and Howard, however, depart from this trend by highlighting the actions of the male powerbrokers who created female-dominated retail environments. Readers looking to learn more about consumer behavior or activism should look elsewhere. These three authors instead focus on the merchants, architects, professional groups, policymakers, jurists, and other state actors whose decisions shaped the landscape of shopping in the twentieth century. In Carson Pirie Scott, first published in 1988 but now reissued, Siry examines architect Louis Sullivan’s iconic design for Chicago’s Schlesinger & Mayer department store, completed in 1904, as well as the commercial culture from which the building emerged. Smiley probes deeper into the twentieth century to reveal how architects developed modernist style by responding to the functional needs of suburban shopping centers, typically anchored by new branch locations of department stores. In From Main Street to Mall, Howard takes the widest view by scrutinizing how retail executives and state actors facilitated the consolidation of the department store industry over the course of the twentieth century and, ultimately, enabled the triumph of discount retailers.
Siry’s monograph presents the urban department store as the product of a particular “place and time” (p. 3). Of course, so, too, is the book itself. When Carson Pirie Scott was first published in the late 1980s, historians had only recently started to investigate consumption as a serious realm of inquiry. Siry’s work debuted alongside foundational texts on the department store by historians such as Susan Porter Benson, William Leach, and Elaine Abelson. 2 Earlier studies of retail had focused on individual merchants or firms. By contrast, this new scholarship instead examined the cultural conditions that enabled department stores to thrive—and that their own practices helped to uphold. 3 Using architecture as the point of entry, Siry’s text similarly approaches the department store as an artifact of turn-of-the-century culture and commerce.
“Carson Pirie Scott emerged from a particular historical situation and urban context,” the author explains in the introduction. “Through this building Sullivan gave expression to notable facets of the life of Chicago in 1900” (p. 3).
Siry’s chosen title, Carson Pirie Scott, misleads in at least two ways. To begin with, Sullivan’s creation was designed and built for the retail house of Schlesinger & Mayer. Not until 1904, the point at which Siry’s analysis concludes, does Carson Pirie Scott purchase the building. More importantly, the specificity of the title belies the book’s expansive account of the development of Chicago’s entire State Street retail district. In the decades after the Great Fire of 1871, civic and business leaders attempted to transform State Street into a grand shopping avenue to rival Paris’s Champs-Élysées. Along this thoroughfare, stores such as Marshall Field’s, Mandel Bros., and The Fair vied with one another to attract the passing throngs and stimulate spending. The new Schlesinger & Mayer store was built amid this frenzy of retail growth and competition. As Siry reveals, commercial objectives influenced every aspect of the building’s design. To maximize selling space, for example, Sullivan utilized the thinnest possible finishing materials, consolidated mechanical fixtures, such as pipes and ventilating shafts, and favored elevators over bulky staircases. Open floorplans and expansive aisles were intended to encourage guests to wander while also providing clear sightlines to product displays. The result of Sullivan’s efforts, Siry argues, was “a definitive architectural form for a new order of commercial activity” (p. 120).
Carson Pirie Scott draws on a rich trove of architectural sources, such as professional journals, site maps, floorplans, and the papers and published works of Louis Sullivan. But, the author also mines many sources outside of the architectural field—contemporary fiction, newspapers, national magazines, retail trade journals, merchant biographies, travel guides, and local histories of Chicago. Particularly impressive is Siry’s use of visual materials. The text includes more than 125 images that document details of the Schlesinger & Mayer store as well as State Street crowds, window displays, commercial buildings in other cities, and various marketing materials. Far from mere decoration, these sources deepen Siry’s analysis. Drawing on images from newspaper advertisements, for example, Siry demonstrates that Schlesinger & Mayer incorporated features of Sullivan’s design, such as the front rotunda and ornamental cast iron, to distinguish the store from its State Street competitors and establish a recognizable brand identity. This type of creative deployment of visual material, which abounds throughout the book, provides a valuable model even for historians already adept at using graphic sources.
Written three decades ago, Carson Pirie Scott still deserves attention from urban and consumer historians. Yet, in at least one respect, recent scholarship has moved beyond Siry’s view of department stores. Highlighting visual accessibility and practices of free entry, Siry claims that contemporaries viewed these commercial giants as “inclusively democratic institutions” (p. 124). Many scholars have since challenged this assumption, laying bare how retail practices reinforced divisions of race, class, and ethnicity. 4 Hints of the role Schlesinger & Mayer played in upholding such inequalities already lie within Siry’s text, in details of the store’s layout. The author notes, for example, the “relative allotment of space” favored shoppers while squeezing workers into tight quarters (p. 197). Similarly, a bargain basement collected less affluent customers, many of whom were immigrants and people of color, in the underbelly of the store while leaving open the elegant upper floors to wealthy white shoppers. A reassessment of such aspects of Sullivan’s design in light of recent historiography would provide insight into how the built environment itself helped to segment consumers and promote social distinctions.
Shortly after construction ended in 1904, Carson Pirie Scott took over Sullivan’s iconic building, operating there for more than a century before shuttering in 2007. Five years later, after considerable renovations, the ground floor and second level of the once opulent store reopened as a CityTarget—a compact, urban iteration of the familiar discount retailer. This evolution in the building’s identity would not surprise Vicki Howard. In From Main Street to Mall, Howard traces the many decisions by business leaders and state actors leading to the decline of independent department stores and the rise of consolidated retail chains and big box stores. The pith of Howard’s argument is that this shift was neither sudden nor unexpected—there was no abrupt “retail revolution” that led to the triumph of Walmart, Target, and other discount stores. 5 Rather, as Howard argues, the transformation of American retail unfolded in a “gradual and uneven fashion,” driven as much by policy decisions and business priorities as by customer preferences and demands (p. 6).
In tracing the fate of downtown stores, Howard builds on the insights of urban historians such as Alison Isenberg, Lizabeth Cohen, and Richard Longstreth. 6 Yet she expands the conversation by examining the evolving commercial landscape of small cities as well as major metropolises. We learn as much about places such as Oneonta, New York and Little Rock, Arkansas as we do about New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco. In probing these far-flung sites, Howard demonstrates that department stores were initially preeminently local institutions, invested in the well-being of their cities and downtowns. By the 1920s, such hometown connections had started to fray, as flagging profits—driven by rising operating costs, changing consumer habits, and the increasing importance of the automobile—encouraged retailers to embrace suburban branch stores, chain organization, and industry consolidation. A signal moment, in Howard’s view, is the 1929 creation of the retail holding company Federated Department Stores, now Macy’s Inc. Foreshadowing broader industry trends, Federated assembled a large portfolio of once-independent, geographically dispersed department stores and began to centralize their management. The eventual outcome was the loss not just of local nameplates, such as Marshall Field & Co., but of connections to the local community.
Yet even as department store executives “cut their own throats” by embracing consolidation and suburban branch stores, their actions alone were not enough to secure the triumph of discount retailers (p. 138). The state, as Howard argues, played an indispensable role in facilitating the “creative destruction” that reshaped the shopping landscape (p. 6). It is her insightful analysis of political economy that provides the book’s greatest contribution to the already vast scholarship on retail and department stores. As Howard deftly shows, the federal government—both accidentally and intentionally—undermined independent stores and fostered mergers, chain organization, and “bigness” in the retail industry (p. 83). For example, lax enforcement of fair trade legislation allowed department store chains and holding companies to undercut smaller, independent firms—a tactic that Walmart and other discount retailers would later use against department stores. Meanwhile, federal support for highway construction and homeownership stimulated suburban commercial growth and the proliferation of branch and smaller “twig” stores. These and other state actions greatly weakened downtown department stores and ensured that by 1966 a majority of sales would take place in branch locations (p. 139). The era of the grand urban emporium had passed.
To make her case, Howard utilizes an impressive array of store records, industry reports, and trade journals. These sources provide unprecedented insight into how executives and government officials shaped the retail industry. Understandably, such a deep focus on business and state actors leaves comparatively little room for analysis of consumers’ influence. Their choices also mattered, according to Howard, in determining the “success and failure” of the department store (p. 6). Yet beyond noting their pursuit of low prices, the text does not examine consumers’ motivations for abandoning downtown stores and embracing branch and discount retailers. Prices, although certainly important, may not have been a deciding factor for every shopper. Many racial minorities, for instance, likely preferred frequenting chain stores, which were “the same pretty much everywhere,” to patronizing idiosyncratic local institutions (p. 3). Probing more consumer-centered sources would have shed light on how their actions helped to determine the industry’s fate—as well as the scope of their feelings of nostalgia and loss amid downtown store closings, which Howard highlights in the introduction and conclusion.
In Pedestrian Modern, David Smiley explores one of the major architectural forms that emerged from the trends Howard traces—the suburban shopping center. His work challenges long-standing views of this building type as banal, vulgar, or “pedestrian” (p. 6). According to Smiley, the shopping center was instead “an integral protagonist” in the development of modernist architecture (p. 10). The architects who designed these sites, such as Victor Gruen and Morris Ketchum, helped to forge modernism even as they responded to the commercial needs of retailers. Indeed, in Smiley’s view, it was addressing the problems posed by mass distribution and merchandizing that encouraged architects to innovate and embrace modernist practices, especially an emphasis on function over ornament. But even as shopping center architects helped to drive early modernism, Smiley argues, the connection of their work to the realm of commerce obscured the cultural significance of their work, keeping figures such as Gruen from recognition in the modernist canon.
By establishing shopping centers as examples of modernism, Smiley invites a reassessment of related architecture and planning decisions often disparaged as “suburban,” or lowbrow (p. 15). In particular, Smiley calls for reevaluating pedestrianization, an approach that led many American cities in the mid-twentieth century to ban automobile traffic on particular streets, rendering those spaces pedestrian-only zones. Scholars have characterized such efforts as misguided attempts to suburbanize downtowns. For Smiley, however, pedestrianization reflects the modernist practices that first emerged in shopping centers. American retailers, he explains, were plagued by traffic congestion and insufficient parking as early as the 1920s. At first, architects responded to these headaches by orienting commercial landscapes toward the automobile, prioritizing curbside and even drive-through access. Yet the problem of transforming passers-by into customers persisted. Responding to this dilemma, architects began to emphasize walkability and foot traffic. Pedestrian zones—which fostered window shopping and social activity—became the focal points of shopping centers, as parking lots were increasingly hidden from view and buried below ground. Developed to meet the needs of retailers, pedestrianization was not suburban, Smiley asserts, but fundamentally modern.
Pedestrian Modern mines the papers and published works of architects, as well as architectural magazines and other industry publications. Smiley remains centered on architectural discourse and practice. As such, his work will find its primary audience among architecture scholars. Urban historians will appreciate details shedding light on the relationship between downtown retail districts and suburban shopping centers, but will likely crave more exploration of the social and cultural context in which these landscapes were created. Of course, Smiley makes clear from the beginning that Pedestrian Modern is “neither a history of built form nor a social history” (p. 13). Still, one wonders how transformations outside of the architectural field, such as rising consumer activism, the evolving needs of middle-class families, or even the consolidation of the retail industry, influenced shopping center design. Smiley provides a fascinating taste of such broader connections in his discussion of architects’ efforts to pitch shopping centers as emergency shelters amid Cold War nuclear anxiety. Examining such cultural and commercial influences on the shopping center—as Siry did with the department store—would have enhanced Smiley’s analysis while establishing its relevance to a broader audience.
The three books reviewed here historicize the link between department stores and urban downtowns that Theodore Dreiser took for granted. Together, they underscore the contingency of the ascent of the department store in the fin-de-siècle city, the spread of branch locations and shopping centers amid the postwar suburban boom, and the decimation of both urban and suburban department stores in the late twentieth century by discount retailers and category killers. The three authors also reveal that, despite a vast extant literature, there is still much more for scholars to learn about American retail and consumer capitalism.