The Places of Sense Chronicles

Recently, I had the privilege of working in Cumberland, Maryland this past year.  Cumberland is not just any place – it has a history extending to the French and Indian War, where a young George Washington made a name for himself as an officer in the British army.  Nestled in the Appalachian Mountains in the thin neck of land separating western Maryland from its eastern communities and metro areas, Cumberland has a stunning setting of rolling hillsides marked by a multitude of church steeples.  It is rather eye-catching – you cannot miss it when driving into town.  At night, the church steeples are lit up, making for an even more dramatic scene.

Cumberland is a timepiece in architecture and history – a place that time has forgotten, especially in its downtown district where it reflects its early 20^th century hey-day.  Downtown’s scale is different from most small rural communities I’ve come to know in my travels.  It features a mix of good-sized commercial buildings designed in the Romanesque, High Victorian Gothic, Classical Revival, and Art Moderne.  And it is all intact – not much appears to have changed on these buildings in the decades since they were built.  Except for an ill-conceived pedestrian mall installed along Baltimore Street, downtown’s main commercial thoroughfare.  The city fathers recently decided to remove it, albeit for a one-way street.  But at least the architecture remains a tangible link to what was a glorious past.  Downtown vacancies are high but there are signs of investment here and there.

In many respects, Cumberland makes me think of Galena, Illinois – another place where time stood still.  Most people may know Galena as the one-time home of President Ulysses S. Grant but it was long a lead-mining town that ran its course after the Civil War.  After that, Galena was a backwater town.  Its lack of commercial activity and declining population left Galena and its citizens little money to do anything.  Hence, the two and three-story, mostly Italianate buildings and storefronts lining its Main Street were left untouched for decades.  It would not be until the 1960s, within the backdrop of the nation’s burgeoning preservation movement, that Galena’s small-town charm and architecture would appeal to a new influx of homebuyers and investors.  Today, Galena is a tourist mecca.  It has boutiques, restaurants, and bed and breakfasts – everything that one would want for a getaway destination.  While it struggles like small towns with keeping all its storefronts full, it bustles with people most days and weekends.  A close preservation colleague of mine calls Galena a place where preservation ran amok.  To me, it’s a community that transformed itself.  It had to.

My thoughts on Cumberland stretch to Galena – can or could it become another Galena?  Cumberland is in every bit of the word a quintessential legacy city – it has lost almost one-third to one-half of its population in recent decades due to the closure of factories and diminishment of its employment base.  The level of disinvestment in Cumberland’s neighborhoods is, according to my guess, likely more extensive in this community than Galena probably ever experienced in its downtime.  Galena just seemed to pause in time in the most literal sense.  Cumberland just declined.

But back to the subject of this essay – Morris Lapidus.  Lapidus was a Jewish-Ukrainian immigrant born in 1920, whose family fled from Russian pogroms of the period to settle in New York just before the Great Depression.  He then attended Columbia University and became an architect.  Today, he is mostly known for his pleasure palaces in Miami, most notably the Fontainebleau Hotel, a 1,200-room complex noted for its sweeping, curving form, and sleek Modernist design.  It is now listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Before his glory days as a hotel designer, Lapidus was a retail storefront designer, first with the firm of Ross Frankel in New York, then for a short time with his father’s company, U.S. Metals.  His storefronts were clearly a break from the past with an emphasis on sleek, backlit sign lettering; the use of porcelain enamel wall panels and expansive storefront glazing; and the placement of small rectangular “jewel box” display cases near storefront entrances meant to attract the attention of shoppers to the store’s most special merchandise.  I did not know anything about Lapidus and his cool modern storefronts until midway through my career at the National Main Street Center when I met up with Anthony Rubano of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, as the office was then called.  At that time, Anthony and his colleagues at the Agency were busy producing a series of articles on Modernism and Main Street when much of the Main Street educational and training materials still focused on rehabbing and reconstructing the “original” storefront.

After hanging around Anthony and reading his articles, I became a fan of Modernism on Main Street.  Basically, history did not stop in the 1940s with Art Deco vitrolite and structural glass storefronts.  Lapidus’ storefronts were so cool to look at – at least through the images in Anthony’s writings and the HABS photos of them I see from time to time when researching the history of the communities I was working in.  I had never seen one in person.  They are such cool storefronts to look at.  To me at least, they sprang out of a George Jetson cartoon – metal and glassy storefronts that seemed like some harbinger of a space age to come.

During one of my recent visits to Cumberland for a community meeting, a historian with the National Park Service mentioned to me that Lapidus designed at least two storefronts in downtown Cumberland.  One was one I happened to walk by during one of my earlier visits to photo-document the town.  There was something special about this storefront given its glass display boxes and the porcelain enamel panels adorning the building’s first-floor walls.  The storefront, located at the corner of Liberty and Baltimore Streets in the former Manhattan Building, was in decent shape despite the years since its installation and the wear and tear of the businesses that rented the space over the decades.  It looked highly intact and quite amazing – a compelling clue of a past that was not that long ago.

I am writing about this one particular storefront as it’s actually threatened with total removal by a preservation tax credit project – yes, not kidding about that. A developer is proposing a hotel for this three-story 100-year old commercial building, which is a great investment for a downtown area that is struggling to fill its empty spaces – but why sacrifice the storefront? Perhaps not all the players involved with this project are aware of this special display of Modernism. How many preservationists know about Mr. Lapidus, let alone anyone else? I hear it is still early in the tax credit review process but this storefront is Lapidus at his best. Mr. Rubano would certainly agree.

While this story plays out in Cumberland – whether this storefront will be preserved or not – I wonder why Main Street Modernism still doesn’t get its due. And why preservationists and Main Streeters alike are not doing enough to embrace the style changes that made our downtown a picture window into the past – and the very recent past. It seems like every downtown I visit these days has some Mid-Century storefront with its Roman brick and stone piers and bulkheads painted over or taken out altogether to recreate a storefront that looks from the 1880s but likely never existed. Let’s have diversity – storefronts from the 1950s and 60s are cool.

Mid-Century Main Street buildings and their storefronts seem to be the victimization of the Main Street movement itself.  Every building downtown must look cute and quaint – a packaged history to those who think time did stop.

We’ll see what happens with the Manhattan Building storefront that I became so fond of in my Cumberland work.  I hope this Morris Lapidus gem stays where it’s at and gets the refresh that it needs, not occupying space somewhere in a landfill.  Yes, there is an odd benefit to having a community stop in time.  It gets us to see history up close, even in an old Lapidus storefront.

Downtown Cumberland boasts a number of other highly-intact 1920s, 1930s structural glass storefronts. Photos by the author.