09 · American Vernacular & Regional

Commercial Vernacular

c. 1850–1930

The American Main Street block: brick fronts with big glass storefronts below, regular windows and a decorated cornice above.

Look for

Cornice Sash window Flat roof

Sixth Street, Austin, Texas: an example of Commercial Vernacular architecture — Sixth Street, Austin, Texas. Photo: ajay_suresh, CC BY 4.0

Strand Historic District, Galveston, Texas — **Strand Historic District** Galveston, Texas · Da Lien, CC BY-SA 4.0

Larimer Square, Denver, Colorado — **Larimer Square** Denver, Colorado · Pdubs.94, CC BY 4.0

Pioneer Square, Seattle, Washington — **Pioneer Square** Seattle, Washington · Toohool, CC BY-SA 4.0

Old Sacramento, Sacramento, California — **Old Sacramento** Sacramento, California · Morn (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0

what it is

Commercial Vernacular buildings are the two- and three-story brick blocks of American main streets. Each building shares side walls with its neighbors. The ground floor is a storefront of large plate glass windows, often with a recessed entrance and a row of small transom windows above. Upper floors, used for offices, meeting halls or apartments, have evenly spaced windows. Decoration is concentrated at the top: a cornice of stepped brick or pressed sheet metal, often carrying the building's name or date.

The architectural historian Richard Longstreth, in The Buildings of Main Street (1987), calls the most common form the two-part commercial block, with a public ground floor for shops and a separate upper zone. The Grainfield Opera House in Grainfield, Kansas (1887), has a Mesker Brothers cast iron storefront below a meeting hall. Austin's Sixth Street Historic District preserves nine blocks of two- and three-story masonry commercial buildings, most built by the 1880s.

how to spot one

Cornice A deep, overhanging ledge that caps the top of a facade. It is often supported by brackets and marks where the building ends. Sash window A window made of one or more glass-filled frames, called sashes, that slide up and down in grooves. It is standard on Georgian and Federal houses and common on Victorian buildings. Flat roof A roof that is level or nearly level, often edged by a low wall called a parapet. It is standard on modernist buildings and on Pueblo adobe buildings of the American Southwest.

Also look for

Round arch Keystone Pilaster

history

Commercial Vernacular has no single designer. Local builders and owners put these buildings up across the United States from the 1850s on, usually without an architect. Manufactured parts reduced their cost: cast iron columns for storefronts, plate glass, and, from the 1880s, sheet metal facades and cornices sold by catalog. The Mesker Brothers of St. Louis and George L. Mesker & Co. of Evansville, Indiana, sold storefronts to every state; a 1915 catalog listed 4,130 in Indiana, 2,915 in Illinois and 2,646 in Kentucky.

The type remained standard into the 1920s. After that, shopping strips built for cars, and later shopping malls, drew business away from many downtowns. In 1977 the National Trust for Historic Preservation began a pilot program to revive the main streets of Galesburg, Illinois, Madison, Indiana, and Hot Springs, South Dakota. In 1980 it founded the National Main Street Center and added 30 more towns in six states.

where to find it

Historic main streets everywhere: Austin's 6th Street, small-town squares across the country, and older commercial strips in big cities.

easy to confuse with

Italianate Low roofs on deep eaves with ornamental brackets, tall round-topped windows with heavy hoods, and square cupolas.

E. V. Haughwout Building, an example of Cast Iron

Cast Iron Prefabricated iron facades: slender columns, huge windows, and identical arched bays repeating by the dozen.