The Kress Building, located at 1508 Main Street in downtown Columbia, is one of the city’s finest surviving examples of Art Deco commercial architecture. Constructed in 1934 by S. H. Kress & Company, the building was designed as a modern five-and-ten-cent store during a period when national retail chains were reshaping Columbia’s Main Street. Its sleek, highly ornamented façade represented a deliberate departure from the elaborate Classical Revival and Romanesque commercial buildings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and introduced the streamlined vocabulary of the Machine Age to Columbia’s downtown. The South Carolina Department of Archives and History identifies the Kress façade as the best example of Art Deco architecture in Columbia.

Architecturally, the building is a two-story masonry commercial structure faced almost entirely with brilliant white glazed terra cotta, accented with colored terra cotta in shades of orange, green, and blue. The combination of glossy surfaces, geometric ornament, rounded forms, and stylized floral decoration gives the building a distinctly modern appearance. The façade demonstrates the Art Deco preference for clean lines, symmetry, abstraction, and decorative motifs derived from nature but reduced to bold geometric patterns.

The first floor was designed to attract pedestrians with an unusually open and inviting storefront. Two recessed entrances are flanked by rounded storefront windows, while three fluted pilasters divide the principal display areas. A broad marquee with rounded corners extends across the width of the building, providing shelter for shoppers while reinforcing the horizontal emphasis of the façade. Above the marquee are eight second-story windows and the original identification “S. H. Kress and Co. 5-10-25 cent store,” clearly announcing the building’s function as one of Kress’s standardized retail establishments.

The upper façade culminates in an especially memorable Art Deco composition. The cornice incorporates the word “Kress,” while above it rises a stepped parapet that gently increases in height toward the center. A highly stylized floral ornament crowns the central portion of the parapet. The contrasting white and colored terra cotta, rounded corners, stepped silhouette, and abstract ornament combine to give the building a strong sense of vertical movement and visual sophistication. The design illustrates how Kress company architects adapted standardized commercial architecture to the distinctive Art Deco vocabulary of the 1930s.

The interior was equally modern in conception. The first floor retains much of its original appearance, including a paneled ceiling decorated with a chevron motif and nine freestanding columns extending through the sales area. The columns are octagonal in form, stand on high pedestals, and terminate in distinctive Art Deco capitals. Together, these elements created an open, spacious retail environment characteristic of the large chain stores that increasingly dominated American downtowns during the interwar period.

The Kress Building also has an important connection to Columbia’s civil-rights history. Although African American customers could shop at the Kress store during the Jim Crow era, they were not permitted to eat at its lunch counter. The building was subsequently among the downtown Columbia establishments targeted during the student sit-in movement of the 1960s, when African American students challenged segregation at lunch counters and other public accommodations. Thus, the building represents both the development of modern consumer culture and the racial inequalities that shaped access to downtown commercial spaces.

The construction of the Kress Building was part of a broader wave of 1930s modernization along Main Street. The National Register documentation for the Columbia Commercial Historic District notes that the Depression-era period brought a major wave of façade improvements and new construction as retailers sought to remain competitive and appear modern. National chains such as Kress and Woolworth’s employed standardized architectural designs to create recognizable corporate identities, while local merchants likewise modernized their storefronts. The Kress Building is especially significant because it was a purpose-built store designed by company architects, making it an excellent local expression of this national retail trend.

The building was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on March 2, 1979, recognizing its architectural significance. It was also designated a City of Columbia historic landmark in 1982. Its architectural importance rests particularly on the unusually intact Art Deco character of its terra-cotta façade and interior. Today, the building continues to contribute prominently to the historic character of Main Street and has been adaptively reused, demonstrating the continuing usefulness of historic commercial architecture in downtown Columbia.