Rethinking Region along the Railroads: Architecture and Cultural Economy in the Industrial Southwest, 1890–1930

As D. W. Meinig has suggested, regions are best understood as dynamic processes, part of a continuous shaping of human culture. Regions are not “natural” phenomena but historical constructions. This is certainly true of that malleable category, the Southwest. As the nation expanded from its colonial boundaries, its location shifted ever westward. By 1904, the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, railroads had finally domesticated the nation’s southern frontier, fostering settlement and development. It would seem that under these circumstances the location of the Southwest would finally be a settled matter. Instead, the arrival of the railroads produced two distinctive but occasionally overlapping regions. The first, and better known, Tourist Southwest, is the desert land stretching from western Texas to California at the far southwestern boundaries of the North American continent. Architecturally speaking, this Southwest is defined by a style of building that interprets the historical traditions of the place: Native American pueblos, Spanish missions, and Santa Fe’s mythic yet modern tradition of adobe buildings. The Tourist Southwest has remained a fixed geographical category in the minds of most Americans, in large part because of its consistent architectural image. By contrast, the Industrial Southwest has disappeared from public memory. It was, for a brief period of time between 1890 and 1930, a powerful economic and cultural system, with St. Louis as its capital. Stretched across Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas all the way to San Antonio, its territory has today been absorbed into a noman’s-land at the edge of the Midwest and the South (Map 1). Unlike the Tourist Southwest, the architecture of the Industrial Southwest has no regionally distinctive style. It is not defined by common building materials or forms. Instead, it is bounded by the cultural economy: an intricate series of financial, industrial, and commercial connections between clients and designers, linked by common transportation and communication systems. Although there are occasional symbolic references to the Alamo, much of the regional architecture of the Industrial Southwest actually rejected the specifics of place, of history, of climate, instead emulating the Beaux-Arts design tradition as symbolic of its progressive connection to the national, modern, and industrial world. paula lupkin