Window Shoppers, Shoe Shiners, and the Art of the Storefront

If you’re in real estate, you know right now there’s nothing hotter than walkability. People are tired of driving stressed all day, hunting for parking. They yearn to walk to school, walk to the park, walk to the corner store. The idyllic American main streets that’ve been boarded up by Sprawlmart big box leviathans – well, they’re back, baby.

For as long as humans have enjoyed cities, the place where commerce took place and merchants lured patrons was along the street, not a quarter mile back from the curb behind an eye-sore parking lot. The arrangements and configurations of these store fronts was paramount to attracting business. Maybe you sold the same wares as a shopkeeper down the block, but if you could arrange your goods in a more eye-catching manner, well you just might end up bagging the sale they didn’t.

Shorpy.com has done a tremendous job corralling and promoting thousands of plate glass negative images from the Library of Congress’ millions strong collection from the turn-of-the-century and beyond. With the small collection assembled below, we see the intricacies and smallness of these store fronts. These were spaces designed to linger around, to converse with each other about. You’d be hard pressed to find anything of the sort outside a Target or Best Buy.

The architecture, as well, is painstakingly beautiful. It is elegant as it is egalitarian, regardless of the segregated status of commercial space at the time; there was no physical or logical reason these spaces couldn’t accommodate one and all.

It’s truly a shame so many of these buildings were lost to ‘urban renewal’ and ‘modernization’. It’s a damn tragedy that for the love of the automobile walkable outdoor streets became such a rarity they’re now a luxury item often catered for the rich. Hopefully as more city-lovers realize what they’ve lost, a demand will grow for walkable neighborhoods across the classes.

Check out the images below in all their mind-shattering super high resolution glory, and be sure to check out previous collections assembled here on Rebel Metropolis.

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Click each image to view full resolution. Click the link below any image to view it’s source.

New York City, c. 1948