Richard Longstreth . The American Department Store Transformed, 1920–1960 . New Haven : Yale University Press, in association with the Center for American Places at Columbia College, Chicago . 2010 . Pp. xi, 323. $60.00.

Abstract

For well over a decade, the architectural historian Richard Longstreth has steadily chronicled what must be the most significant understudied aspect of the built environment: its retail landscapes. His books on Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century filled a gaping hole in scholarship by documenting and analyzing the profound impact of decentralization on the spaces of shopping in particular and on the urban fabric as a whole. Among the building typologies that formed the dramatis personae of The Drive‐In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914–1941 (1999), the department store was a bit player. In several chapters of City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 (1997), it took center stage briefly, though importantly. Now, in Longstreth's latest book, the department store finally gets a well‐deserved star turn. Longstreth is hardly the first scholar to train his critical gaze on the great emporia. Indeed, the literature of the American department store is as vast as its cultural significance, ranging from monographs of individual stores to its role in the creation of gendered space and, especially, its relationship to consumerism. Longstreth's singular contribution is to examine the department store as one of the defining institutions of the modern city, one whose commercial raison d'être was in no way at odds with its civic contributions. An important aspect of the book is that Longstreth's conception of the city embraces both the urban center and the suburban periphery as part of an expanded metropolitan landscape, the social and spatial implications of which became clear during the period bookended in his title.