Insufficiently Vixeny, but who cares

Eldon Davis, The architect of the California Coffee Shop Style has died, as you may have heard. (Thanks to all who thought of your host and sent in the news.) I thought of his work today as I looked at this set of pictures of Minneapolis and St. Paul in the 70s. They’re black and white, which adds to the grimness, but not much. You really get the feel for the era – how the old architecture looked tired and broken and forgotten, and the new leviathans rose without care for the city or the insignificant creatures who scuttled below. It’s a miracle we saved anything, but that’s probably because they didn’t have the money to tear it all down. There’ll be time for that later, you know.

The more I think about the City Center project, the more irritated I get. I was probably a booster at the time, since it was Progress, and had two skyscrapers and a big thrilling indoor shopping mall, but in retrospect it was an urban disaster. It contributed handsomely to city coffers, which is no small thing, and kept downtown moving forward, which at the time seemed a difficult proposition, but like all big dreams it required the destruction of a hundred prosaic realties that said more about the life of the city than any blockbuster project ever will. Plus, it was ugly. It is ugly. It will always be ugly. It was a windowless fortress sheathed with undulating panels of grey-hued aggregate, a motif extended almost 50 stories into the sky in the main tower. There was a parking ramp with a different facade, and a mirrored facade for the triangular AMFAC hotel. It destroyed, oh, at least two dozen individual buildings, ranging from an old skinny office building from the teens to a few old variety stores to a peculiarly charmless white hotel, a venerable Chinese chow-mein joint, and so many other places cities now covet, and can’t quite figure out how to attract and keep. And, two theaters. Yes, we tore down this:

It was old and porny by the end, and the era of the downtown theater was over, but still. You’d think you’d preserve this. Graft it on to the new buildings. But no. Hey, that’s a brilliant example of a style that will never come around again! Let’s demolish it!

How does this relate to coffee-shop architecture? Oh, I don’t know. It just struck me that commercial architecture in the age of the streetcar was human-scaled and solid and occasionally quite stylish, and car-era commercial architecture is much less so – except for coffee-shops and restaurants of the 50s and 60s. Food + cars + mobility + the pleasures of pie and coffee and pancakes and a Winston afterwards, as was often the case in those blue-smoke days, produced an utterly American style that couldn’t have come from anywhere else. It still speaks to a few of us, and it still seems like it was supposed to be the road forward instead of a detour to a cul-de-sac. The seventies would turn its back on all that, and put a mansard roof on everything and call it Classy.

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Some random shots that never made it into the Black and White World – the movies I’ve been watching haven’t been interesting enough, at least visually, or because they’re light-heartened romances that revolve around A Misunderstanding, something that would be cleared up if people didn’t leave the room in a huff or ask a question or two. They annoy me. Such a movie:

Ray Milland is the smooth debonair eligible wealthy guy. I’ve always had a standoffish reaction to him; he seemed like Cary Grant’s less interesting and slightly resentful brother. Great in “Lost Weekend,” but his career went on long enough to squander the movie-star coin on TV crap and things like “The Thing With Two Heads.” But the director is an interesting story:

I first encountered the name in a biography of Thurber, who was a college chum and collaborator. In the book he seemed to be the fellow who enjoyed life, got out there, did things, shook hands, trod the boards, took the bows – while Thurber sat in small smoky rooms and mooned over unattainable boring women and fancied himself the Artist, at least compared to Nuge. Both ended up with a hellacious drinking problem, it seems.

But the real reason I wanted to watch the movie:

Paulette Goddard, who is funny enough, but doesn’t have the same vixeny spark she had in other films. I still have a hard time believing she was married to Burgess Meredith. Her page at this great site has an entry that sums up an era quite nicely: “begins a romance with George Gershwin, whom she met at party at the Edward G. Robinsons.” She later married the author of “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

http://www.glamourgirlsofthesilverscreen.com/show/104/Paulette+Goddard/index.html

Also watched this:

It’s a movie about God speaking on the radio. We never get to hear Him, although I’m sure he sounded like Morgan Freeman. The movie isn’t about what people are told, it’s about the effect such an event would have. Sci-fi for the Saturday Evening Post crowd, you might think, but you know, it’s quite an interesting movie. The woman who plays the Mother:

Recognize? No? The credits:

Later known as the First Lady. And those were the days when such appellations were intended without irony. Generally. They might be used with gentle irony in a comedy. Starring Robert Benchley.

Well, we’ve some links today, we do. Say hello to the latest batch from the Bureau of Corporate Allegory, and of course the interminable 1930s magazine ads section, here. Enjoy! See you around.