Why do Twin Cities suburban car showrooms look like enormous meat lockers?

If you believe the TV commercials, it’s never been easier to buy a car. Just go online and pick one out! This is fine for some, but many of us need more. We need to look at the car. Walk around, appraise it from various angles. Sit behind the wheel and decide whether it speaks to us. For that, you have to go somewhere that has cars — a used lot, a dealership. The former has never had much of an impact on the streetscape, since it’s usually a lot in a middling part of town.

The dealerships are different. They’re embassies of national brands, and have presence and promise. Here it is: the latest model. Your ticket to joy. Your self-expression in sheet-metal form.

Like the cars, dealership architectural styles have changed over the years. You might not think the big white boxes along the suburban highways have a style at all, but they do. Before we give it a name, though, consider the dealership styles of the past. Let’s call them Classical, Swank and Garish.

It characterized the early days of the automobile, from 1911 to the Depression. Dealerships abounded in downtown Minneapolis. The first dealership was the 1911 Fawkes showroom on Harmon Place, nestled in the upscale Loring Park neighborhood.

If you don’t remember Fawkes cars, don’t worry — the early days of the industry had dozens of nameplates that would rise and crash. REO, Pierce-Arrow, the Diana Car Company’s short-lived Moon. Studebakers were sold from a handsome building at 1328 Hennepin Avenue S.

The area was perfect for a test drive: You could see how it handled in city traffic, then take it up Lowry Hill to see how it dealt with steep streets.

All of these showrooms had one thing in common: None of them would strike you as a car dealership today. They looked like standard commercial brick buildings. Fawkes had a nice big window, but you could imagine it being used for a dress shop. Buildings did not change to adapt to the selling of cars. The streetscape was not transformed. When the downtown car district contracted, the buildings were easily reused.

The Swank era came after the war, when car lots found a new home on the great commercial corridors: Lake Street, Central Avenue, University Avenue. They’d never been high-class streets. The building stock was mostly low-slung, with a diverse mix of stores. Dealerships were constructed in a more stripped-down, modern style: broad plate-glass windows that angled up as if leaning into the wind. The showrooms had room for more cars than the cramped first-floor spaces in downtown Minneapolis, and at night the lights spilled out on the winter streets, showing you the gleaming chariots that might take you away to a happier, warmer place. Well, you could dream.

The Garish Era. As the inner city slumped in the ′60s and ′70s and the burbs grew, dealerships took to the outskirts where land was plentiful.

We associate these freeway dealerships with endless streamers flapping in the breeze, or perhaps a giant American flag. Convenient locations but charmless; the floes of parked cars in the lot was a blight if you weren’t in the market. The dealership buildings were unremarkable. The signage was boring and plain, because it had but one purpose: the brand, or the name of the dealership. You could say the entire enterprise was architecturally indistinct, but there didn’t seem to be any architecture involved at all.

This has changed. Dealerships have adopted a new model: big, white, cool and almost indifferent.

They could be server farms for AI.

Some have a big logo, such as the BMW building at Interstates 494 and 35W: That tells you what you need to know. The most extravagant ones have an upper floor with cars that sit behind windows, spotlit like sex workers in an Amsterdam brothel. The interiors are simple and uncluttered, with nothing to distract you from the goods. The showroom might be two stories high, impressing you with the dealership’s status. Those one-story guys make you feel like you’re in a church basement.

Above all, they are white. They are clean. They are rational and calm. No tail-fin flourishes, no brash neon come-ons, no fluttering strings of multicolored plastic triangles.

In the Classic, Swank and Garish eras, they had salesmen. Guys who’d slap the roof and ask what it would take to get you into this honey. Today’s dealerships have purchase facilitators, who are more like guidance counselors. The buildings will be replaced someday, and no one will mourn the loss, and no one will remember what was different between one or the other. They’ll be forgotten in a day.

The great-grandchildren of people who bought a car at the Fawkes building can still admire the showroom today.