The Urban Department Store in America, 1850‐1930LouisaIarocci. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014.

Abstract

Urban Department Store in America, 1850-1930 Louisa larocci. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014.Recent theoretical debates concerning the increasingly complex and unstable relationships among today's urban commercial, transactional, interstitial, or even community spaces and places have inevitably produced flurry of scholarly books on the commercial walking spaces of the modernist city, and, in particular, the department store-the synecdoche for female engagement with all of the above. Louisa larocci's book differs from many previous studies in number of ways. Her research is impeccable, both longitudinally and latitudinally, and her arguments cross disciplines with ease and skill. Yet, her primary arguments, that the department store in America functioned, until the 1929 crash, as both solid building block within the modern and as a more ephemeral aggregation of consumer practices are fresh and innovative; and she asks the reader to re-imagine the place of this comfortable and well-trod institution within American urban culture (8).Iarocci's book is divided into three parts: The City and the Store, 1850-1880; The Department Store, 1880-1910; and Utopias and Distopias, 1900-1930. Part One consists of Chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 1 examines the relationship between the city and the store; it locates the department store within the nineteenth-century American city, street architecture, and American mercantile culture through an analysis of the changing foci of urban mapping companies from landmarks and public buildings to mercantile structures that represent pivoting of narrative from public to commercial community. Chapter 2 then describes the mercantile house as having narrow facade, where it met the public but was emblazoned with the store's name, but great depth to accommodate the floor and stockroom. Part Two begins with the description of the department store's emergence in the 1890s as distinctive entity, usually as goods stores expanded into larger all-purpose enterprises that, in their expansive scope, fantastic and spectacular displays, typography and spatial arrangements, mimicked in miniature the display strategies of wildly popular international expositions. Department stores were paradoxically both glittering palacefs] (71) that enticed shoppers to spend and retailed mass-produced, relatively inexpensive, ready-made, personal and household goods with the new practice of low-pressure sales strategies, clearly marked and fixed prices, and even liberal return policies. As such, larocci argues, department stores functioned as both agents and products of distinctly feminized modern urban American retailing practice. Chapter 4 concludes Section Two and details the many-layered ways in which the department store could thus function as civic institution and business concern (6). …