We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2015
Through a study of the history of department stores and shopping centers in the Philadelphia metropolitan region between 1920 and 1980, I explore the historical role of retailing in the evolution of the "sprawl" landscape that came to dominate urban form in the United States by the end of the twentieth century. Philadelphia is an important case study for this topic because of its long history of urbanization, during which it developed from a colonial port city to a nine-teenth-century industrial metropolis to a model of twentieth-century deindustrialization. Through all the phases of its growth, Philadelphia remained an important consumer marketplace serving the regional hinterland of the Delaware Valley. I sought to understand the forces that led to the city's twentieth-century decline as the primary site of consumption for the Delaware Valley, when major sites for distributing consumer goods developed in the hinterland itself.
1. William, Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Thomas J., Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J., 1996)Google Scholar; Robert, Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950 (New Haven, Conn., 2001)Google Scholar; Lizabeth, Cohen, “From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America,” American Historical Review 101 (1996): 1051–80Google Scholar; Longstreth, Richard, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 1997)Google Scholar.
2. My major archival sources for business records were: the Strawbridge & Clothier collection at the Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Del.; the John Wanamaker papers and the Albert M. Greenfield papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.; the Gimbel Brothers records at the Milwaukee County Historical Society, Milwaukee, Wisc.; and the James Rouse papers at the Columbia Association Archives, Columbia, Md.
