During a particularly random Wikipedia spiral, I stumbled across the story of Best Products, the “catalog showroom” retailer that competed with Service Merchandise and went out of business in the late 90’s. Growing up the store meant little to me other than having to go there so my parents could buy some mundane item or another (although I do remember my dad getting a particularly pretty strand of pearls for my mom for her birthday) or paging through the color-coded catalog, looking at all of the mundane items at home. That said, I knew little about the retailer’s contributions to the architectural landscape from 1974 through 1980 until I stumbled across its Wikipedia page—who would have thought that a fairly conservative couple-cum-retail-magnates from Virginia want to revolutionize the way the suburban retail landscape would look?
The firm responsible for carrying out their vision of turning retail on its ear was SITE, (anagram for Sculpture in the Environment), a high-concept architectural firm in New York committed to elevating the general public’s self-awareness via grandiose, daring building projects. Each of the eight BEST buildings were meant to generate both internal and external dialogue, from doubting the wisdom of entering a building that appears to be crumbling before you, to allowing yourself to be put on display in what could be termed a human-sized terrarium, to discussing the physics of a building that literally looks like its’ been hoisted off of one end.
Despite this seemingly progressive attitude towards retailing, BEST’s business model was not one of longevity, and certainly not one that could anticipate the advent of the Internet and the rise of the big-box discounters, and its swift demise rendered many of the buildings left in its wake completely useless to any other business—only one of the eight buildings survives in its original form today, ironically both as a Christian chapel and the only one that looks like it’s been left abandoned as an intentional line of trees bisect the building, encouraging growth all around the structure.
To get an idea of exactly how cool these projects were, a documentary made sometime in the 80’s looked at each building individually, and is now posted on YouTube in four parts:
Note: in this segment they also mention the now-demolished Ghost Parking Lot that lined Dixwell Avenue in the Hamden Plaza parking lot—it’s wild to see the difference in the area between then and now.
