Calder Circle Community Center

Calder Circle Community Center

Calder Circle Community Center Photograph by Gerald Moorhead
1931. 2590–2598 Calder Ave.

Wholesale grocer, oil, and real estate investor John Henry Phelan built the Calder Circle Community Center—careful examination reveals that there are indeed quarter-circular curb cuts at the 10th Street–Calder intersection, making it a circle. It is a retail strip, with one-story wings splayed to either side of a diagonally aligned two-story central block capped by a central tower bay. The outspread wings frame a surface parking lot, a spatial arrangement that caused architectural historian Richard Longstreth to note that Calder Circle is an early example of a shopping center that spatially addresses its parking lot rather than, in an older, more urban fashion, the sidewalk and street.

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