American Autopia

An Intellectual History of the American Roadside at Midcentury

Gabrielle Esperdy

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780813942957
• eBook ISBN: 9780813943107
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Early to mid-twentieth-century America was the heyday of a car culture that has been called an "automobile utopia." In American Autopia, Gabrielle Esperdy examines how the automobile influenced architectural and urban discourse in the United States from the earliest days of the auto industry to the aftermath of the 1970s oil crisis. Paying particular attention to developments after World War II, Esperdy creates a narrative that extends from U.S. Routes 1 and 66 to the Las Vegas Strip to California freeways, with stops at gas stations, diners, main drags, shopping centers, and parking lots along the way.

While it addresses the development of auto-oriented landscapes and infrastructures, American Autopia is not a conventional history, offering instead an exploration of the wide-ranging evolution of car-centric territories and drive-in typologies, looking at how they were scrutinized by diverse cultural observers in the middle of the twentieth century.

Drawing on work published in the popular and professional press, and generously illustrated with evocative images, the book shows how figures as diverse as designer Victor Gruen, geographer Jean Gottmann, theorist Denise Scott Brown, critic J.B. Jackson, and historian Reyner Banham constructed "autopia" as a place and an idea. The result is an intellectual history and interpretive roadmap to the United States of the Automobile.

Detail of fig. 11, Parking Garage for Marshall Field

1

THE CAR AND WHAT CAME OF IT

If the automotive age commenced on October 7th, 1913, when Model Ts began rolling off the moving assembly line at Henry Ford’s factory in Highland Park, Michigan, the precise moment of autopia’s establishment as a place created by the car is harder to pin down. Chronologically, autopia’s origins do parallel the rise of the Tin Lizzie, because in the years after its 1908 debut and especially after Fordist production methods lowered manufacturing time and retail cost, the Model T transformed the car from a luxury object into an affordable commodity. As car ownership expanded across the United States, from fewer than 200,000 registered motor vehicles before the Model T to more than 20 million in its last year of production in 1927, so, too, did an extraordinary range of automotive accommodations in the built environment, from asphalt paving to traffic signals, from garages to curbside pumps.1 Whether welcome or intrusive, these changes were mostly modifications to systems and institutions that already existed: stables in which cars outnumbered horses; grocery and farm stores that sold gasoline along with food and feed. Increasingly, however, cars required—and their drivers desired—an infrastructure of their own: motor highways, standardized signage, and landmarks by which this brave new world might be navigated. This chapter considers the emergence of car-centric spatial realms from the perspective of architects as they confronted the challenges, and imagined the possibilities, of the coming autopian order.

The earliest motor highways were already underway in 1907, when planning commenced for the Bronx River Parkway and the Long Island Motor Parkway.2 Due to complications with funding and land acquisition, the 15.5-mile public road through the Bronx and Westchester wasn’t completed until 1923. On Long Island, however, William K. Vanderbilt completed the world’s first limited-access high-speed roadway purpose-built for automobiles in a little over a year. His 45-mile private road through Nassau and Suffolk counties welcomed its first drivers in October 1908. Charging a $2 toll that signaled motoring elitism, Vanderbilt’s parkway also featured tollhouses designed by John Russell Pope. With pitched roofs, shingled dormers, and brick quoins, these rustic buildings were among the classical architect’s earliest independent commissions. For motorists with the financial resources to drive the Long Island Motor Parkway, these were also some of autopia’s earliest architectural landmarks.

When Vanderbilt’s parkway opened in 1907, such landmarks existed on both coasts and points in between, in forms both workaday and monumental. In Seattle, south of downtown on the industrial waterfront of Elliot Bay, a sales manager for Standard Oil of California worked with a local engineer to open what some call the world’s first gas station, on land opposite the company’s main storage terminal. The unprepossessing station was off the street and consisted of only a holding tank, covered by an awning and fitted out with a measuring gauge, a valve, and a hose that dispensed a set amount of gas directly into the fuel tanks of waiting vehicles. This feature alone, which eliminated messy and dangerous intermediate containers, must have been sufficiently convenient to lure motorists to the station’s remote location, far from Seattle’s business center and residential neighborhoods.

If those off-the-street Standard Oil pumps were a tentative step toward an evolving typology, across the country in Manhattan, the Automobile Club of America (ACA) was a luxurious hybrid, offering a variety of enticements to select motorists in the opulent surroundings of its new headquarters on West 54th Street. Though in period photographs the ACA appears like an institutional intruder among low-rise brownstones, the midtown blocks west of Broadway were already the center of the city’s “automobile district.” As such, 54th Street near 8th Avenue was an appropriate location for an elite social club dedicated to promoting “automobilism” at local and national levels and counting Astors and Vanderbilts among its early members. This exclusivity is reflected in Ernest Flagg’s Beaux-Arts scheme for what amounted to a palazzo with plenty of parking. With a two-hundred-foot street frontage and room for three hundred cars, the ACA housed what the New York Times claimed was the largest garage in the world in 1907. This went unmentioned in the architectural press, which focused on the building’s stylistic embellishments. Flagg’s eight-story loft building had a concrete structural frame enlivened with a glazed terra-cotta facade, most elaborately at the clubhouse level where rooms for meeting, dining, and lounging were located. Above were parking and service levels, illuminated by ample factory glazing and electric lights, and including lifts, turntables, and washing stations. The top floor contained a state-of-the-art skylit repair center staffed by professional mechanics, but available to members (or their chauffeurs) who wished to tinker with their own machines.3 While this programmatic mixing of spaces for automobiles and socializing was novel for the time—the equally opulent Royal Automobile of London had no such facilities in its new Pall Mall headquarters—it was not all that different from an arts club with studio space or an actors club with a stage. Laying the cornerstone of the 54th Street clubhouse in March 1906, and sounding very much like a Gilded Age capitalist, the ACA’s president declared that the building “should stand as a vital force of our modern civilization and illustrate at all times what is best and most serviceable in the future development of the motor industry.”4 Here was a lofty cultural goal to match the club’s aesthetic and programmatic aspirations.

Figure 2. Automobile Club of America (Ernest Flagg, 1907), West 54th Street, New York, as it appeared in 1948. (Photograph by Wurts Bros. [New York, N.Y.]/Museum of the City of New York, X2010.7.1.13288)

In the coming years, few car-oriented buildings would possess such grasping civic grandeur. They did not lack ambition, but their designers understood that what was best and most serviceable in the city center required a different expression in the automobile’s expanding urban territories. Within a few decades, as sociologists Ernest Burgess and Robert Park recognized as early as 1925 in their classic study of urban growth, as the impact of the automobile spread beyond the central business districts through the transitional zones and the residential neighborhoods, out past the suburbs and the periphery and on into the countryside, it would challenge urban expectations and forge new definitions of urban form.5 But as all that was happening there was also a disturbance of a smaller order as the nexus of car and building upended architectural conventions and confounded architectural proprieties.

Architect Meets Car

In Pittsburgh, by the 1910s, the railroad suburbs of the city’s East End had become “the heart of motordom,” especially the automobile row developing along Baum Boulevard. Lined with garages and dealerships, the boulevard’s 1.5-mile length was a segment of the Lincoln Highway, the nation’s first transcontinental auto route, a 1913 designation that intensified Baum’s auto-orientation. The boulevard was also home to the Pittsburgh chapter of the Automobile Association of America and to Motor Square Garden, an exhibition venue that hosted the first Pittsburgh Auto Show in January 1914.6 A month earlier and two blocks west, an equally notable motoring attraction appeared on the scene when the Gulf Oil Refining Company opened a drive-in service station “fully equipped with the latest and most modern appliances.”7 A far cry from Standard Oil’s baldly pragmatic station in Seattle, this was a consumer-oriented retail outlet attuned to location, marketing, and design. The latter was entrusted to James H. Giesey, a man described in his obituary as “the personal architect for the Mellon family of Pittsburgh.” Gulf was a Mellon company; the service station was built on Mellon-owned land; several Mellons lived nearby. Though family connections likely secured Giesey the job, his competent eclecticism—neoclassical at a university, neo-Tudor for an office building—probably didn’t hurt.8 But what style was appropriate for an automotive service station?

Writing in 1893, architect and theorist Henry Van Brunt accurately described the situation Giesey would confront twenty years later: “The architect, in the course of his career, is called upon to erect buildings for every conceivable purpose, most of them adapted to requirements which have never before arisen in history.” After listing a bewildering assortment, including railway buildings, mercantile structures, casinos, and skating-rinks, all accommodating “the complicated conditions of modern society”—Van Brunt observed that in their “essential character” these buildings had “no precedent in architectural history.”9 Writing a year before Karl Benz introduced the world’s first production automobile, Van Brunt does not mention of the motorcar, but had he lived a few years past 1903, he might have viewed it as one of modern society’s more complicated conditions. Even before the turn of the century, the architecture profession had taken notice of the new machine, considering its cultural potential and observing its swift impact on the built environment. As early as 1898, American Architect and Building News—a journal that architectural historian Mary Woods has described as “the profession’s voice” circa 1900—began reporting on a range of car-related developments: how automobiles made European sketching trips more leisurely and affordable; how automobiles aided urban sanitation since cars were cleaner than horses from a street-cleaning perspective; how inevitable it was that within a few years institutions like museums and libraries would provide “storage-room and care” for patrons’ motorcars. Architects, the magazine cautioned, needed to keep their “manners and practices” in step with increasingly auto-oriented times.10

To this end, after 1900, though wide-ranging motoring commentary continued in multiple architecture journals, in news items about the preservation of El Camino Real for auto-tourism or the widening of Fifth Avenue to deal with car congestion, the automotive notices were increasingly pragmatic.11 Architects were counseled to include place names in building inscriptions as an aid to the “automobilist” whose daily “locomotion” meant he might reasonably have “a dozen towns on his itinerary.” Similarly, they were reminded to consider “automobile loads” when designing stables and carriage houses since the presence of cars in these facilities was bound to increase. Indeed, such “automobile stables” and “garages” (after the French verb to shelter) were some of earliest car-oriented buildings featured in the plate sections of American architecture journals.12 In 1910, when automobile ownership in the United States topped half a million, nearly every issue of the Brickbuilder featured at least one example, from small private garages attached to suburban houses to larger detached garages on country estates to urban mixed-use, or live-park, structures with studios and apartments above street-level car storage.13 In their inoffensive historicism and competent space planning, these garages offered little in terms of stylistic or programmatic innovation, but their presence on the pages of a national design magazine augured the car’s expanding presence as a subject and object of American architecture.

Three years later, just as James Giesey was confronting the problem of designing an automotive service station in Pittsburgh, the Brickbuilder published the results of its first automobile-centric competition in an issue devoted almost entirely to the car and its architectural requirements. There was nothing unusual about the call for submissions, the latest installment in the competitive prize for a terra-cotta building design the journal had issued annually since 1900. But careful readers of the competition announcement in the October 1912 issue would have noted that the program was an unmistakable product of the modern and automotive age. It called for a building labeled a “public garage” and including automotive sales and service. Its “Main Street” location was resolutely urban, occupying “the corner of a city block in the automobile district.” Thus, the competition’s organizers tacitly acknowledged that the car had already engendered distinct types and shaped new territories, like the auto rows that existed in New York and Pittsburgh. Whether it had produced a new architecture remained to be seen, and there was little in the brief to suggest that it might, though the organizers welcomed any “original devices” that might add “value” to a building of this “character.” When the winning designs appeared in the spring of 1913, character—or lack thereof—was at the heart the jury report. While much of the jury’s disappointment stemmed from unimaginative use of terra-cotta cladding, they were equally frustrated by the lack of designs that were “festive in character,” something they agreed was requisite for a combination garage–auto-sales-and-service building.14 So restrained were the prizewinning entries that a profusion of classical foliated archivolts, Gothic tracery, and Baroque swags barely lessened their sobriety. Even the signage was muted, as if, despite the brief explicitly stating their necessity, the designers felt that automobile-related advertising was somehow beneath their dignity. Only architect Valare de Mari’s second-place design, with a Puginian corner tower and crowning parapet emblazoned with oversized lettering, acknowledged the realities of the commercial sphere, where high visibility and legible marketing were essential aspects of Main Street architecture.

Back in Pittsburgh, James Giesey confronted similar realities as he dealt with the unprecedented problem of designing an automotive service station located in a prominent commercial area at the edge of the city’s automobile district, which was also surrounded by upscale residences. Balancing commercial character with domestic scale, Giesey produced a scheme both brash and modest. His Gulf station was the first building on its large triangular site, and Giesey placed it toward the eastern apex of Baum Boulevard and South St. Clair Street, connecting it to both via elegantly curved concrete drives. With a row of handsome houses as the station’s nearest neighbors, Giesey gave the small building a dignified air, designing a lozenge-shaped pavilion with a brick base and tall windows flanked by pilaster-like jambs. These rose to a broad canopied roof that extended sufficiently to shelter patrons, cars, pumps, and attendants. Inside was an office, storage space for motor oil, and a restroom opened to customers, free of charge. At a moment when ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Car and What Came of It
• 2. Roadside Metropolis
• 3. Autopia and Its Discontents
• 4. Learning from Autopia
• 5. The Twilight of Autopia
• Notes
• Index
• Color Plates