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    Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It
    Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It
    Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It
    Ebook446 pages11 hours

    Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It

    By Alison Isenberg

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    About this ebook

    Downtown America was once the vibrant urban center romanticized in the Petula Clark song—a place where the lights were brighter, where people went to spend their money and forget their worries. But in the second half of the twentieth century, "downtown" became a shadow of its former self, succumbing to economic competition and commercial decline. And the death of Main Streets across the country came to be seen as sadly inexorable, like the passing of an aged loved one.

    Downtown America cuts beneath the archetypal story of downtown's rise and fall and offers a dynamic new story of urban development in the United States. Moving beyond conventional narratives, Alison Isenberg shows that downtown's trajectory was not dictated by inevitable free market forces or natural life-and-death cycles. Instead, it was the product of human actors—the contested creation of retailers, developers, government leaders, architects, and planners, as well as political activists, consumers, civic clubs, real estate appraisers, even postcard artists. Throughout the twentieth century, conflicts over downtown's mundane conditions—what it should look like and who should walk its streets—pointed to fundamental disagreements over American values.

    Isenberg reveals how the innovative efforts of these participants infused Main Street with its resonant symbolism, while still accounting for pervasive uncertainty and fears of decline. Readers of this work will find anything but a story of inevitability. Even some of the downtown's darkest moments—the Great Depression's collapse in land values, the rioting and looting of the 1960s, or abandonment and vacancy during the 1970s—illuminate how core cultural values have animated and intertwined with economic investment to reinvent the physical form and social experiences of urban commerce. Downtown America—its empty stores, revitalized marketplaces, and romanticized past—will never look quite the same again.

    A book that does away with our most clichéd approaches to urban studies, Downtown America will appeal to readers interested in the history of the United States and the mythology surrounding its most cherished institutions.
     
    A Choice Oustanding Academic Title.
    Winner of the 2005 Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians.
    Winner of the 2005 Lewis Mumford Prize for Best Book in American 
    Planning History.
    Winner of the 2005 Historic Preservation Book Price from the University of Mary Washington Center for Historic Preservation.
    Named 2005 Honor Book from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.
     
     

     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateMay 15, 2009
    ISBN9780226385099
    Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It

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    • 5/5
      In Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It, Alison Isenberg argues, “Throughout the twentieth century, decisions about Main Street’s mundane material conditions revealed broader cultural and economic values…Together, these values have shaped the contours, meaning, and experience of many journeys downtown” (pg. 12). Isenberg works to problematize the narrative of Main Street, U.S.A. from one of decay to a more dynamic story in which women, African-Americans, and others were continually reinventing the space. Isenberg draws upon developers own plans, advertisers documents, as well as extensive visual records documenting the changing face of various downtowns.Isenberg begins with the City Beautiful movement of the 1890s, which sought to modernize cities through promotional materials emphasizing paved roads, straight corridor-like lanes, and buried wires. Women played a key role in this movement, though “women’s downtown initiatives paved the way for men’s commercial organizations to take up the cause of Main Street beautification too – by carefully defining such work as civic and public, rather than political” (pg. 15). Women may have defined the scope of these projects, but social mores of the time required them to step aside when businessmen took over the projects. Postcards of various downtowns during this period helped sell the image of City Beautiful by removing sidewalk obstructions that business owners feared would limit pedestrian traffic and cleaned up roads and wires that they feared created an uninviting atmosphere.During the early twentieth century, “Commercial real estate investors…became preoccupied with women shoppers because they recognized that women’s behavior underpinned not only peak downtown real estate values but also alarming developments such as the apparent decline of small-town Main Streets and the unpredictable scattering of stores throughout city outskirts and residential neighborhoods” (pg. 79). Even with their focus on women shoppers, they limited their attentions to white, middle-class women. This attention affected perceived land values, with the most valuable land comprising the prime retail sector of the city. Zoning during this time hearkened back to the City Beautiful movement. Isenberg writes, “Advocated legally justified all land-use segregation on the basis of the state’s police power to protect public health, safety, and welfare, but they also pledged that zoning would contribute to the prosperity and convenience of the citizenry, protect land values, and infuse city-building with ‘common sense and fairness’” (pg. 102).During the Great Depression, business owners and realtors recycled unused spaces into parking lots or gave buildings facelifts to reflect more modern sensibilities. Isenberg writes, “To reassure themselves, their clients, and the public, appraisers began to demand of one another a detailed documentation of city character and projected development – incorporating what might be called a city planning approach into their reports” (pg. 131). This focus stressed harmony in the overall aesthetic of streets and business districts.Discussing the role of race and gender in shaping the downtown cityscape, Isenberg writes, “Postwar commercial aesthetics, sharpened in competition with new suburban shopping centers, were determined by concerns over who would be the ideal consumer – who would reinvigorate downtown property values and profits or breathe life into the malls” (pg. 167). To this end, “investors resurrected some of the same arguments invented by female municipal housekeepers in the 1890s to justify women’s participation in civic affairs and urban design. In the 1950s, however, mostly male downtown interests invoked women’s housekeeping standards in the name of mostly female consumers” (pg. 176). This afforded women an opportunity for a public voice, though one narrowly circumscribed by men’s views of women’s desires. According to Isenberg, Race played a role, as “the racialized fears that downtowns might become ‘lower-class ethnic islands’ of commerce added urgency to the calls for urban renewal and articulated a preference for who should be downtown” (pg. 189). These racial tensions shaped Americans’ views of downtown spaces during the Civil Rights era. Ironically, businesses often suffered from boycotts led by both segregationists and civil rights activists. The former sought to punish those businesses considering integration while the latter pressured businesses to abandon segregation (pg. 217). Later riots gave credence to white suburbanites’ fears of the city and downtown, leading to economic stagnation.
    • 4/5
      The particular interest of this book is that the author addresses the evolution of the American city through the prism of business and retail interests; people who kept their collective eye fixedly on the pursuit of the affluent female suburbanite and were prepared to move heaven and earth to cater to this class. This is at the expense of the working-class and non-white communities who did make up much of the actual urban shopping clientele. Perhaps the most interesting portion of the book deals with the contrast between the blue-sky business plans of the Twenties, the golden age of "Downtown," as compared to the various survival modes that the owners of urban real estate have had to adopt in the decades since; all very relevant in the wake of the current real estate bust.

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