City Center to Regional Mall ─ Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950

Winner of the Society of Architectural Historians' 1999 Spiro Kostof AwardFrom the1920s to the 1950s, Los Angeles did for the shopping center what New York and Chicago had done forthe skyscraper. In a single generation, the American retail center shifted from the downtown core tothe regional shopping center.Ten years in the making, City Center to Regional Mall is a sweeping yetdetailed account of the development of the regional shopping center. Richard Longstreth takes ahistorical perspective, relating retail development to broader architectural, urban, and culturalissues. His story is far from linear; the topics he covers include the emergence of Hollywood as adowntown in miniature, experiments with the shopping center as an amenity of planned residentialdevelopments, the branch department store as a landmark of decentralization, the evolution ofoff-street parking facilities, and the obscure origins of the pedestrian mall as a spine for retailcomplexes.Longstreth takes seriously the task of looking at retail buildings--one of the mostneglected yet common building types--and the economics of real estate in the American city. He showsthat Los Angeles in the period covered was a harbinger of American metropolitan trends during thesecond half of this century. Over 250 illustrations, culled from a wide variety of sources,constitute one of the best collections of old LA photographs published anywhere.