Between 1933 and 1943, Americans spent $4 to $6 billion on commercial modernization, enough "to provide a 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" to improve their retail establishments, investing in signs of promise that prosperity was returning to 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, a program the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) devised to stimulate recovery by encouraging privately issued "low-interest federally-insured loans to repair and improve business properties" (5). The MCP made modernized...
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December 2010
Book Review|
December 01 2010
Review: Modernizing Main Street: Architecture and Consumer Culture in the New Deal by Gabrielle Esperdy
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
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2010) 69 (4): 592–593.
Citation
Review: Modernizing Main Street: Architecture and Consumer Culture in the New Deal by Gabrielle Esperdy. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 December 2010; 69 (4): 592–593. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2010.69.4.592
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