Twentieth Century Retailing in Downtown Detroit

Twentieth Century Retailing in Downtown Detroit PDF Author: Michael Hauser
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 9780738561905
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
As Detroit developed northward from the riverfront, Woodward Avenue became a mecca for retail, restaurants, and services. The 1870s and 1880s saw many independent merchants open their doors. By 1890, a new type of one-stop shopping had developed: the department store. Detroit's venerable Newcomb Endicott and Company was closely followed by other trailblazers: J. L. Hudson Company, Crowley Milner and Company, and the Ernst Kern Company. At its peak in the 1950s, the Woodward Avenue area boasted over four million square feet of retail, making it one of America's preferred retail destinations. Other Detroit emporiums such as the homegrown S. S. Kresge Company set trends in consumer culture. Generations made the trek downtown for back-to-school events, Easter shows, holiday windows, and family luncheons. Then, with the advent of suburban shopping centers, downtown stores began competing with their own branch locations. By the 1970s and 1980s, the dominoes began to fall as both chain and independent stores abandoned the once prosperous Woodward Avenue.

Twentieth Century Retailing in Downtown Detroit

Twentieth Century Retailing in Downtown Detroit PDF Author: Michael Hauser
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 9780738561905
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Get Book Here

Book Description
As Detroit developed northward from the riverfront, Woodward Avenue became a mecca for retail, restaurants, and services. The 1870s and 1880s saw many independent merchants open their doors. By 1890, a new type of one-stop shopping had developed: the department store. Detroit's venerable Newcomb Endicott and Company was closely followed by other trailblazers: J. L. Hudson Company, Crowley Milner and Company, and the Ernst Kern Company. At its peak in the 1950s, the Woodward Avenue area boasted over four million square feet of retail, making it one of America's preferred retail destinations. Other Detroit emporiums such as the homegrown S. S. Kresge Company set trends in consumer culture. Generations made the trek downtown for back-to-school events, Easter shows, holiday windows, and family luncheons. Then, with the advent of suburban shopping centers, downtown stores began competing with their own branch locations. By the 1970s and 1980s, the dominoes began to fall as both chain and independent stores abandoned the once prosperous Woodward Avenue.

Remembering Hudson's

Remembering Hudson's PDF Author: Michael Hauser
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1439640904
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
Relive the history of Hudson's department store, a fixture in downtown Detroit , when retailing was an event and the department store ruled the shopping scene and was a Detroit icon. The J. L. Hudson Company redefined the way Detroiters shopped and enjoyed leisure time. Many Detroiters share memories of times spent shopping and enjoying spectacular events sponsored by Hudson's. A solid and lofty icon built by businesspeople who believed in their passion, Hudson's defined Detroit's downtown, creating trends and traditions in consumer culture that still resonate with us today. Now and in the future, as Hudson's boxes, shopping bags, and artifacts are discovered in closets, attics, basements, and flea markets, many will remember that it was once as solid a civic fixture as the City-County Building or the Detroit Public Library.

20th-Century Retailing in Downtown Grand Rapids

20th-Century Retailing in Downtown Grand Rapids PDF Author: Michael Hauser and Marianne Weldon
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1467112569
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Grand Rapids, Michigan was the center for shopping in western Michigan with department stores, five-and-dimes and more, until the advent of the shopping mall. For decades, downtown Grand Rapids enjoyed a long run in the limelight as the epicenter of shopping in western Michigan. The vibrant Monroe Avenue corridor included three homegrown department stores, several chain department stores, five-and-dime stores, and scores of clothing and specialty retailers. It weathered mother nature, wars, the Great Depression, the advent of neighborhood shopping centers, and civil disturbances--but the one change it could not overcome was the regional shopping mall.

20th-Century Retailing in Downtown Detroit

20th-Century Retailing in Downtown Detroit PDF Author: Michael Hauser
Publisher: Arcadia Library Editions
ISBN: 9781531640217
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
As Detroit developed northward from the riverfront, Woodward Avenue became a mecca for retail, restaurants, and services. The 1870s and 1880s saw many independent merchants open their doors. By 1890, a new type of one-stop shopping had developed: the department store. Detroit's venerable Newcomb Endicott and Company was closely followed by other trailblazers: J. L. Hudson Company, Crowley Milner and Company, and the Ernst Kern Company. At its peak in the 1950s, the Woodward Avenue area boasted over four million square feet of retail, making it one of America's preferred retail destinations. Other Detroit emporiums such as the homegrown S. S. Kresge Company set trends in consumer culture. Generations made the trek downtown for back-to-school events, Easter shows, holiday windows, and family luncheons. Then, with the advent of suburban shopping centers, downtown stores began competing with their own branch locations. By the 1970s and 1980s, the dominoes began to fall as both chain and independent stores abandoned the once prosperous Woodward Avenue.

Hudson's: Detroit's Legendary Department Store

Hudson's: Detroit's Legendary Department Store PDF Author: Michael Hauser
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 9780738560656
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 34

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Book Description


Detroit's Downtown Movie Palaces

Detroit's Downtown Movie Palaces PDF Author: Michael Hauser
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 9780738541020
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
The spokelike grid of wide grand avenues radiating out from downtown Detroit allowed for a concentration of theaters initially along Monroe Street near Campus Martius and, after the second decade of the 20th century, clustered around Grand Circus Park, all easily accessible by a vast network of streetcars. In its heyday, Grand Circus Park boasted a dozen palatial movie palaces containing an astonishing total of 26,000 seats. Of these theaters, five remain today, fully restored and operational for live entertainment. Detroit, more so than any other North American city, illustrates how demographic and economic forces dramatically changed the landscape of film exhibition in an urban setting.

American City

American City PDF Author: Robert Sharoff
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814332706
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
"In the 1910s and 1920s there was more steel going up in Detroit than anywhere outside of New York and Chicago. The result was the country's first high-tech metropolis, a city of lavish monuments and glittering skyscrapers." "The list of major architects who designed buildings for Detroit includes Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Stanford White, Daniel Burnham, Cass Gilbert, Albert Kahn, Minoru Yamasaki, Philip Johnson, and numerous others." "Detroit's public buildings - its museums, libraries, schools, and monuments - are second to none in terms of their overall scale, materials, and detailing. Hotels, stores, theaters, and other commercial venues display a breezy cosmopolitanism consistent with the city's position as both a technology hub and a crossroads of immigration." "Overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of the buildings they encountered on a 2003 visit to downtown Detroit, writer Robert Sharoff and photographer William Zbaren were inspired to create American City: Detroit Architecture, 1845-2005, the first new large-format book on the city's architecture in more than thirty years." "The fact that many structures are either endangered or marginally in use makes the book all the more compelling. In 2005, the National Trust for Historic Preservation placed "the historic buildings of downtown Detroit" on the list of the country's most endangered landmarks." "The book also includes examples of interesting new architecture as well as numerous historic buildings from the 1920s and earlier that have been maintained or in some cases painstakingly restored."--BOOK JACKET.

Dream City

Dream City PDF Author: Conrad Kickert
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262039346
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
Tracing two centuries of rise, fall, and rebirth in the heart of downtown Detroit. Downtown Detroit is in the midst of an astonishing rebirth. Its sidewalks have become a dreamland for an aspiring creative class, filled with shoppers, office workers, and restaurant-goers. Cranes dot the skyline, replacing the wrecking balls seen there only a few years ago. But venture a few blocks in any direction and this liveliness gives way to urban blight, a nightmare cityscape of crumbling concrete, barbed wire, and debris. In Dream City, urban designer Conrad Kickert examines the paradoxes of Detroit's landscape of extremes, arguing that the current reinvention of downtown is the expression of two centuries of Detroiters' conflicting hopes and dreams. Kickert demonstrates the materialization of these dreams with a series of detailed original morphological maps that trace downtown's rise, fall, and rebirth. Kickert writes that downtown Detroit has always been different from other neighborhoods; it grew faster than other parts of the city, and it declined differently, forced to reinvent itself again and again. Downtown has been in constant battle with its own offspring—the automobile and the suburbs the automobile enabled—and modernized itself though parking attrition and land consolidation. Dream City is populated by a varied cast of downtown power players, from a 1920s parking lot baron to the pizza tycoon family and mortgage billionaire who control downtown's fate today. Even the most renowned planners and designers have consistently yielded to those with power, land, and finances to shape downtown. Kickert thus finds rhyme and rhythm in downtown's contemporary cacophony. Kickert argues that Detroit's case is extreme but not unique; many other American cities have seen a similar decline—and many others may see a similar revitalization.

Detroit City Is the Place to Be

Detroit City Is the Place to Be PDF Author: Mark Binelli
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250039231
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
"The fall and maybe rise of Detroit, America's most epic urban failure, from local native and Rolling Stone reporter Mark BinelliOnce America's capitalist dream town, Detroit is our country's greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the farthest. But the city's worst crisis yet (and that's saying something) has managed to do the unthinkable: turn the end of days into a laboratory for the future. Urban planners, land speculators, neo-pastoral agriculturalists, and utopian environmentalists--all have been drawn to Detroit's baroquely decaying, nothing-left-to-lose frontier. With an eye for both the darkly absurd and the radically new, Detroit-area native and Rolling Stone writer Mark Binelli has chronicled this convergence. Throughout the city's "museum of neglect"--its swaths of abandoned buildings, its miles of urban prairie--he tracks the signs of blight repurposed, from the school for pregnant teenagers to the killer ex-con turned street patroller, from the organic farming on empty lots to GM's wager on the Volt electric car and the mayor's realignment plan (the most ambitious on record) to move residents of half-empty neighborhoods into a viable, new urban center.Sharp and impassioned, Detroit City Is the Place to Be is alive with the sense of possibility that comes when a city hits rock bottom. Beyond the usual portrait of crime, poverty, and ruin, we glimpse a future Detroit that is smaller, less segregated, greener, economically diverse, and better functioning--what might just be the first post-industrial city of our new century"--

The Heart of the City

The Heart of the City PDF Author: Alexander Garvin
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610919491
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Downtowns are more than economic engines: they are repositories of knowledge and culture and generators of new ideas, technology, and ventures. They are the heart of the city that drives its future. If we are to have healthy downtowns, we need to understand what downtown is all about; how and why some American downtowns never stopped thriving (such as San Jose and Houston), some have been in decline for half a century (including Detroit and St. Louis), and still others are resurging after temporary decline (many, including Lower Manhattan and Los Angeles). The downtowns that are prospering are those that more easily adapt to changing needs and lifestyles. In The Heart of the City, distinguished urban planner Alexander Garvin shares lessons on how to plan for a mix of housing, businesses, and attractions; enhance the public realm; improve mobility; and successfully manage downtown services. Garvin opens the book with diagnoses of downtowns across the United States, including the people, businesses, institutions, and public agencies implementing changes. In a review of prescriptions and treatments for any downtown, Garvin shares brief accounts—of both successes and failures—of what individuals with very different objectives have done to change their downtowns. The final chapters look at what is possible for downtowns in the future, closing with suggested national, state, and local legislation to create standard downtown business improvement districts to better manage downtowns. This book will help public officials, civic organizations, downtown business property owners, and people who care about cities learn from successful recent actions in downtowns across the country, and expand opportunities facing their downtown. Garvin provides recommendations for continuing actions to help any downtown thrive, ensuring a prosperous and thrilling future for the 21st-century American city.