Review: Modernizing Main Street: Architecture and Consumer Culture in the New Deal, by Gabrielle Esperdy

Abstract

Gabrielle Esperdy ; Modernizing Main Street: Architecture and Consumer Culture in the New Deal ; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008, x + 307 pp., 66 b/w illus. $35.00, ISBN 9780226218007 Between 1933 and 1943, Americans $4 $6 billion on commercial modernization, enough to provide new storefront for each of the 1.5 million retail establishments then operating in the United States (Esperdy, 222). Financial institutions, merchants, and property owners lent and spent improve their retail establishments, investing in signs of promise that prosperity was returning main streets across the nation (3). In Modernizing Main Street , Gabrielle Esperdy analyzes the sponsorship of private storefront modernization, a materially significant and highly symbolic portion of all New Deal building activity (6––7). Her central focus is the little-remembered Modernization Credit Plan (MCP), part of Title I of the National Housing Act, program the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) devised stimulate recovery by encouraging privately issued low-interest federally-insured loans repair and improve business properties (5). The MCP made modernized storefronts affordable for struggling retailers. It aggressively marketed credit ordinary proprietors and installed commercial modernization as federal public policy. Because the MCP did not provide direct public intervention into commercial property improvement, the federal government's sponsorship of main street modernization has been largely invisible scholars and the general public until now. Esperdy's study joins historian David Freund's …