| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Richard Longstreth. The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914–1941. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1999. Pp. xviii, 248. $55.00.

This book is the second installment in a two-volume landmark study of Los Angeles as a site of innovation in the history of American commercial architecture in the twentieth century. In the first volume, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 (1997), Richard Longstreth analyzed the regional dispersion that shifted retailing from the downtown core to the periphery. Now the author describes another facet of the centripetal process for which the region is renowned: the role of Los Angeles in the nationwide transformation in the character of shopping. Once shopping was characterized by pedestrian-centered activity in physical spaces where sales personnel dominated the exchanges necessary for transacting business. Today, shopping takes place in automobile-centered locations, and customers, not clerks, call the shots. Longstreth has a dual purpose in this work, which he realizes with effective writing style and impressive documentation. The first is to demonstrate the extent to which these fundamental changes in daily life in the United States occurred according to patterns established originally in Los Angeles. The second is to underscore the multiple causes that propelled the changes he describes. . . .

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