Join us for a captivating journey into the golden age of San Francisco’s grand department stores, featuring historian and author Anne Evers Hitz. In this program, Hitz will share fascinating stories from her books, Lost Department Stores of San Francisco and Emporium Department Store, detailing how iconic stores like City of Paris, I. Magnin, and The White House once shaped the city’s identity and retail culture.
We will also dive into the architectural innovations and stylistic trends that made these grand stores the jewels of urban landscapes. Together, they’ll uncover the rise, transformation, and lasting legacy of these retail palaces that defined 20th-century America.
This program uncovers the rise and fall of these commercial giants, delving into their social and architectural significance while celebrating their lasting legacy. Perfect for anyone interested in architecture, retail history, or the cultural fabric of San Francisco.
Presented by...
Jeff Hardwick, Director of the Division of Public Programs, National Endowment for the Humanities. Author of Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream. Jeff Hardwick's academic background is in American Studies, with a doctorate from Yale University, a master’s from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware, and an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2003, he published a biography of the émigré architect Victor Gruen, Mall Maker, with the University of Pennsylvania Press. He has taught 20th-century American history, architectural history, and public history at numerous universities and currently teaches in the Smithsonian Institution’s History of Decorative Arts program at George Washington University.
Anne Evers Hitz, Freelance Writer, descendant of one of the Emporium's founders, and Author of "Lost Department Stores of San Francisco." Proud to be a fifth-generation San Franciscan, author Anne Evers Hitz has had a long interest in San Francisco history, its lore, and legends. Anne’s most recent book is Lost Department Stores of San Francisco: Six Bygone Stores That Defined an Era (History Press, 2020). She is also the author of Emporium Department Store (Arcadia, 2014) and San Francisco’s Ferry Building (Arcadia, 2017). Anne is a volunteer guide at the Ferry Building for City Guides, a group of local volunteers who give free walking tours of San Francisco.
A graduate of U.C. Berkeley, Hitz is a writer, editor, and project manager who has had her own communications consulting firm in San Francisco for over 25 years. She worked as publicity director for the University of California Press and as an editorial assistant at publishers Oxford University Press and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in New York.
David J. Smiley, Associate Director and Adjunct Associate Professor, GSAPP, Columbia University. Author of Pedestrian Modern: Architecture and Shopping, 1925-1956. Trained as an architect and as an architectural and urban historian, David Smiley’s research and teaching focus on the intersections of architectural and urban theory, design and modernization. He was written about contemporary urban and suburban issues, examining large-scale urban interventions, the single-family house and multi-family housing, the re-use of shopping malls and the recent history of urban planning and urban design. Smiley is especially interested in the making of architectural and planning culture: the ways in which magazines, schools, policies, professional associations and local and regional politics continually reshape the discourse and practices of the built environment. His book, Pedestrian Modern: Architecture and Shopping, 1925-1956 (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), is a study of the ways architects interpreted shopping centers as Modernist architectural and urban projects rather than, or alongside, their role as sites of consumption.
Most recently, Smiley contributed an essay on Broadacre City to the 2017 Museum of Modern Art catalog and exhibit, Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive. He also contributed chapters to Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America, edited by John Archer, Paul J. P. Sandul, Katherine Solomonson (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) and Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies That Transformed a City, edited by Nicholas Dagen Bloom and Matthew Gordon Lasner (Princeton University Press, 2015). Smiley has also written about architecture, cities and suburbs in Perspecta and Lotus magazines, the Urban Design Review, the Journal of Architectural Education, the Journal of Urban History, Buildings and Landscapes, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.
The California Preservation Foundation is a network of more than 35,000 members and supporters who are committed to protecting our shared architectural and cultural heritage. We are a leader in preservation education and advocacy, responding to hundreds of requests for assistance and training more than 3,000 people each year.