Downtown America

A History of the Place and the People Who Made It

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by Alison Isenberg

University of Chicago Press

Due/Published April 2005, 464 pages, paper

ISBN 0226385086

New in paper (S05)

Once upon a time, downtown America was the vibrant urban center romanticized in the Petula Clark song--a place where people went to spend their money and lose their worries. But in the second half of the twentieth century, "downtown" became a shadow of its former self, succumbing to economic and commercial decline. And the death of Main Streets across the country came to be seen as sadly inexorable, like the passing of a loved one.

Downtown America cuts beneath this archetypal story of downtown's rise and fall and reframes the history of urban development in the United States. Moving beyond the conventional narrative of disembodied capitalism that has shaped our understanding of American business districts in the twentieth century, Alison Isenberg shows that the trajectory of downtown 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, and even postcard artists.

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. Given her eye for the unexpected, 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.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Beyond Decline: Assessing the Values of Urban Commercial Life in the Twentieth Century
1. City Beautiful or Beautiful Mess? The Gendered Origins of a Civic Ideal
2. Fixing an Image of Commercial Dignity: Postcards and the Business of Planning Main Street
3. "Mrs. Consumer," "Mrs. Brown America," and "Mr. Chain Store Man": Economic Woman and the Laws of Retail
4. Main Street's Interior Frontier: Innovation amid Depression and War
5. "The Demolition of Our Outworn Past": Suburban Shoppers and the Logic of Urban Renewal
6. The Hollow Prize? Black Buyers, Racial Violence, and the Riot Renaissance
7. Animated by Nostalgia: Preservation and Vacancy since the 1970s
Conclusion
"The Lights Are Much Brighter There"
List of Archival Collections
Notes
Index