How might the study of architecture enhance our understanding of business history? In The Urban Department Store in America, 1850–1930, Louisa Iarocci illuminates some of the rich possibilities that analysis of the built environment could offer to scholars of commercial practices and institutions. A licensed architect as well as a historian of architecture, Iarocci examines the department store as both a physical artifact and an expression of merchant and consumer practices. This approach allows her to reveal the gradual and uneven development of nineteenth-century dry goods houses into the commercial palaces that dominated American retailing in the early twentieth century. Her account challenges a prevailing narrative that the department store emerged almost fully formed at the turn of the century as a result of rapid, large-scale transformations in production and the innovations of individual entrepreneurs, such as John Wanamaker and Marshall Field. As Iarocci's work illustrates, the modern department store was not a “singular invention” of visionary merchants but the outcome of myriad small shifts in established practices of building and trade (p. 1).
Iarocci divides the book into three parts, each focusing on a different period in the growth of the department store. Other scholars to have taken up this subject have concentrated primarily on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Iarocci, by contrast, devotes the book's entire first section to the years between 1850 and 1880. It was in this era, she observes, that the purpose-built retail building first arose amid urban economic expansion. Her claim develops from the close analysis of streetscape and storefront views found in sources not often mined by business historians—guidebooks, city directories, and lithographic prints sold for display in middle-class homes. She demonstrates that the construction choices made by mercantile capitalists influenced urban development as much as the actions of manufacturers and industrialists. Meanwhile, the mercantile house itself emerged as a distinctive type of building, and its image became an important trademark for merchants in early retail advertisements.
The following sections investigate the more familiar rise and decline of the urban department store in the era from 1880 to 1930. Iarocci brings new insight to this oft-told tale by highlighting the dynamic relationship between business practices and the built environment. She shows, for example, that as dry goods merchants moved toward policies of free entry, high turnover, and low markup, the spatial organization of store premises also changed to project “the illusion of unrestricted accessibility and unlimited selection” (p. 72). In making her case, Iarocci draws on numerous floorplans and interior views from architecture publications, popular magazines, and trade journals. She also traces retailers’ efforts to present the department store as a tastemaker and consumer educator by adding physical features, such as model homes, dining facilities, and sites for the production of private-label fashion and goods—for example, Marshall Field's famed Frango mints. These innovations, Iarocci argues, obscured the selling purposes of the department store, just as the addition of new employee spaces, such as lounges and lunchrooms, deflected “very real concerns about labor abuses and poor working conditions” (p. 109).
One of Iarocci's notable contributions is her assembling of nearly one hundred illustrations of dry goods houses and department stores, many of them quite rare, from cities across the United States. She probes expected materials, such as trade cards and advertisements. But she also introduces more surprising sources, such as pictorial directories of store merchandise and commercial panoramas mapping nineteenth-century business districts. In providing a close and insightful analysis of so many artifacts, Iarocci sometimes overlooks the broader historical context shaping the department store's development. She shows, for example, that the bargain counter emerged as an important store feature and a space of conflict between shoppers and clerks in the early twentieth century. Yet she does not consider how this innovation may have been influenced by transformations outside of the store, such as rising working-class incomes, an incipient consumer rights’ movement, or the consolidation of the department store industry. Exploring these types of external factors would have further enriched the analysis and established its relevance to a broader audience.
Iarocci's book deftly joins the methods of architectural history and cultural history. She draws on several classic texts in the latter field, notably the scholarship of Alan Trachtenberg and Neil Harris, as well as a profusion of studies focused solely on the department store itself, such as the work of Susan Porter Benson and William Leach. Iarocci might have reaped further insights by also addressing more recent studies by urban and business historians who have applied spatial and cultural analysis to other commercial spaces. Fruitful points of connection could have been found to the scholarship of Molly W. Berger or A. K. Sandoval-Strausz on the hotel; Angel Kwolek-Folland or Daniel Bluestone on the office building; and Alison Isenberg, Lizabeth Cohen, or Jessica Sewell on twentieth-century retail landscapes, to name only a few examples.
Ultimately, The Urban Department Store in America, 1850–1930 offers a powerful illustration of the value of taking seriously the material and visual culture of commercial life. Architecture scholars likely do not need this reminder. But historians of business and capitalism would do well to consider the new intellectual vistas that such an approach might engender.
