Bringing together an innovative history of architecture, capitalism, and the state, Gabrielle Esperdy's Modernizing Main Street shows how the business conditions and political programs during the Great Depression intersected and produced a new retail landscape in Main Street America. Through storefront facades literally the changing face of retail Esperdy shows how an obscure New Deal finance program, the Modernization Credit Plan (MCP), enabled small business owners to update their storefronts and, in the process, help to prime the pump of the economy. Esperdy emphasizes the capitalist orientation of the New Deal, showing how business-friendly programs like the MCP successfully achieved their goals, and she correctly criticizes much of the existing literature on the New Deal for overly focusing on large-scale monumental architecture, avant garde painting, and socialized public housing. To understand the New Deal's impact on architecture, we must look to the ubiquitous storefront, not the occasional stadium. Storefronts, she points out, were everywhere. Small business owners, already under pressures that had been mounting in the late 1920s, embraced modern facades, if not always modern business practices, as a way to draw reluctant shoppers into their stores. Manufacturers embraced this financing to sell new materials like structural glass and extruded aluminum. Synthesizing the fiscal and the formal, Esperdy offers a wide variety of historians a new perspective on their own sub-disciplines, while offering a genuinely new perspective on New Deal-era America. Facades might be on the surface but this history of facades is not. New Deal policymakers seized on business construction as a way to prime the pump of the economy and, to that end, created a novel financing scheme to enable businesses to modernize their buildings. Except for chain stores, during the Great Depression most businesses stopped investing in business construction, which helped to paralyze the economy. At the same time, however, the government did not have the resources to pay for the rebuilding of America's commercial building stock. Signed into law as Title I of the National Housing