1900 - 1914 The Consumer Society  Jump to:
In this section:  The press and the city life   The rise of advertising   Early film industry: Foundation of Hollywood
First movie theaters: Nickelodeons   Early European film   The first Hollywood stars   Ragtime and dance
Newpapers and City Life - The Origins of the Skyscraper
Newspaper delivery teams: Cities bred newspapers, and made possible the mass distribution of a daily press. View larger
Modern Industrial Buildings and Fairs
America's most advanced ideas in architectural construction have found their widest dissemination through a series of great industrial exhibitions or fairs, beginning with New York's Crystal Palace Fair of 1853 and the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. In these early fairs a number of greenhouses constructed of glass and iron introduced Americans to the possibilities of metal construction such as that in Labrouste's Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève and Paxton's London Crystal Palace.
The Columbian Exposition of 1893-1894, not only gave Sullivan an opportunity to show the excellence of his design, but even more strikingly, through its great "Hall of Science", copied after the French Hall of Science, impressed upon the people the possibilities in well-designed truss construction. That Chicago fair was still more important for its influence upon city planning. Its architects, many of whom had been trained in Paris, had an eye to vistas and placed their chief monuments at significant focal points. The system of parks that grew out of that exposition definitely benefited the city where it was held. Other expositions -in Buffalo, St. Louis, San Diego, and San Francisco -- gave many of the better known American architects opportunities to influence American taste.
The Chicago Century of Progress fair, in 1933, introduced many novel schemes of construction, most of which were too bizarre to be practical. The chief advantage to be gained from a study of this Chicago fair lay in the use of color in architecture and in the development of lighting effects, which began to play an increasingly extensive role in the design of buildings after 1930. The New York World of Tomorrow fair of 1939-1940 showed increasing skill in functional design and a renewed interest in group planning. The model city exhibit in the Perisphere unites the best of the practical suggestions resulting from the last fifty years of city planning. The contemporaneous Golden Gate Exposition at San Francisco, on the other hand, stressed highly decorated Pacific aboriginal and Indian styles.
After the depression of 1929, when American businessmen found that the highest skyscrapers could not pay, architects turned to the design of smaller buildings with greater refinement. The discovery of new materials, particularly glass brick and weatherproof metal alloys, and the development of air conditioning led to the design of new building types. The Corning Glass Works Building at 718 Fifth Avenue, New York City, with sculptured details by Sidney Waugh, marks a step forward in design. Here modern American architectural form reaches a state of refinement comparable to that achieved by the designers of late American motorcars. The function of this building as a display room and offices for Steuben glassware is completely expressed by the immaculate design. Its sparkling glass units, framed in bars of Indiana limestone and nickel silver, suggest the skilled workmanship in the product sold.
The press and city life
With the first post-war boom in the 1860's, observers began to note that New York society was becoming entirely based upon wealth, social prestige being won by those who had the most splendid carriages, drawing-rooms, and opera boxes. Concentrating large numbers of people into smalI and tightly defined geographical areas, American cities provided the mass readership that made the distribution of a daily press practical. Many of the new city dwellers had immigrated from smalI country towns or from other countries or continents, and their sense of dislocatian provided a context for the rise of newspaper reading.
Through the wire services and news agencies, newspapers provided word from the migrants' homes. At the turn of the century there were more than a thousand foreign-language daily newspapers published in the United States. Immigrants were many times more likely to read a paper in New York than they had been in their native Minsk or Naples, whether that paper was written in their own language or in the English they were learning as part of their process of Americanization.
Even more importantly, newspapers offered their readers explanations of city life. In their exposes of government corruption, their gossip about the metropolitan elite, and in their scandalmongering pursuit of "human interest" stories as William Randolph Hearst put it, stories about "crime and underwear" - they gave substance and form to the anxieties of metropolitan existence. The newspapers proclaimed themselves the people' s guardians, in smalI matters as well as large.

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