Taste is (ultimately) political

The 90-year-old pioneer behind Williams-Sonoma.

Nearly 50 years ago, a former department-store window dresser and gourmet home cook took an old hardware store in a rural California town and turned it into a groundbreaking store that changed the way Americans shop for kitchenware.

Interesting story if you think -- as I do -- that people like Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren and now (new to me) Chuck Williams are significant, maybe even historical, figures in their influence on the way we live and how we view our world.

Comments

[JRoth]

Do you remember the cover piece in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine from maybe 10 years ago talking about the democratization of design? Essentially the argument was that more people (in the US) had access to better design than ever before. Whereas even the Eamses had limited reach in their heyday, Gap and Target and Ikea and Williams-Sonoma were bringing well-designed objects to almost everyone in society. No more chasm between, say, JC Penney and Macy's. I thought it was on track (if not exactly right) at the time, and a decade on, the trend has only grown. It's become genuinely difficult to surround yourself with ugly, poorly- (or, perhaps, un-) designed things.

Unfortunately, I think that the public's sense of material quality has suffered at the same time - perhaps in exchange? I'm not sure about that.

[Brian Miller]

I also read that one reaction to this is certain elite tastemakers have embraced the hideous, the ugly, to keep one step ahead still of the now tastefully clad masses. :)

I would note, however, from observation at a local mall in my working class/middle class town, that simple decorum in demeanor and clothing have NOT overall improved for "the masses" overall. Americans are an amazingly slovenly bunch, on the whole.

[Benjamin Hemric]

From an urbanologist's point of view, I'm curious how many of these lifestyle chain stores (Pottery Barn, Sharper Image, Banana Republic, Brookstone, Restoration Hardware, etc.) originated in (more or less) traditional walkable cities the way Williams-Sonoma did (moving to SF in 1958, two years after starting out in a small town).

The reason this interests me is that it seems to me that many people seem to perceive these stores as being "suburban" chain stores. I wonder if this is true? (Also would be interested if anyone has any suggestions as how to research this. The easy internet route usually turns up only corporate web pages with very cursory histories of these companies.)

I also wonder why more of these chains didn't orginate in Manhattan? For instance, in the late 1960s/early 1970s, there were a number of stores / businesses in Manhattan that I was kind of hoping would develop into national chains (e.g., Bazaar Francaise [sp?]; the genuine men's clothing outlets along lower Fifth Ave.; Dean & DeLuca's; Balducci's; Zabar's; Unique Clothing; Canal Jeans; Strand Books; etc.). Ironically a number of them were located in or near the old "Ladies Mile" department store district of Manhattan, a area that has, in fact, now (in the mid-1990s) become the home of "big box" suburban chain stores -- from outside of Manhattan.

(Although two of the stores that I hoped would become chains, did: 1) Barney's and 2) (even outdoing my wildest dreams!) Barne's & Noble [sp?])

[Benjamin Hemric]

Whoops! I meant "originated (more or less) in traditional walkable cities . . ." NOT as I wrote, "originated in (more or less) traditional walkable cities . . " -- which seems to imply that SF is only "more or less" a traditional walkable city!

In any case, what interests me is what kind of environments serve as incubators -- TODAY -- to innovative products and retail concepts. And as a Jane Jacobite, I wonder why traditional walkable cities (e.g., Boston, Philly, Cleveland, Chicago, etc.) haven't produced more than they have? (Or perhaps they have, and I just am not aware of it?)

And, in particular, as someone who has observed the NYC / Manhattan economic environment as a Jane Jacobite for about thirty-five years or so now, I wonder why, in some ways, New York seems to be "importing" retail more than we are "exporting" it? To me, having a Williams-Sonoma in Chelsea (just a few blocks from where Bazaar Francaise was located); having a Starbuck's in SoHo (not far from Dean & DeLuca's which, before I had ever heard of Starbuck's, I had hoped would develop along the very same lines); and having a Pizza Hut in Greenwich Village (one of NYC's Little Italy's, and not far from where the very first pizzeria ever to open in the U.S. was located) are like shipping coal to Newcastle! And that's not to mention how fashion conscious Manhattan has been invaded by a small army of Gap's, Banana Republic's, Old Navy's, Limited's, Victoria Secret's, Men's Warehouse's, etc. (By the way, Lombardi's, cited as the first pizzeria in the U.S. was mentioned in a "New York Post" article today. I believe it just celebrated its 100th anniversary.)

[Brian Miller]

Interesting question, benjamin. I think given the realities of modern American urbanism-traditional cities as either withered remnants of themselves basically dispersed over the countryside as suburban spralwvilles (most midwestern and southeastern cities, arguably), or as hyper-expensive boputique cities (Boston, San Francisco, North Side Chicago), most incubation of new businesses occurs in older strip malls in dense post war suburbs (Los Angeles, for example). The space is relatively cheap, the population relatively dense and increasingly diverse.

[Benjamin Hemric]

Brian, I agree that the spread of suburbanism and the shrinkage of true urbanism is probably the main reason for this phenomenon. (If the phenomenon is indeed a true one, and not just another "trendy" conventional wisdom.)

The paradigm that comes to my mind, in particular, is the one in Jane Jacobs', "Economy of Cities," where she talks about how all cities grow out of trade with other cities. And, thus, in areas of the world where the trading routes are severed or dry up for one reason or another, the various cities connected by them shivel and die (or become anachronistic backwaters). The same holds true if a major city, or a number of smaller cities in the network, die for other reasons (e.g., major natural disasters, epidemics, etc.).

In a way, that seems to me what has happened in the U.S. In post-WWII America, as we all know, most traditional cities experienced dramatic shrinkage, while the new suburban "cities" blossomed in size and grew in number. As a result, truly urban areas had fewer and weaker trading partners for truly urban products and services, while the new suburban "cities" had more and stronger trading partners for their own suburban products and services. So eventually the money and energy of the country went into suburban commerce; this commerce dominated; and it eventually "invaded" the weaker backwater economies of traditional cities (or what was left of them).

I think there are also other reasons for the decline of urban commerce and the rise of suburban commerce -- at least as seen in NYC. Here are some tentative thoughts about them.

I think NYC (and perhaps other cities too) have often suburbanized and de-vitalized their own most economically fertile areas (i.e., their downtowns fed by public transit lines) with economically sterile urban renewal projects, parks and plazas. For instance, many previously economically vital or potentially vital Manhattan streets have been rendered into economically sterile deadwood, so it seems to me, by "plazas" (modeled after that of the Seagram Building's "plaza") bonused under the 1961 revised zoning code and subsequent amendments.

I think there is also what might be called the "Manhattan Disease" (a cousin to the "British Disease") which consists of 1) the belief that commerce is inherently "bad" (a barely necessary evil) and 2) that, in any case, Manhattan products and services are just too "special" to bother marketing in the rest of the country.

But also, to be fair, due to various special anti-business conditions peculiar to Manhattan (e.g., high land costs, high taxes, run down infrastruction, inordinate amounts of red tape, the Mafia "tax", etc.), perhaps many business people were just so busy trying to make a go of their business to begin with that they were too worn out to try and expand them nationally too.

I also think the former "downtowns" of the outer boroughs, like downtown Jamaica, may suffer from being "neither here nor there": they don't have the same transit accessiblity as Manhattan, but they don't have the same auto accessibility as the post WWII suburbs, either. So they have also become, relatively speaking, economic deadwood -- while formerly sterile shopping/commerical areas of boring, "homogenous" post-WWII suburbs have often developed into free-wheeling economic hot houses.

# # #

[Benjamin Hemric]

I forgot to mention two other possibly important reasons for the decline of urban commerce:

1) Over regulation that prevents or retards the development of new and innovative urban products and services

For example, in NYC the development of gypsy cab and jitney services were retarded for a long time (and still may be?) by various regulations intended to protect the City's transit monopoly -- stultifying not only the industry itself, but the outer borough areas served by it.

2) Micro urban planning and zoning

Micro planning and zoning prevent the development of urban problems (e.g., "over" development, congestion, etc.), but maybe they also prevent good urban development too? Could Greenwich Village have developed with today's micro urban planning and zoning? Could cities, in general, have developed the way they did with today's micro urban planning and zoning? (Or would such micro zoning and planning have created a lethal straightjacket?)

And does the prevention of urban problems by government fiat (i.e., zoning) mean that we are precluding the development other, potentially more economically beneficial, non-governemental solutions too? If cities were zoned in the mid-19th Century as they are now, would we had the same dynamic economic development that we experienced -- and would anyone have needed to develop the street car, the elevated or the subway?

# # #