Saturday, February 9, 2008
<-- No Parking This Side -->
As we have previously seen the study of the mall in relation to the French Arcades, it is very interesting to see their American counterpart developing in the early 1920’s. With the recent development of the mass production automobile, the standards of retail and sales began to simultaneously shift. The automobile became a key feature in the design and planning of these facilities and it is interesting to see the development of these schematic designs progress through the 1900’s. The retail industry begun to experiment with this idea that catered to the motorist in both terms of appeal and functions of circulation. In the 1920’s, shopping centers oriented themselves in a very dominate, frontal condition to the street and considered street parking sufficient for the amount of visitors per day. However, architects and planners in the market of shopping center quickly noticed that off street parking would be essential if the facilities they were designing were to be successful. The Latchstring drive-in market, built in 1927, served as a precedent for configuration of shops in a linear pattern, therefore allowing motorist to view the array of options from the street. Adversely, the Latchstring market served as a precedent of what not to do when it came to the configurations of vehicular traffic, pedestrian circulation, and adequate on-site parking. As this problem became more apparent to real estate developers of the time, the development of facilities such as the Park and Shop were implemented predominantly in the area surrounding Washington D.C. in the early 1930’s. These facilities very much learned from their drive-in counterparts in the west, but focused on providing adequate on site parking and direct access to their much larger stores. Yet another positive aspect of the newly developed “park and shop” typology was its ability to create an uninterrupted correlation with its surrounding neighborhoods. The improved area of off street parking did not create a large hindrance, which the street side parking of previous years did, to the surrounding neighborhoods. “Here stores and automobiles could be concentrated in an efficient way that was at once physically integrated with, yet not intrusive upon, the places they served” (Longstreth).
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