Before the Condo Coast: Clearwater Home Show and Real Estate Archive of 45 Photographs and Negatives Documenting the Retail Culture of Florida’s Postwar Housing Boom, 1951 to 1952

Sunbelt Expansion George Fulmer

Photograph

Clearwater home show and real estate photo archive by George Fulmer, 1951 to 1952, recording the local sales culture that accompanied Florida’s postwar growth: model ranch houses, property storefront advertising, appliance booths, lighting displays, paint counters, floor covering samples, table settings, and floral arrangements prepared for buyers entering the Gulf Coast housing market. Florida’s population rose remarkably from 1950 to 1960, and in Pinellas County it more than doubled, turning communities around Clearwater into a major residential market during the first postwar decade. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 helped returning veterans obtain federally guaranteed home loans, while the end of wartime building restrictions released pent up demand for new single family houses. Fulmer’s commercial assignments place that migration inside its retail setting, where the Florida house was sold not only as land and structure, but as a complete domestic environment of refrigerators, lighting, heating, flooring, paint, patios, tableware, plants, and display-ready interiors.

Photo archive of 45 items, including 19 silver gelatin photographs, and 26 large scale negatives, ranging 3.5 x 5 inches to 4 x 5 inches. Many photographs have correlating negatives while some negatives contain unique images. Contained in 14 annotated studio job envelopes, Clearwater and Pinellas County, Florida, 1951 to 1952. The envelopes identify dated assignments for Francis Paint Store, Y B Refrigeration, Rehbaum Display, Floor Center, Daniels Electric, Kenson Supply, a Flower Show at the Clearwater Civic Center, and Charles R. Fischer’s real estate office, with several descriptions reading “Home Show,” “Home Show Booth,” or “Home Show Board.” Charles R. Fischer’s brick storefront appears with a projecting sidewalk canopy, a hanging sign reading “Charles R. Fischer Real Estate Appraisals,” window cards advertising property listings, and three men in matching dark shirts and white slacks positioned on the bench, sidewalk, and doorway. The home show interiors include Daniels Electric Co. at 204 S. Garden Street advertising fixtures, contract wiring, electric heating, and Wesix “Wiredheat”; Rehbaum’s Kelvinator Maytag booth with refrigerators, washers, stoves, and a “House of Gifts” display; flooring and paint booths with sample boards, cans, placards, and counters; and an athletic scoreboard overhead in the exhibition hall. The residential scenes record one story ranch houses with low rooflines, attached garages, broad windows, concrete drives, sparse new lawns, palm trees, patio umbrellas, screened porches, and backyard service areas, while the flower and table setting assignments include folding screens, draped fabric, “Section B” and “Class 4” placards, potted tropical plants, formal place settings, glassware, and checkerboard flooring.

Fulmer's photography acts as evidence of the direct connection between population movement and the consumer choices packaged around the new Florida household. Rather than recording only subdivision construction or real estate promotion, the archive links property listings to the merchants who sold the interior and exterior life of the house: electric wiring, heating, refrigerators, floor coverings, paint, table service, patio furniture, flowering plants, and staged show interiors. The named firms, dated envelopes, and matching commercial scenes supply what broad Sunbelt narratives often lack: local actors, addresses, sales displays, and finished houses from a county whose population more than doubled in the 1950s. Light handling wear, envelope toning, and tonal variation to prints and negatives; overall in good condition. The archive gives a collection a concrete Clearwater case study of Sunbelt migration becoming a retail marketplace for houses, appliances, furnishings, utilities, and domestic aspiration during the first postwar growth decade.

Item #23378

Price: $480.00