Three Generations at the Shopping Center Planter, 1950s

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Three Generations at the Shopping Center Planter, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Three Generations at the Shopping Center Planter, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1953–1958

AA-2026-53790D

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Two women and a girl sit on a bench built into a low stone planter full of yellow marigolds, posed for the camera in the middle of what is clearly a shopping center parking lot. The parking lot is the point: in the mid-1950s, the suburban strip mall was new enough to feel like a destination in itself, and someone decided that what this expanse of asphalt needed was a decorative planter with a bench, the kind of civic flourish that assumed shoppers would want to linger. A Buick and a dark Ford sit in their spaces behind the trio, well-chromed and enormous, because fuel was cheap and the idea that it might not always be had not yet occurred to Detroit. The women are dressed for an outing — full skirts, careful hair — which is how you dressed to go shopping then, because shopping was an occasion rather than an errand. The pennant bunting strung above the lot announces something, a sale or a grand opening, the kind of event that drew a crowd to a parking lot and made it feel, briefly, like somewhere worth commemorating.

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