THE MODERNIZED CHARLES F. BERG STORE BUILDING (1930) PORTLAND, OREGON
| dc.contributor.author | Butler, Heather V. | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-02-27T00:44:50Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-02-27T00:44:50Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2018 | |
| dc.description | 76 pages | |
| dc.description.abstract | In February 1930, a few months after the stock market crash, a downtown Portland, Oregon retailer, Charles F. Berg, opened a new, expanded location of his well-known women's apparel store. This new store, at 615 SW Broadway between SW Morrison and Alder Streets, was in a commercial masonry structure built by the Dolph family around 1902 on the site of their former home. It was transformed into the spectacularly modernized Charles F. Berg Store Building, its fa9ade supplied by the Grand Rapids Design Service of the Grand Rapids Store Equipment Corporation. This formerly unremarkable storefront became a dramatic Parisian Art Deco fa9ade of black terracotta and 18-karat gold, punctuated by incised, angular naturalistic and abstract motifs in cream and teal spandrels. In its day, only two other American buildings featured gold ornament. And only a few, and none in Portland, featured dark terra cotta cladding. No other retailers downtown used the Art Deco style on its exterior, although some used touches of it in their modernized interiors. The terracotta cladding of the Charles F. Berg Store and its rivals and neighbors was supplied by Gladding, McBean & Company, a Lincoln, California manufacturer and a major contributor to the architecture of the western United States. Most of Portland's downtown buildings were clad in white, in the preferred Beaux-Arts Neoclassical style. Although the modernized Charles F. Berg Store Building's Art Deco exterior remained mostly unchanged, its retail architect Kenneth C. Welch shifted his work to the Streamline Moderne style when he promoted the 1934- 1943 FHA Modernize Main Street movement. From WWII on, he became known as a designer of shopping centers. The Charles F. Berg Store attempted to compete with them by opening a suburban branch in the late 1950s, but the company was sold in 1975. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/30498 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-US | |
| dc.subject | historic preservation | |
| dc.subject | Charles F. Berg | |
| dc.subject | preservation concerns | |
| dc.subject | Main Street | |
| dc.title | THE MODERNIZED CHARLES F. BERG STORE BUILDING (1930) PORTLAND, OREGON | |
| dc.type | Terminal Project |