Praise of the Places That Plein-Air Capitalism Built

Plunk yourself down on the main street of some fair-sized American city and I defy you to identify where you are by just surveying the purveyors of goods. Where once the storefront styles and stock would have been distinct, or at least regional, where the names over doors and display windows might have read “Danville Drugs” or “Pink Halo Shoes,” now they are just as likely to be repetitions of national chain stores: Jamba Juice, Gap, Wal-Mart, and their fast-food accompaniment.

Whatever its advantages of economy and quality, the dreary homogeneity of it all gets a little dispiriting. Thank goodness, then, for what remains of Southern California’s commercial quirkiness, for a cola bottling plant shaped like an ocean liner, for donut-shaped donut shops. And for the idiosyncrasies of space and light and air that made possible all that plein-air capitalism, which took, in one form, the shape of drive-in markets as informal as Boy Scout tents and as preposterous as cheese chow mein. . . .

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Richard Longstreth was born in San Marino in the 1940s, when Los Angeles was still a kind of singular outpost of commerce, patronizing stores of its own making.

Of course, he didn’t realize this for years; he was only a year old when his parents whisked him East and away from Los Angeles. “I don’t think my parents liked the place particularly.”

His father was an architect who worked on both coasts with the masterly Richard Neutra, and while L.A. became ground zero for the R-1 lifestyle and the architects who designed for it, Richard Longstreth would become enamored of the city’s commercial architecture.

In 1966 he was a student with a summer job in Neutra’s office in Silver Lake and spent all his free time driving about town, staring up from the curb at the marvels described in a newly published guide to the architectural delights of Los Angeles, especially its underappreciated commercial whimsies and delights.

“If you’re going to look at the origins of skyscrapers, New York and Chicago are crucial places for that,” he says. And when it comes to innovative commercial architecture, “L.A. has always been bandied about: ‘Well, of course this happened in L.A. and that started in L.A.,’ but it was never documented and never really known.”

So Longstreth pursued a little curiosity into a biggish book, “The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914-1941.” What he found was that the reputation of Los Angeles for inventing “this and that” was “if anything, an understatement.”

Chief among these innovations was the idea of the drive-up and drive-in: the grocery market, the super-service gas station, sometimes in conjunction with the “auto laundry,” the carwash. All that fulfilled landowners’ needs to make use of all that commercial frontage on the long avenues out to the ‘burbs. It worked best in cities where cars and climate made outdoor commerce tolerable, if not outright pleasant.

Changes outside led to changes behind the counter. Longstreth, now a long-distance Angeleno as a professor of American studies at George Washington University, quotes some early advertising hotshot who coined the term “monkey-wrench merchandising” to describe a phenomenon in which customers were dealing more and more with technicians--mechanics, checkout clerks--and less with the traditional commercial personnel, salesclerks. Over time, vast supermarkets, such as the pioneering Ralphs, would take it even further, with the entire stock displayed on the sales floor for fast self-service, rather than on high shelves or in stockrooms.

All of this was enhanced by the inviting L- or U-shaped layout of several shops, and ratios of parking-to-store space that eventually would reach 3 or 4 to 1. A real estate broker visiting Los Angeles from Washington, D.C., noticed the L-shaped drive-in markets and used them as a model for a Park and Shop venture in the nation’s capital in 1930. (One L.A. business, Longstreth points out, was spelled Parque-n-Shoppe as a stab at venerability.)

That first flattering imitation, the Washington, D.C., Park and Shop, has been ferociously defended and beautifully restored. Characteristically of Los Angeles, many of the buildings whose photographs appear in Longstreth’s book are “no longer standing.”

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Curiously, the L-shaped market evolved into one of the most common and most despised buildings on the urban landscape: the mini-mall, whose heyday began to wane when people demanded a moratorium to their cookie-cutter repetition. The development company that became inextricably identified with the mini-mall was named La Mancha by its owners, who thought it was Spanish for “impossible dream.” Actually, it means “the spot,” like the blot that Angelenos came to think these malls were on the urban terrain.

Such is the way of it, says Longstreth. “The retail environment is like the J.R. of urban history--the thing we love to hate. People put it down yet people can’t live without it.” *

Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com