The _shop front_ is something that we must have in some shape or other, and, if fairly treated, it would become as decidedly American as business is. It is susceptible of great variety, but care must be taken that it harmonizes with the superstructure. How often we see massive structures of marble, five stories or more, supported on basements of plate glass, apparently; while the real supports are carefully concealed! The best method, so far tried, seems to be that in which the columns are made sufficiently prominent to show their object, and are surmounted by arches, which give a good basis for what comes next above, while affording sufficient window space to the store front.
But we must make up our mind to part with those hideous signboards, which trail their loathsome length across our best buildings, regardless of console or capital or cornice. For the importance of the sign renders it constructive, and it has as much right to take part in the design as a door or a window. Instead of being pinned on like an afterthought, it should be built into the wall, panel fashion, and by a little taste in the selection of the style of letter, it might become one of the most striking features of the whole front. Color would be better for the letters than relief, being more economical and more easily altered.
Our warehouses and even our factories might become imposing objects if appropriately conceived, for is not labor ennobling? Anything that is worth doing, is worth doing well; and if any of our manufacturing towns are hideous, they are not necessarily so.[24] There is a certain grandeur about many such places, with their myriad chimneys and ponderous wheels and whirling engines, that deserves a corresponding grandeur of expression, and some of our Pennsylvania ironworks already afford splendid examples of this. We have seldom been more impressed by the grandeur of mechanical operations than on a recent night visit to one of the large rolling mills of Scranton. The whole interior, vast as a cathedral, was brilliantly lighted by the numerous operations in molten and red-hot iron that were everywhere in progress, and, with its gleaming furnaces, ranged on either hand down the long vista, and glowing here and there from the galleries, really made us feel prouder of our race than did many a dim, dilapidated temple of the Old World.