The American Department Store Transformed, 1920-1960
The American Department Store Transformed, 1920-1960
October 2011
By Professor of American Studies Richard Longstreth
Like my two previous books, this one grew, in part, out of historic preservation projects with which I had been involved, and like those books, it had relatively modest origins.
Two initiatives, both successful, to secure landmark designation for the warehouses of the Hecht Company and Woodward & Lothrop (long Washington’s two leading department stores) led me to explore the role of the giant, multi-purpose, off-site service facilities that were removed from the limelight, but nonetheless were essential for the grand emporiums to function effectively during much of the last century.
Then, I gathered so much material on the development of branch department stores (a type that no longer exists, but one that radically changed the nature of retail operations) for one of my earlier books that I sought to pursue the subject further. So, in 1997, I made a proposal for a loose collection of essays—chapters on the modern history of the department store in the U.S., focusing on new tendencies that occurred largely outside downtown from the late 1920s to the mid-1950s. It was well received, but the reviewers thought it should be further developed as a history of that building type. I agreed, naively.
If I was to do a history, I did not want it to focus just on the most famous companies, such as Macy’s (New York), Wanamaker’s (Philadelphia), Marshall Field’s (Chicago), Hudson’s (Detroit), and the May Company (Los Angeles), but to analyze broad patterns across the country. To get that representation, I selected the sixty largest cities as of 1930 and looked at all the major department store companies in each – nearly 200 in all.
As I progressed with my research, it became clear that the city center should figure as much in the account as developments in outlying areas. The 1920s was a period of immense expansion of these emporia downtown. It was marked by many innovations in design and operation, but also by new phenomena that would soon challenge the department store’s hegemony—the rise of major chain companies catering to the lower end of the middle-class market, intense outward movement of that market to locations ever further from downtown, and traffic congestion that spiraled to the point where the urban core seemed marooned in a sea of vehicles.
There were many other revelations as well. Branch store development was so multi-faceted—from modest shops serving colleges and resorts to behemoths of 200,000 square feet duplicating much that could be found in the downtown store—that it had to be covered in two chapters, one focusing on the decades of experimentation before World War II, the other, on markedly different trends of the post-World War II boom. Branches that were added to or built as an integral part of shopping centers received two chapters as well, the second of which addressed the central role these retailers had in creating the regional shopping mall. That chapter is the first account to offer a detailed probe into the rise of a building type that radically changed the metropolitan landscape between the 1950s and the 1980s. And, contrary to widespread belief, major retailers hardly abandoned downtown once outlying development took off on a large scale; instead, they continued to make substantial investments in modernizing and sometimes in rebuilding their flagship stores well into the 1960s. The complexities of the retail story downtown during the postwar era were more than sufficient to warrant yet another chapter.
The challenge, of course, became controlling what seemed like an overwhelming amount of material and an equally formidable array of issues—from the intricacies of store layout to debates over the nature of parking facilities, from the complex service networks stores developed to the myriad planning issues entailed in creating a regional mall, from the department store as an emblem of modernity to the undertow of management’s conservative inclinations—and delineating both coherence and diversity in such topics in different parts of the country. Much of the research could be done in Washington, but field trips of all the cities and to many other branch locations were essential.
The fact that this was all virgin territory—the historical literature of department stores for the most part ends around 1920, where I begin—added to the challenge, but also to the excitement of helping to define a new era in the retail sphere. The only disappointment was that so many interesting topics had to be left out or given only a small space in a crowded room. I was fortunate in interviewing Stanley Marcus of Neiman Marcus and other retired senior executives in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles, who could recall the details of their trade half a century before, but I know I missed the opportunity to track down many others.
The biggest reward was being able to produce a book that provides a fresh view of architecture and urbanism as well as of retailing in the twentieth century, a view that underscores how fleeting the environments of consumption are, but also how complex, varied, and intellectually engaging they can be.
