Gabrielle Esperdy
When automobile manufacturer Henry Ford introduced the assembly line in 1913, Ford employees were able to build one automobile every ninety-three minutes. In 1914, Ford provided his employees with a profit-sharing program, an eight-hour workday, and a five-dollar-a-day minimum wage. These innovations resulted in a new socioeconomic class—the middle class—able to purchase Ford’s cars. Between 1915 and 1916 the number of registered motor vehicles in America increased by 50 percent[1] and the automobile’s transformation of American society began. The introduction of an inexpensive mode of transportation meant more people could travel further, resulting in a less provincial, more worldly population. With the increase in automobiles came the need for good roads, gas stations, restaurants, and motels to accommodate automobile travelers. Strips of national chain stores sprang up along major transportation corridors. Communities began adopting zoning laws to protect quality of life. Tourist destinations, like state parks, were created in areas that had previously been inaccessible. By the end of the 1920s a new car-oriented culture had emerged in America, peaking in the 1950s as the nation reinvented itself after World War II. The drive-in became popular, neon signs enticed passing motorists, and new architectural forms developed as buildings themselves became advertisements. Henry Ford’s innovations had completely changed the landscape, not only in America, but around the world. Photographer John Margolies was among the first to document the simple, vernacular structures that once lined our roadways and to recognize the important role roadside architecture played in America’s history.
TOP: Snow Flake Motel, Red Arrow Highway, St. Joseph, Michigan, c. 1962-63 (demolished). Architect: William Wesley Peters. From New Dimensions of Design, Southern Pine Association, New Orleans, Louisiana. Courtesy Architectural Trade Catalogs, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.
BOTTOM: Snow Flake Motel signage. Photographer: John Margolies, 1991. Courtesy John Margolies.
A tourist brochure from 1930 promoted the geographic and cultural centrality of Detroit with the following declaration: “All hard surface roads in the U.S. and Canada lead to Detroit.”[2] That the Motor City was a crossroads and a destination was evident not only in the convergence of highways, but also in its prominent skyline, in modern skyscrapers like the prewar Guardian and Fisher Buildings and the postwar One Woodward Avenue. The same was true of Detroit’s less vertical cityscape, in dozens of less monumental buildings that once lined the city’s principal automotive thoroughfares. These buildings, housing shops, restaurants, and saloons, and eventually more car-oriented typologies like gas stations and motels, constituted an everyday landscape that was understood as an embodiment of modernity and progress until well after World War II. Though the language of Modernism was as dynamic as the commercial landscape itself, embracing a range of modern stylistic idioms—Art Deco, streamlining, Wrightian, International style, and so on—what was constant was a desire to impress with newness of materials and of forms, depending on how those were defined at any moment from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Elwood Bar & Grill, Detroit, Michigan, 1937. Architect: Charles Noble. Photographer: John Margolies, 1976. Courtesy John Margolies.
Of course the same roads that led to Detroit also led from Detroit, and one can track the outward growth of the city (and Michigan) by studying these architectural forms as they changed across the decades and as they spread out across the commercial landscape, from local roads to state routes and federal highways, from city centers to suburban peripheries and beyond. What is needed, then, is a double history tracking the evolution of roadside Modernism in Michigan while also recording the ephemerality of the state’s least permanent buildings. Responding to market pressures and demographic urgencies, roadside structures are rarely built for the ages, but that doesn’t mean they lack cultural or architectural ambitions. The problem is that these buildings rarely last long enough for us to contemplate their meaning or ponder their significance, which is why we are so dependent on the work of a photographer like John Margolies, who spent the last quarter of the twentieth century documenting commercial vernacular buildings with a 55 mm lens and thousands of rolls of Ektachrome.[3] In his Michigan work, shot on trips through the state between 1972 and 1996, Margolies produced spare and dignified portraits of small-scale midcentury buildings lining roadsides from Lake Erie to Lake Michigan, from the Indiana border to the northernmost reaches of the Upper Peninsula. Unfortunately, through benign neglect or rapacious sprawl, few of these buildings survived into the twenty-first century. In many cases, all that remains is a trace on the hardscape and John’s vibrant images. The Frank Lloyd Wright–inspired design of the Snow Flake Motel by William Wesley Peters on Lake Michigan was designed in 1960, opened in 1962, and demolished in 2006, the outline of its six-point star plan still visible in Google satellite images—at least until something else is built on the site. John’s 1991 photographs capture a building that is run down, but still possesses a good deal of its original integrity, including its corrugated steel roof, hexagonal canopy, and abstracted snowflake sculptures. His photographs capture enough for us to understand the motel for what it was, for what so many of these roadside buildings were: a cohesive body of minor Modernism that has much to tell us about the emergence of drive-in culture and the spread of architectural ideas, across Michigan and the United States as a whole.
The rise of America’s automobile-oriented cultural landscape after World War II is symbolized in this publicity photo of a 1954 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible in front of a drive-in restaurant. Courtesy General Motors Archives.
In the beginning was Woodward Avenue, one of five principal thoroughfares included in Detroit’s 1805 city plan. By the time Woodward was fully paved in 1916, it stretched northwest for twenty-seven miles from the Detroit River to the center of Pontiac and was regarded as Michigan’s Main Street, a commercial artery whose economic and cultural importance would expand in the following decades.[4] By the end of the 1920s, the blocks of Woodward north of Grand Circus Park were home to Detroit’s grandest movie palaces, and what had only recently been “Piety Hill,” because of its density of churches, had become a center for entertainment and nightlife that thrived even during the Great Depression (and especially after the end of Prohibition). So it made sense when the Elwood, a new bar and grill, opened on the corner of Elizabeth and Woodward, a location just east of the State and Fox Theatres that seemed ideal for capturing thirsty and hungry movie patrons before and after their shows. However practical the Elwood’s business plan might have been, in the context of Woodward’s rapidly changing urban character, with high-rises surrounding it on all sides, the one-story building it occupied had the air of a taxpayer, something erected as a real estate expedient until the property could be developed more profitably.[5] But even if it was not meant to endure, the Elwood was not inattentive to material or aesthetic considerations. Its architect, Charles Noble, was well versed in commercial eclecticism; in the 1920s, he moved capably between Tudor Revival and Mediterranean Revival to suit the needs of client or program.[6] In the 1930s, he followed stylistic trends and shifted towards Modern idioms. As a result, the Elwood is a happy conflation of Art Deco details and streamlined form. The building is clad in buff-colored porcelain enamel panels with blue trim that emphasize the asymmetry of facades on either side of a corner entrance. To make this entrance as visible as possible, Noble topped it with a tall cylinder that rises to form a tower above a curved marquee of speed lines, pulsating lights, and neon signage. When it was built, the Elwood maintained the street wall of Woodward Avenue, contributing to the urban fabric of a Detroit that was, as yet, poised between pedestrian orientation and automobile subjugation.[7]
Socony-Vacuum Oil Company Mobilgas station, Gratiot Avenue near 15 Mile Road, Clinton Township, Michigan, 1947. Architect: Frederick Frost. Photographer: John Margolies, 1986. Courtesy John Margolies.
In the decades after World War II, as Detroit’s metropolitan development pushed further out beyond the city limits at 8 Mile Road, the urban balance would shift inexorably towards the car, but in the 1940s few people saw this in anything but the most optimistic light. The car promised mobility, and mobility promised freedom; and in the crucible of the Arsenal of Democracy, even a gas station could become something akin to a civic monument of the roadside metropolis. It’s unlikely that the March family had such lofty ideals in mind in 1947 when they decided to open a gas station in Clinton Township, east of Detroit, but when they became operators of a Socony-Vacuum Oil Company Mobilgas outlet, that’s exactly what they got. Earlier in the decade, the company had hired New York–based architect Frederick G. Frost to design a prototype Mobilgas station that would create brand identity through instant legibility of built form—what John Jakle and Keith Sculle call “place-product-packaging.”[8] Designed in collaboration with Donald Dodge, Frost’s scheme consisted of a broad cylinder for the sales room with flanking, asymmetrical wings for service bays, restrooms, and other functions. While this simplified composition was easily adapted to a variety of site conditions and lot sizes, branding was insured by the prominence of the drum and the other elements Frost specified: porthole windows, white enameled steel cladding, red trim, and especially the Pegasus logo affixed to the curving signboard of the drum’s upper half. Frost later claimed that his iconic drum was inspired by a can of oil—and there is a clear resemblance to a quart of circa 1940 Mobiloil—but the form also has less programmatic precedents that better reflect the prototype’s overall design sensibility: namely, European Modernist projects from the 1920s and 1930s by J. J. P. Oud and Erich Mendelsohn.[9] Their work, published frequently in U.S. architecture journals of the period, would likely have been familiar to Frost, a young Yale-educated designer who had been working on projects for Socony-Vacuum since joining his father’s architecture firm in 1936.
With its clean lines, sleek form, and bold graphics, Frost’s drum-type Mobilgas station for Socony-Vacuum must have seemed the very image of the future when it finally appeared on Gratiot Avenue just north of 15 Mile Road. Gratiot, like Woodward, was a principal route connecting Detroit to its rapidly developing periphery, in this case to the east. Like Woodward, Gratiot’s initial roadside development was tied to the streetcar, which terminated its outbound run at the city line. Beyond that was the territory of the automobile, though in the 1940s the scale was smaller and more conventionally urban than is generally realized. Though the shift from walker to driver had already been effected on commercial strips like Gratiot, in suburban places like Clinton Township, a vestigial notion of street frontage still existed. This meant that the Mobilgas station was placed relatively close to the road, maximizing visibility and emphasizing the drum’s importance as a branded icon and a local landmark of, and in, the modern roadscape. At this point in the late 1940s, the relationship of the building to the driver and the street still mirrored the relationship, albeit in attenuated form, of the building to the pedestrian and sidewalk downtown. Within a decade, however, as the car proliferated so did the attenuation. By the time the Northland Center opened in 1954, the nature of this formal and cultural relationship was entirely new.
Probably no one but architect Victor Gruen understood that his design for the Northland Center, strategically located just beyond the Detroit city line at Northwestern Highway (now the John C. Lodge Freeway) and Greenfield Road in Oakland County, would be an epochal event in the history of twentieth-century metropolitan development. With its carefully detailed Modernist buildings, thoughtfully conceived landscape and sculptural program, and sophisticated superblock planning, it was an exemplar of midcentury design. But those aspects of Northland are less significant than what many at the time saw as the shopping center’s major achievement: accommodating around 8,000 cars in nine parking areas, on two levels, accessible from major access roads. Anchored by Hudson’s first branch store, Northland used what Gruen called a “cluster” scheme to create a fully pedestrianized environment, an island in a sea of parking set back from the road by more than eight hundred feet.[10] From the drivers’ perspective, the signs were more important than the building, and at Northland, Alvin Lustig’s playfully Modern designs for entrances and parking areas didn’t disappoint. Gruen’s Northland was a highpoint of Modern architecture in the middle decades of the twentieth century—on the roadside, in Michigan and across the country—and few projects that came after it would match its quality or its quantity.[11] Most weren’t trying to; rather, they were content to satisfy more modest programmatic, aesthetic, and marketing goals—but they still managed to produce satisfying, eye-catching, and even innovative Modern buildings, as one final example along a Michigan highway ably demonstrates.
Miracle Mile Drive-In, 2103 South Telegraph Road, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1960. Architect: Robert Snyder. Photographer: John Margolies, 1986. Courtesy John Margolies.
The success of Northland precipitated a wave of shopping center construction across greater Detroit, almost to the point of market saturation. Within the dog-eat-dog world of retail, newness alone was not enough; each shopping center required some special feature to attract patrons—and to keep them. At Northland, the suburban presence of a downtown dowager like Hudson’s was the draw; at Miracle Mile Shopping Center, thirteen miles north in Bloomfield Township, it was a first-run, jumbo movie screen at the Miracle Mile Drive-In. In a multiplex age, it seems almost quaint that a single-screen drive-in would anchor a shopping center. But this was no ordinary screen. It was a 70 mm, wide-angle behemoth housed in a tower 85 feet high, 140 feet wide, and supported by floodlit pylons originally painted blue, orange, and pink. Set far back from the road, behind the shopping center, the tower served as a beacon along South Telegraph Road, as did the 33-foot-tall sign placed hard by the highway and fitted out with neon stars and arrows that directed as many as 1,800 cars for each show to the entrance ramps of the theater’s double-lane, 900-foot-long access road.
In the decades following the opening of the first drive-in (in Camden, New Jersey, in 1933), any distinction these outdoor movie theaters achieved was more technological than architectural, more Guinness World Records than AIA, and while the Miracle Mile Drive-In obviously had its by-the-numbers superlatives, it was equally notable for its Modern design. Elton and Marjorie Samuels, owner-operators of Miracle Mile, had three other drive-ins in Southeast Michigan, but none possessed the formal interest of their theater in Bloomfield Township. Indeed, it may have been this specific location that caused them to commission Robert Snyder, then head of architecture at Cranbrook Academy of Art, five miles away in Bloomfield Hills. Snyder’s design was described in the trade press at the time, and not inappropriately, as both “Japanese” and “Neo-Gothic,” a reference to its most distinctive features: repeated peaked gables that appear on virtually every building except the screen tower. Above simple concrete block structures, set in staggered patterns to create visual interest through spacing and projections, Snyder’s “galloping roof” defined the ticket booths, concession stands, administrative offices, utility sheds, and miscellaneous other pavilions across the thirty-two-acre site.[12] As simple as this element is, it reflects Snyder’s awareness of midcentury architectural discourse, when designers in his orbit—especially Eero Saarinen and Minoru Yamasaki—were pushing Modernism’s formal language “beyond the box” towards a new emotionalism and expressionism. At the same time, Snyder’s decision to equip some of the gables with flashing white lights along the cornice reflects his equal awareness of commercial exigencies, which required less subtle, more direct means of attraction. Snyder’s comfort with what are today too frequently seen as irreconcilable values of culture and commerce was not unusual at midcentury, but his willingness to use architecture as a bridge between elitism and populism lasted about as long as the drive-in did. The Miracle Mile Drive-In closed in 1986, the same year John Margolies arrived to photograph it; it was demolished a short time later. Like so many of the buildings Margolies documented in Michigan, its heyday had long passed, and with it a brief period when the state’s roadsides were as modern and stylish as the cars that cruised them.
Notes
[1]. Automotive Industries, January 16, 1919, 98.
[2]. Detroit Facts and Director Map (Detroit: Detroit Convention and Tourist Bureau, c. 1930).
[3]. The term “commercial vernacular” is problematic, despite its common use, because it too frequently implies anonymity and lack of design intention; by contrast, the buildings discussed here all have known architects and obvious design intentions.
[4]. On Woodward Avenue’s importance, see Anthony Ambrogio and Sharon Luckerman, Cruisin’ the Original: Woodward Avenue (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2006), and George Galster, Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). See also Susan Whitall, “Woodward Avenue: Michigan’s Main Street,” Detroit News, March 12, 2007.
[5]. The State and Fox Theatres both occupied the ground stories of tall office buildings; east on Elizabeth was the seventeen-story Wolverine Hotel, now demolished.
[6]. See, for example, Noble’s other work in Detroit: his 1927 Miller-Storm Company Office on Linwood Street and his 1929 Lee Plaza on West Grand Boulevard.
[7]. In 1997, the Elwood was moved two blocks away, to the corner of Adams and Brush, to make way for surface parking that, in effect, serves as a plaza on Woodard for Comerica Park. In its current location, the Elwood is pulled back from the sidewalk and hemmed in by multilevel garages. See Kathryn Bishop Eckert, Buildings of Michigan, rev. ed. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 70.
[8]. John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, The Gas Station in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 18–47.
[9]. On the evolution of the drum prototype, see Chester H. Liebs, Main Street to Miracle Mile: American Roadside Architecture (1985; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 106–07.
[10]. For a full analysis of Gruen’s design for Northland, see David Smiley, Pedestrian Modern: Shopping and American Architecture, 1925–1956 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 193–205.
[11]. Northland was renovated into an enclosed shopping mall in 1974. Though some of Gruen’s original details were retained, and are visible today, overall Northland has been utterly disfigured by careless rebuilding.
[12]. Haviland F. Reves, “The New Miracle Mile Drive-In,” BoxOffice, October 17, 1960, section 2.