Throughout much of the city’s history the central retail district was the principle shopping area. It was here that one would come to browse for the latest fashions as well as pick up many of the necessities for daily life. Mainstreet was a vibrant hub of activity, with customers and citizens alike congregating in a dense milieu that has come to symbolize for many the city at the turn of the twentieth- century.
This chapter examines the central retail district1 in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth-century, a time when the district was at its apex. Demand for space was high and customers abundant in the premiere shopping district in the city. The spatial and functional compositions of the district are studied at the micro- scale, looking at individual buildings and aggregating them to the block-faces2. Dundas Street, London’s mainstreet was the spine of the district along which most shops located. Richmond Street, the second most important artery in the city, is also included in this area.
The central retail district was a densely developed area due to the intense demand for space within its limited area. Land values in the district were
exponentially higher than anywhere else in the city. A discussion of the land values opens this chapter, framing the results which follow. Then the functional
composition of the district is analysed, with a specific breakdown of its retail land- uses. Following the land-use analysis is a detailed study of the area’s built forms,
1 The term mainstreet retailing is used interchangeably with the central retail district, both
representing the same area along Dundas Street from Talbot to Wellington and Richmond Street from Carling to King. Extending beyond this area is the general downtown core of the city, its Central Business District, which had a wider array of functions including office, governmental and industrial. The CBD, core and downtown are all used to describe this larger area.
2 A block-face is comprised of the buildings and the parcels in a block abutting a street
segment. An example of a block-face would be the north side of Dundas Street between Richmond and Clarence Streets.
namely the three elements of the town-plan, and their interrelatedness. Also considered are the three-dimensional qualities of the interior and exterior of the buildings which line mainstreet, and their formation into a vibrant streetscape.
This chapter adds to our knowledge concerning the functioning of the downtown cores of cities at the turn of the twentieth-century. The dynamic nature of the downtown is demonstrated by looking at the changes in the land-use
composition and assessed values between 1880 and 1930. A major finding is the realization that, despite the intense demand for space, the central retail district did not expand, and was a relatively small area. Conclusions are drawn as to the uses of the downtown and the relationship to the underlying town-plan. Looking at all of the townscape elements at the micro-scale provides evidence for their inter-
relatedness throughout the urban development process.
Recent books have on the downtown include Isenberg’s (2004) social history of the downtown and Fogelson’s (2001) study of the rise and fall of the city centre; both of which are general surveys of the downtowns of (North) American cities. Richard Dennis includes a chapter on shopping in the urban downtowns around 1900 in his volume which addresses the rationalization of cities undergoing modernity (Dennis 2008); however, he is almost exclusively concerned with the grand department stores and their movements; he makes a similar argument as Domosh (1998) that these important institutions can change the social practices of their users and the areas where they locate. These volumes lack the comprehensive analysis of the micro-scale form and functioning of the core during its heyday
outside of the department stores that have already been well-documented (Bluestone et al. 1981; Leach 1993; Ashmore 2006; Miller 1981).
The research presented in this chapter more closely aligns with the work produced from an earlier generation of researchers who were examining the form and functioning of downtown cores. Murphy and Vance produced a series of studies that proposed methods for delineating the downtown core (Murphy and Vance 1954b) and mapping their internal structure (Murphy, Vance, and Epstein 1955). Their comparative study of nine central business districts shows the generally tight structure and the importance of the peak value intersection (Murphy and Vance 1954a). Although these works are more typical of that found in this thesis, they differ in that they look only at the downtowns in the post-World War II period. They
are not historical works, and they also look at the entire Central Business District, whereas this research is concerned primarily with the mainstreet shopping district, or central retail district. Bowden’s work on nineteenth and early-twentieth century San Francisco (1971) is perhaps the most closely related paper to this chapter. He details the changes of downtown San Francisco, showing how it was a dynamic organism, and idea that will be tested here, although in a much-smaller city without the intense development pressures found in large cities.
The aforementioned works miss the opportunity to examine the morphology of the core, and its relationship to the functioning of the central retail district. This chapter shows the form, function and composition of this important area at the height of its success. In doing so, this chapter does reveal an inherent logic in these selling areas due to the profit maximization strategies of the retail operators. It thus is an example of how the underlying motivations of capitalism shape the landscape, and demonstrates that these drives were pervasive over a century ago.