Vesuvius erupts in the prairie.

In the world’s most overbuilt nation for retail space, any outside influence can induce an infinitesimal change that nonetheless completely transforms the landscape for commerce.  The retailers who continue to succeed in this economy—particularly impressive given the growing portent of online shopping’s eventual dominance—help shed light on what type of structures/milieus they are seeking to house the goods that they sell.  White-collar workers are broadly familiar with the Class A/B/C ranking of office space, but what if we applied this system to retail?  My suspicion is that, based on occupancy levels and the tenant mix, the average American metro area has about 10% at class A, 40% at class B, and a whopping 50% at Class C—the low-end structures that desperately snatch up any tenant they can get.  In relation to the demand, the supply of retail in this country is outrageous, and there’s no sign of this supply flagging, since developers continue to build new strip malls on raw land.

At any rate, retailers enjoy the privilege of calling the shots in a national market that suffers from this plethora of supply.  And it allows for an anthropological study of commercial epochs, by exhuming the remains from within shopping sarcophagi from yesteryear.  Take this one, for example:

 

The name “Venture” and its black-and-white logo are unlikely to be familiar to anyone outside of the Lower Midwest, or anyone who has not yet graduated high school.  But for the rest of us, it was a prominent name in the mid-1990s.  Based out of O’Fallon, Missouri (a suburb of St. Louis), Venture was a discount all-purpose store trying to gain a national foothold at the same time that Wal-Marts and Targets were proliferating wildly.  Needless to say, Venture lost to those two giants and filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in early 1998, then closed all its stores later that year.

My memory of Venture depends on its fiercely confident advertising campaign launched on Indianapolis a few years prior; I can still remember the jingle to the radio/TV commercials.  While it positioned itself as the new challenger to Target (much more than Wal-Mart), I never got the feeling it inspired a lot of confidence.  I’m pretty certain it choked in Indy a few years before it folded completely.  If it survived even four years in my hometown’s market, I’d be surprised.

The sign from the above photo comes from an old shopping center in Fairmont City, Illinois, a small, incorporated stretch of land between two larger and more prominent St. Louis suburbs of East St. Louis and Collinsville.  By this point, many Americans know of the formidable struggles East St. Louis has endured over the years.  Burgeoning in population through industrial and railroad growth after the Civil War, the city achieved its population peak (like so many in the Rust Belt) of 82,000 at around 1950.  It even earned All-American City recognition in 1959.  But de-industrialization and the diminishing importance of freight rail hit the city hard, instigating a precipitous population loss that continues to this day.

As of 2010, the city had 27,000 inhabitants—less than 1/3 its rate from sixty years prior.  Racial tensions undoubtedly amplified problems in East St. Louis; the city suffered a serious racially motivated riot in 1917.  In the ensuing decades, the white flight that took place in older industrial cities across the country across the country managed to culminate in the almost complete desertion of East St. Louis, which today this day is nearly 98% black.  Needless to say, people of all races with enough wherewithal have striven to get out of East St. Louis for quite some time.  It typically ranks near the top small cities in America for percentage of population in poverty.  As is typically the case, these people evacuating East St. Louis, few of whom have a great deal of assets to begin with (housing equity in ESL is next to nothing), quite logically move to the next tranche of housing affordability, which are typically the (slightly) more economically healthy communities nearby.  The migration pattern around East Saint Louis is obvious: abutting municipalities such as Washington Park, Centreville, and Cahokia now suffer similar conditions.  These three communities, originally early 20^th century bedroom communities that swelled from the white flight after 1950, now have profiles similar to the core city from where the flight began: poverty is above 20% in each, and the African American population ranges from 55% to 95% (despite the fact that St. Clair County as a whole is only 29% black).  Those with more continue to flee from those with less.

The aforementioned village of Fairmont City also sits in close proximity to East Saint Louis, but its ethnic shift falls under different contours.  Originally settled by Central European immigrants, the non-Hispanic white population plunged asLatino settlers moved in, pushing the Hispanic population above 55%.  Fairmont City’s population hasn’t dropped like the other communities listed; in fact, it grew from about 2400 to 2600 over the last ten years.  But the newcomers, often non-English speaking, lack the same purchasing power as their long established white predecessors.  How does this shape the commercial landscape?

It’s not so much that Venture went out of business in 1998; it’s that nothing has come to replace it, or at least nothing with enough capital and staying power to justify removing that sign with the old logo.  A cruddy photograph below suggests that the shopping center might still claim some marginal tenants:

Unfortunately, I didn’t think to get a good image of the store as I zipped by, but it appears that it still might host (or has recently hosted) some sort of showroom for racing cars.  But it’s obviously not an establishment with enough capital to replace the “Venture” sign along the road, and it doesn’t appear the owners could conceal all of the old logo on the sign attached to the building.  Perhaps it didn’t matter enough: the checkered flag and the diagonal stripes still use the same black-and-white motif.

For Fairmont City, with a poverty rate now hovering around 15%, economic disinvestment has induced retail stagnancy, forcing a chronological deep freeze on basic advertising and signage.  Or, to use the metaphor in this essay’s title, a volcano suddenly erupted and halted economic advancement in its tracks.  Apparently as recently as 1995—when Venture stores were at their peak—the Fairmount City area could economically support this competitor of Target.  Not anymore.  The middle class fled that quickly.  This aging big box may eventually find a new tenant, though the demographic shift doesn’t suggest that a widely known national chain is itching to move in.  But it could be just the right size—and location—for a supermercado.

If a mall implodes in a small town, is anyone there to hear it--or to care?

I’ve documented evolving retail trends with a keen eye over the past few years.  Regardless of the size of the community, certain similar features have emerged that very well may augur a monumental shift in typology, akin to what transpired in the 1950s and 60s when pedestrian-scaled downtowns lost all their commerce to suburban strip malls and shopping malls catering to the automobile.  This time, the loser is exactly what previously vanquished the downtown: the enclosed shopping mall.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or even an entry-level associate at Simon Property Group) to conclude that the era of the mall is over.  Sure, plenty of malls out there are still thriving, but you’d be hard pressed to find one person in this country who cannot think of a mall that is dying, or is already completely dead.  The last mall built in the US was The Mall at Turtle Creek in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in 2006.  (Incidentally, it was the second mall to open in the Jonesboro metropolitan area; the older mall, Indian Mall—serving the community since 1967—promptly lost nearly all of its tenants, and quickly died.  Demolition crews took down everything except the still operating Sears in 2012.) While Simon (among others) proposed some malls in the latter part of the decade, all deals collapsed at the onset of the 2008 recession.  Not a single mall has broken ground in seven years.  As recently as the early 1990s, a new mall opened somewhere in the country at least every month—in the 80s, they opened practically every week.   Not only is the mall no longer the dominant hub for retail in large metro areas, it has lost out in the smaller ones as well.

I noticed this shift—already widely documented throughout major cities—in the small metropolitan area of Houma, Louisiana, where pocket neighborhood shopping districts (scattered throughout the city) and the moderately sized Southland Mall were losing out steadily to a throng of big-box stores, all lined up in a row along one of the biggest highways in town.  It seemed like residents of Houma were more than willing to drive greater distances to run the gauntlet of traffic around the superstores, rather than enjoy the convenience of a smaller retail plaza close to home.  Today, those neighborhood strip malls, close to most of the housing, generally share high levels of vacancy and disrepair.  Meanwhile, the Southland Mall clings to life, its occupancy rate at around 60%, well below the level indicative of a healthy commercial landscape.

Now, apparently, the enclosed shopping mall even struggles in municipalities so small that it’s hard to spot the competition.

The above photo depicts the Village Square Mall in Effingham, a community with a little over 12,000 inhabitants in south-central Illinois.  Truth be told, the economic conditions in Effingham are not hugely different from Houma: the regional economy has weathered significant ups and downs over the last few decades, but the population of the municipalities themselves has remained mostly stable.  Both municipalities are regional employment hubs, offering both jobs and retail offerings that serve a broader spatial area than their populations would suggest.  And in both cases, the downtowns show some evidence of revitalization, featuring locally run shops and restaurants in refurbished older buildings.  Effingham has only about one-third of the population of Houma, though, and it boasts one significant advantage: it sits at the convergence of two major thoroughfares, Interstate 70 (connecting St. Louis to Terre Haute, and eventually Indianapolis) and Interstate 57 (connecting Chicago and Champaign eventually toward Memphis).
 
No doubt this geographic blessing helped the city christen itself as “the Crossroads of Opportunity” and emboldened it to earn the status of a Micropolitan Area by the US Census Bureau, indicating that it attracts commuters well outside its city limits, much the way a metropolitan area does—except that Effingham is not populous enough to classify as a metropolitan area.  However, its centrality and influence span the entirety of Effingham County, which contains a population of 34,000 people—almost identical to the city limits of Houma. 

Thanks to these two interstates, Effingham may be preferred stop for travelers coming lengthwise across Illinois, or for those seeking a pit stop between St. Louis and Indianapolis.  In case the long-distance traveler wasn’t aware of Effingham’s regional significance, the local Cross Foundation helped erect a 198-foot steel cross structure on the outskirts of the city limits, broadly visible from a distance and dedicated just days after the September 11, 2011 attacks.

It is the region’s biggest attraction.  And, surrounding the cross in almost every direction is a none-too-surprising industry.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get any good photos, but Google Streetview offers a perfectly good representation, both here and a bit further to the north. It should come as no surprise that Effingham boasts a flourishing logistics and trucking industry, no doubt providing the city with tax revenue that explains its well-paved streets, abundant sidewalks and jogging paths, and a well-maintained downtown.

But nowhere along the I-70 or I-57 corridors does a motorist encounter a sign for the Village Square Mall.  Taking another look at it, it’s easy to see why it gets neglected.  The photos at the top of this essay actually showed the good wing of the mall, with a still operational J.C. Penney.  But what about the other wing?  Pivoting to the left, this is what one would see:

And then a bit further to the left:

A pretty bleak scene.  It was never a large mall; it probably only has space for 25 inline tenants.  But that parking lot can sure accommodate a lot of cars.

As for the interior, it offers about what one might expect, given the abundance of cars milling around out front.

I was pretty taken by the tenant at the other long-vacant anchor store (opposite the J.C. Penney):

Obviously I’m giving away the time period that I visited the mall, but I have never seen a haunted house in a mall’s dead space before.  Essentially, haunted houses such as these operate in much the same fashion any other holiday-themed pop-up store, viable only a few weeks before Halloween.  Then, no doubt, the large retail space returned to its usual vacancy.  Here’s the outside view:

A neglected mall such as Village Square would probably suffer serious vandalism if it were in a more high-crime area.  Effingham doesn’t strike me as that sort of place; so instead, the low levels of security and supervision elicit some amiable eccentricity:

I was about halfway through writing this essay when I learned that the well-known site Labelscar had already covered this tiny mall a couple years ago.  Now I’m trying to find ways to distinguish my essay from the one on there.  That site offers a broader array of interior photos, though they’re older, and our primary observation/argument is just about the same: Village Square Mall has endured a steady decline over many years.  The writer for Labelscar claims that a series of non-local property managers showed persistent ineptitude in operating the mall and attracting tenants, and I wouldn’t doubt it.  But the general patterns of development around Effingham are what really stacked the deck against the Village Square Mall.

The map above perfectly demonstrates the problem.  The blue rectangle south of central Effingham shows the general location of the Village Square Mall parcel.  It’s not far from downtown (in Effingham, everything’s close), but notice that the majority of the street grid and development has occurred in a northerly direction.  In addition, the double-barreled interstate I-70/57 wraps around the northern and western city limits—far from the south.  Even if the Village Square Mall were worthy of promotion along the interstate, no amount of signage would make it a convenient destination after getting off the exit ramp.

The map above also reveals what has most likely lead to the mall’s virtual demise.  A purple ellipse on the northwest side of town shows the new retail hub for Effingham, right where busy State Route 33 meets I-57/70 at the exit ramp.  I neglected to photograph the retail at the “Avenue of Mid-America”, but once again Google Streetview comes to the rescue here and a bit to the east, but still in that general location.   You’ve got the usual suspects for shopping and dining: Wal-Mart, Ruby Tuesday, Menards, Arby’s, Starbucks, T.G.I. Friday’s, Cracker Barrel, and a slew of hotels catering to all price ranges.  To the north, sitting amidst an undeveloped field in Effingham’s “frontier”, is a Kohl’s.  Given the persistent success of this supremely well-run company, this land will undoubtedly morph into further big-box retail in the near future, if it hasn’t already (the Google Streetview dates from 2008).

No surprises there.  Much like Houma, the preferred retail hub for Effingham has become even more decentralized than before, lined up along a busy highway that maximizes visibility to the thousands of outsiders who pass through this town on any given day, thanks to those two interstates.  This migration is hardly earth-shattering.  What leaves me scratching my head is the original inspiration for the location of the Village Square Mall.  Why put it to the south?  Was there ever a point when that seemed to be the growing side of town?  If, as Labelscar claims, the mall opened in 1972 through the initiative of a local developer, why didn’t he investigate the construction plans for the interstates?  By the early 1970s, huge portions of these interstates were already complete, and it is likely that the Effington “wraparound” was fully designed, if not already operative.  Did he just have his sights on what most likely has always been the cheaper land?

It’s possible that Village Square would have declined even if it had been front and center along the interstate.  After all, plenty of other malls have sat a stone’s throw from a major highway and croaked in spite of everything; I chronicled the well-known Bannister Mall in Kansas City a few months ago. Not a trace of the Bannister Mall remains, even though I-435 runs immediately to the west.  But Effingham has another peer city in much closer proximity than Houma: Mount Vernon, Illinois, just 70 miles to the south.  I don’t know much about Mount Vernon, except that it, too, sits at the junction of two interstates (I-57 and I-64), has a similar population (15,000), and claims a similarly sized retail hub: the Times Square Mall.  Most online buzz suggests, however, that the Times Square Mall is in much better shape, with three fully operational anchors (Sears, Peebles, J.C. Penney).  It even has a website!  Times Square Mall can claim these victories, despite the fact that Mount Vernon shows evidence of lower economic health than Effingham: it has a higher poverty rate and more notable population loss over the past decade.  But…the Times Square Mall sits just a quarter mile from the busy I-57/64 interstate (probably visible to passers-by), and its on the west side of town—the same direction in which the town’s urbanization seems to be advancing.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Effinghamians go south to Mount Vernon to shop; certainly not the other way around.  Perhaps the Village Square Mall has succumbed to the retail tsunami sweeping America, or it could be something simpler: location, location, location.  The original developer opted for cheap land rather than good land, and though it has taken forty years, eventually the time has come to pay the devil his due.

Amidst all the links in the chain, a new shape emerges.

When zipping across a rural landscape on a limited access highway, the visual impact of the exit ramps—and the various goods or services that they access—begin to erode.  To those unfamiliar with the landscape, these exits often all look alike. Even for those motorists who know their precise surroundings, it would be hard to describe these junctions as anything other than monotonous.  But high speeds are only partly to blame for this blur of homogeneity.  Everything looks the same because it largely is the same: gas (BP, Shell), food (McDonald’s, Subway, Burger King) and lodging (Comfort Inn, Days Inn, Hampton Inn).  On a particularly long road trip, one might witness contrasting offerings between mile eight and mile eight hundred, but this is more reflective of regional differences than anything else: the restaurants at the mile eight be indicative of Northeastern tastes, while the restaurants at eight hundred reflect Southern preferences.  Both stretches of the highway nonetheless feature corporate chains, and the widely known national ones like the aforementioned will pervade from coast to coast.  So, even though I’ll confess I had to get off the interstate highway in order to take these photos (and they still didn’t turn out great), the jaunty angles and windshield reflections offer more distinctions to the pictures than the commercial landscape itself.

They come from just outside Exit 63 along I-70 near Vandalia, Illinois, but it could easily be anywhere in the Midwest, or elsewhere in the country, for that matter.  Wendy’s.  Sonic.  Arby’s.  Subway.   This Exit 63 may reveal more uniformity than most of the others along this stretch of I-70, in fact.  Vandalia, one of the state’s first capitals, is a reasonably large town of approximately 7,000, and it is situated about midway along the corridor between the outer Illinois suburbs of St. Louis, and Effingham, Illinois—about 35 miles to the west and east, respectively.  Thus, the land around Exit 63 offers an excellent opportunity to host establishments that both the locals and passers-by will patronize.

As is often the case, the presence of national chains here is, in terms of Vandalia’s inventory of taxable properties, a good thing.  While it may nullify much of a sense of the exit ramp’s uniqueness, the presence of so many chains is a sign of prosperity and comparatively high land values.  (As is often the case, the low-rent downtown of Vandalia is almost completely dominated by local establishments…when a building isn’t completely vacant.) Compare the photos above with the Exit 52 along I-70, at the town of Mulberry Grove.  Google Streetview reveals the Mulberry Grove ramps on both the south and the north sides of the interstate offer little to nothing in terms of goods or services; the town of less than 750 people simply isn’t big enough to justify a truck stop or hotel, especially when Vandalia’s busy exit is just 10 miles further down the road.  If anything, a minor exit like the one at Mulberry Grove is more likely to host locally owned establishments, since the county road that links I-70 to the town gets significantly lower traffic volumes, resulting in cheaper land that equity-poor entrepreneurs can afford.  Conversely, the higher costs at the Vandalia exit have pushed away almost all proprietors except for the ones with deep pockets, which usually translate to landscape of franchises from regionally or nationally recognized chains.

At the same time that Vandalia’s higher income density encourages a greater agglomeration of commerce in general, it poses greater challenges for individual establishments.  How do the owners at these hotels, restaurants, and gas stations distinguish themselves from the same establishments just 10 or 15 miles further down the interstate?  Clearly one proprietor found a way.

On a highway lacking any other distinctive visual stimuli, this stands out like a beacon: a hotel tipping its hat to the Gateway Arch, St. Louis’ signature monument, which the typical motorist traveling westward on I-70 would confront head-on just 70 miles further.  Obviously this replica pales in comparison to the real McCoy, but it certainly stands out in comparison to anything else along the highway.  Despite its blurriness, the photograph below, from the opposite angle, also reveals how well the signage for the Economy Inn holds up against its neighbor:

The conventional plyon sign used throughout suburban America simply doesn’t stand tall enough to motorists traveling at 70 miles per hour; by the time they would see it, it would be too late to pull over on the exit ramp, so they would simply continue 15 miles to the next exit that offers virtually identically services.  Thus, the high-rise sign is ubiquitous along rural instates precisely because it lingers in the horizon for several minutes before drivers encounter the business directly.  The stanchions hoisting the signs along I-70 in Vandalia are several times taller than the Arby’s, Sonic, or Wendy’s buildings themselves.  But as prominent as they may seem, the sheer redundancy of high-rise signs every few miles has diluted their efficacy.

The Economy Inn’s promotional tactic is simple, humorless and not particularly audacious.  But the sign serves as a cheeky overture to the skyline that westbound travelers will likely confront about 40 minutes later.  It owes its communicative strength to its referential source: Eero Saarinen and Hannskarl Bandel’s masterpiece.  Quietly approaching its 50^th birthday, the Gateway Arch has proven such an effective landmark that it routinely thrusts this medium-sized city into the Top 10 or even Top 5 most recognizable skylines on opinion polls.  Roadside America derives much of its appeal from iteration—reference loops that provide a certain level of hype as the travelers approach the antecedent.  Since so much of the landscape is built on repetition anyway—those same overpasses, green-and-white informational signs, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Holiday Inn—the deviant attraction stands out like a shofar played during a string quartet.  Regardless of the quality of rooms at this budget hotel (TripAdvisor isn’t exactly complimentary), I bet the Economy Inn boasts a higher nightly occupancy and a higher assessed value than most of its neighbors, all thanks to this unconventional little sign.  It catches the eye.  The real question is whether the sign was born during humbler times, when only a few services stood at the Vandalia exit ramp, land prices were lower, and local establishments still had a toehold.  Maybe some mom-and-pop proprietors originally built it to stand out from the competition.  And—better yet, since it apparently was a Travelodge Vandalia until recently—maybe the Economy Inn is a local operation interspersed with all the national chains, hanging on amidst fierce competition thanks to its visually distinct method of self-promotion.

Surgeon General’s warning: “It’s Mail Pouch Tobacco. Treat yourself.”

I’ve gotten in the habit of dropping the word “meme” into blog articles as though it has become a part of common parlance.  (Come to think of it, I probably overuse “parlance” too.)  The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “meme” is that it is “an element of a culture or system of behavior passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means”.  The Merriam-Webster  includes the abstract nouns “idea”, “style”, and “usage” in its definition, but otherwise it says more or less the same thing.  A meme seems to be an inherently sociological phenomenon—the iterations that it encapsulates are antithetical to biological means of transmission.  As of yet, the word seems to evade most thesauruses; as recently as fifteen years ago, social theorists and cultural critics bandied the term around freely, and, inevitably, journalists, who have long perused the corpus of this coterie, picked up the term.  From there it proliferated wildly, almost mimetically, to couch its Greek antecedent.  My guess is that while not every Boomer and Xer is acquainted with the word, it is rare that a Millennial would graduate with a liberal arts degree and not learn to use it correctly.  A meme is not necessarily the same as afad, though most fads originate as memes.  A meme is less temporally ephemeral and rarely as ubiquitous—much like the word itself, most people could remain oblivious to a meme, provided they don’t engage with the specific milieu in which the meme has both spawned and flourished.

If the word still seems shadowy after this definition, allow for a photographic illustration that many Americans have seen even if they haven’t overtly contemplated it.

On the side of a building in the two-block main street of tiny St. Elmo, Illinois is a faded advertisement for Mail Pouch Tobacco.  To someone from Maine or Mississippi or Montana it might seem like no more than the vintage bric-a-brac you’d see along the walls of an Applebee’s, but most adult residents of the lower Midwest, Appalachia, or the Mid-Atlantic have seen one in person.  The Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company, founded in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1890, initially resorted to advertising on the walls of commercial buildings such as the one above, or this one below, in Findlay, Ohio:

Pretty faded stuff, and this Ohio variant most likely sat behind an adjacent building for many years that eventually faced the demolition ball.

The crisper iterations of the Mail Pouch Tobacco ad—the ones by which it has been immortalized—grace the roofs and sides of wooden barns across the countryside in about a dozen states.  I haven’t come across a good vintage one recently in my travels, so I will have to crib from another source:

Other angles of this same barn are visible at the Vintage Log website. 

Bloch Brothers Tobacco shifted its focus toward the barns and away from brick buildings a little after 1900.  It doesn’t take a doctorate in economics to guess the reasons: rented advertisement space on rural barns is much cheaper than urban centers (even if many were small towns), and barns are ubiquitous.  Most of the good chronicles of Mail Pouch advertising (such as Jack Goddard’s account of its cultural importance in Beaver County, Pennsylvania) recognize that the rate paid to barn owners of about $1 or $2 a year wasn’t even much by early 20^th century standards.  (In the earliest days, they were rewarded with tobacco or subscriptions to The Saturday Evening Post.)  The bigger incentive was that the barns would receive a fresh coat of paint every few years, helping to resist moisture intrusion and extend the lives of the barns themselves.  The relationship between landowners and Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company proved symbiotic: as the program peaked at the halfway point of the century, historians estimate that the standardized Mail Pouch Tobacco advertisement graced the faces of over 20,000 barns.  Other companies such as Burma Shave and Beech-Nut quickly caught on to the effectiveness of this carpet bomb approach, but Mail Pouch Tobacco remained pre-eminent.  The campaign suffered a setback with the passage of the Highway Beautification Program of 1965, which seriously restricted the proximity of billboards or other mounted advertisements along federal highways—a policy that tacitly acknowledged Mail Pouch Tobacco ads as visual blight.  Many proponents of the barn painting no doubt saw this as an elitist gesture, prompting officials (at the behest of West Virginia Senator James Randolph) to adapt a 1974 amendment that exempted Mail Pouch barns from the restrictions, by classifying them as “folk heritage barns”.

In the second half of the century, the continued survival of Mail Pouch barns depended heavily on a single individual: Harley Warrick of rural Ohio, who, by his own estimations painted and re-painted over 20,000 barns.  The logo for mail pouch, Spartan but assertive, depended on versatility because the “easel” wasn’t the least bit standardized; no two barns are identical.  Warrick and his team averaged over 200 barns a year and could, at the height of his productivity, complete two full ads in one day.  This most famous barn-painter retired in 1992, and the Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company (after decades of merges and acquisitions, called Swisher International Group, but still based in Wheeling) suspended the barn painting campaign at this point.  Warrick died in 2000, but his legacy survives through American primitive/folk art expositions hosted by theSmithsonian and other globally recognized institutions. 

Unfortunately, in the near future, it’s possible that museum exhibits may be the place to encounter Warrick’s oeuvre.  Time hasn’t exactly been kind to the Mail Pouch campaign; even in his lifetime, Warrick estimated that less than 1,000 barns survive.  Lacking an organized restoration initiative, their numbers are even fewer today.  Passive decomposition is probably a greater culprit than active demolition; anyone driving across a 100-mile stretch of the rural Midwest or Northeast will need more than fingers and toes to track all the collapsing wooden barns.  Mail Pouch Barn Stormers groups are doing their utmost to preserve this endangered piece of Americana, and this initiative proves more than ever that its cultural ascension to the status of a meme: it permeated enough of the collective consciousness to foment a widespread emotional connection.

No example that I have seen better conveys Mail Pouch’s expressive power and resiliency than this barn on a rural road not so far from Tiffin, Ohio.

Yep, it’s a bona fide ad poking up from over the field.  I got a little closer so I could appreciate it.

Hardly a Mail Pouch aficionado, I could still tell that something wasn’t quite right about this.  The colors were legitimate, including the pale blue stripes to the left and right of the sign.  But the letters were too tall and skinny, each row was spaced too closely to the next, and the centering for the “TREAT YOURSELF TO THE BEST” was off.  And the colors just looked way too bold and fresh for it to be even from Warrick’s final years on the job in the early 1990s.  Was it a hack job?  Not even.

Nothing so insidious.  Though the red paint is already widely chipped, the lettering is still in its toddler years, dating from just 2007.  It might not be polished, but it’s a tribute if there ever was one.  Clearly at least a handful of folks in north-central Ohio want to keep the Mail Pouch legacy from fading into extinction, even if its at the expense of the logo’s typographical fundamentals.

Perhaps Mail Pouch Tobacco barns aren’t as an legitimate of a meme as even some contemporary fads.  After all, the campaign was hardly a bottom-up effort; the Bloch Brothers clearly saw a brilliant promotional opportunity and took advantage of it.  It didn’t emerge organically.  But it surely owed at least part of its repetition and proliferation—and it owes virtually all of its continued survival—to a certain “contagion” with humble origins: Landowner A saw what Landowner B was doing to keep his/her barn in tiptop shape, so why can’t I do it too?  Paradigms of contemporary life would suggest that urban settings are the best crucible for the dissemination of memes: after all, they flourish when an agglomeration of people can lubricate them, so to speak.  But billboards continue to thrive in both urban and the most rural of settings; in the age of information, a cultural artifact can “go viral” without having any physical incarnation.  Sites like Youtube spawn digital memes almost every day.  Mail Pouch Tobacco barns are a commodity (I cannot verify if the tobacco is even available for purchase these days) that owes much of its contemporary stewardship to its increasing scarcity.  Though rural in origins, a small-town folk historian and an urban hipster who bought a shirt at Zazzle.com most likely share a core emotional affinity for the advertisement, and who am I to judge the sincerity of their fondness for the meme?  Both depend on the Internet to perpetuate their admiration of this iconic cultural gesture.  I suspect the barn painters outside of Findlay used an online photo as their source of inspiration too.

The emperor might have beautiful clothes, but what about the shoes?

By 21^st century standards, it would seem like a moot point that buildings in high density downtowns would attempt to have at least some street level engagement, meaning that the ground floor offers something for passers-by to look at beyond a mere blank wall.  Usually this translates to a large window for a display that correlates to the activity inside, and since most people in big cities do not want their private lives to be a stage, residential uses on downtown ground floors are not typically very desirable.  However, most businesses—particularly retail—find it not only desirable but advantageous that pedestrians and motorists can easily peer into their establishments: the only thing better than a good window is an equally conspicuous door nearby.  Thus, many buildings that may otherwise house residences, offices, or even covered parking on the upper levels will still have a gregarious ground floor that establishes a dialogue with the street.  Sometimes the “foot” of the building is the most heavily ornamented, while all the other floors between the foundation and the cornice are a bit more austere or conventional.

A survey of any older downtown district confirms this phenomenon, such as the photo below from Roanoke, Virginia:

 

This perfectly conventional building from, most likely, the latter half of the 19^th century was ubiquitous across American cities up until around 1960.  The dichotomy of large, retail-oriented windows on the ground floor and smaller, more private fenestration on each upper level was a standard building typology of that time.

But it all changed concurrent with the decentralization of American cities after World War II.  Automobile ownership was already advancing rapidly beforehand, with the brief exception of the first few years of the Depression (and after 1933, vehicles per capita in the US resumed climbing, despite the persisting economic malaise).  After the surrender of Japan, American soldiers returned home to take advantage of the GI Bill and moved with their sweethearts to a brand-new house in what was probably farmland before they left to fight the Axis Powers.  Then, together, they commenced in an unprecedented babymaking celebration.  A surge in the economy, the population, the rate of homeownership, and private automobiles culminated in the emergence of a new way of life in which downtowns were increasingly less critical for daily routines.  By the time the overwhelming majority of households owned vehicles in the 1950s, old downtowns were not only passé, the physical form was downright inconvenient.  Floorspace in these old buildings wasn’t large enough for the logistical improvements that allowed for supermarkets.  Living above or in close proximity to work was unnecessary thanks to cars.  Small yards in the homes close to downtown put people unappealingly close to their neighbors.  Downtown streets could not begin to accommodate the level of parking available in a typical shopping mall, out around the cheaper land near all the new housing.

In the 1950s and 60s, urban retail didn’t just evolve in its physical form; the old typology almost completely collapsed.  The most outdated old buildings fell vacant and into disrepair; city leaders often demolished them to offer better parking opportunities in an attempt to bolster downtowns’ accessibility.  New structures often needed so much parking that it had to be stacked on the first few stories, below the office uses.  And since downtown parking demand outpaced the need for these surviving urban structures to offer goods and services, the newest generation of buildings turned away from the streets, reducing or eliminating visible displays or entrances.  Quite a few downtown buildings in the mid 20^th century oriented themselves toward a parking garage, built to one side, connected to another block by a skyway, or perhaps underground.  Meanwhile the street and sidewalk merely hosted service vehicle access or fire escapes, but no primary entrance.

For many readers of this blog, a description of the cataclysmic shift in urban design over fifty years is unwarranted, but even for the unacquainted, it doesn’t take much to get the idea across.  I could provide dozens examples of civic buildings, office towers, parking garages, or even shopping centers that features flout this disregard for city streets and sidewalks, but a particular structure comes to mind for its critical place within its city’s landscape.

Lake Point Tower in Chicago, viewed from the lake in the center of the above photo, is among the city’s most iconic buildings: at the time of its development, the 70-story structure was the tallest residential tower in the world.  To this day, it remains the only Chicago highrise that sits to the east of Lake Shore Drive, on a promontory that also includes the city’s famed tourist attraction, Navy Pier, visible in the lower right corner.  It bears a more than passing resemblance to the Spartan elegance associated with Chicago’s favorite (adopted) architect son, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose Second Chicago School of thought during his tenure at the Illinois Institute of Technology exerted a profound influence on the cityscape during middle of the 20^th Century.  The similarities between Lake Point Tower and the work of Mies should come as no surprise; its architects were among his students.  Different vantage points reinforce the distinctive status of this edifice in relation to the waterfront and neighboring highrises.

The structure borrows heavily from Mies’ Bauhaus movement origins, which deliberately sought to avoid engagement with the landscape or local vernacular in an attempt (at least to some degree) to transcend it; thus it earned the uncomfortable nickname “International Style”.  Though the style fell out of favor in the last quarter of the 20^th century for exuding more than a whiff of elitism, the disassociation with place and regional culture certainly gives Lake Point Tower a majesty that underlies the luxury of the residential units inside.  And if it seems regal now, one can only imagine what it looked like when first constructed 45 years ago.  In 1968, it felt even more like an island: Chicago’s central business district was declining, as was the case across the country.  While the city’s above-average public transit system precluded the need for as many parking lots and garages as most Midwestern cities, much of the central city struggled to retain offices and shops, let alone residences.  Lake Point Tower was a risky enterprise—a relative orphan in the Streeterville neighborhood, capitalizing on remarkable multi-directional views of both the Loop and the skyline.  After the residential boom that began in Streeterville and other parts of Chicago’s CBD in the 1980s, Lake Point Tower stopped seeming so lonely.  But the evidence remains powerful of the time period in which it was conceived.  While it often looks fantastic from the water or zipping by on Lake Shore Drive to its west, the other, more pedestrian scaled access roads paint a different picture:

Nothing but a big blank wall across most of the Illinois Street frontage, with the exception of a tiny convenience-type retail opening at the green awning.  The Grand Avenue frontage on the north side of the tower is much the same way: virtually no engagement with the street.  Pedestrians have virtually nothing to look at as they walk by, which might not be such a concern if it were a particularly sleepy or attractionless part of town.  But it isn’t.  Throngs gather at Navy Pier just a block to the east, particularly when the weather is nice.

Thus, the designers of Lake Point Tower missed out on a critical opportunity to divert the attention of passers-by.  Pedestrians in the area, many of which are tourists, would easily have patronized shops and restaurants along Illinois Street or Grand Avenue, so it perfectly embodies a failure to capitalize on the commercial possibilities afforded by this premier urban location.

In the tower’s defense, it is a product of its time.  The architects did not take the designs of pre-war commercial buildings to heart, because in 1968, they were by and large irrelevant.  Lake Point Tower was an investment risk when central cities across the nation hemorrhaged jobs, burned-out swathes reminded everyone of escalating social unrest, and both petty and crime increasingly dominated the news headlines.  Downtown Chicago had plenty of highrises in 1968, but it could not boast a great number of residential high-rises.  Many people living downtown back then were looking for ways out.  Thus, this tower responded to the social climate by turning inward.  It still offers the luxuries its target demographic would expect—a pool, park, playground, shops and restaurants—but they first (and sometimes exclusively) serve the residents under the shared roof.  Dwellers of this tower could function for days without leaving the building’s grounds; an elevator would be all they need. The gourmet restaurants might attract outsiders in order to break even, but they cannot rely on display windows for promotion, and the outside world that chooses to patronize them will probably get there by car.

Lake Point Tower is hardly unworthy of its pivotal role along the Chicago lakefront, as well as its many firsts.  But from an urban design standpoint, its imperfections create what almost amounts to blight on the streetscape.  It may still be luxurious, but it did not place among the top 10 priciest condo buildings last year, and as Streeterville and Near North neighborhoods have invited dozens of other luxury high-rise condo, apartment and hotel developments in the ensuing decades since 1968, most subsequent towers have consciously engaged with the street and sidewalk, as evidenced by the photo below:

Developers have nothing to gain by pasting a blank wall across the ground floor of their buildings, and these days, most new construction recognizes this, even in downtowns with less of an active street life than Chicago.  Many cities remain too decentralized to warrant a store-lined first floor on every downtown street—after all, the suburbs remain the retail hub for most of metropolitan America, despite some recentralizing activity in the last twenty years.  However, most architects, developers, and city planners know better than allow blank walls to permeate new construction; a superficial window display with public art or an advertisement still offers a vast improvement.  Lake Point Tower will probably remain a Chicago icon for decades to come, but its admirers will reserve their kindest words when describing it—and viewing it—from a distance.