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

Although academic and popular observers have mourned the death of Main Street and blamed its decline on objective economic forces, Alison Isenberg challenges these assumptions in her monograph Downtown America. Currently an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, she began her study as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. Isenberg focuses on the changing nature of commercial districts from the late nineteenth century to the present day. She argues that business people, municipal officials, city planners, real estate professionals, downtown residents, and retail consumers have made and remade Main Street for more than a century. Through cooperation and conflict, these participants have debated the appearance, purpose, and cultural meaning of downtown. Whereas many participants desired to improve urban businesses, public spaces, and municipalities, the meaning of "improvement" often differed between each participant and decade. Rather than providing a simplistic and nostalgic account, Isenberg's sophisticated analysis will forever alter our view of Main Street as it highlights the people who repeatedly created and contested the ideals it represented.

Isenberg's first three chapters are devoted to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when thriving downtown cores developed, city planners professionalized, and proprietors attempted to make retailing into a science. Chapter One discusses the City Beautiful Movement of the 1890s to 1910s. The movement began when women's organizations worked to beautify Main Street and teach investors civic responsibility. By the early twentieth century, city planners, business proprietors, and municipal officials distanced themselves from the movement's feminine origins to promote the improvement of Main Street for practical economic purposes. Chapter Two examines this new image of Main Street by studying the work of city planners and commercial artists during the Progressive era. These boosters promoted the development of an orderly and cooperative business district, which would enhance the local economy and property interests of downtown investors. By the 1920s retailers, investors, and municipalities attempted to understand, predict, and control consumers. As Chapter Three recounts, these participants focused their efforts on attracting the spending power of white middle-class housewives who would help boost the reputation and financial well being of Main Street. Single working women were a captive audience needing no attraction, while racial minorities were discouraged through segregation to prevent the lowering of property values. Despite these efforts, consumers often disagreed with these strategies to reorder commercial space.

Isenberg's final chapters reveal the struggles to remake Main Street in the face of mounting economic problems and public conflicts. Chapter Four highlights the investment decisions made during the 1930s and 1940s. The Great Depression and Second World War motivated property owners to transform vacant commercial space into parking lots and one-story buildings while modernizing store fronts. No longer interested in maintaining a harmonious Main Street, investors sought to raise the value of their properties on an individual basis. Meanwhile, appraisers professionalized themselves to restore investor confidence. As Chapter Five explains, the 1950s brought the challenge of increased suburban development and the advent of shopping malls. The promoters of urban renewal worked to save retail businesses, resolve traffic problems, rebuild property values, and replace run-down structures. White middle-class homemakers were seen as the ideal consumer while downtown neighborhoods were targeted for destruction.

Chapter Six illustrates the reaction of African-Americans in the 1960s and early 1970s after years of discrimination. Black protestors wanted unfettered access to Main Street and respect from downtown retailers. Chapter Seven examines how the cultivation of nostalgia since the 1960s became an important investment strategy with efforts to preserve Main Street, the creation of pedestrian malls, and the construction of festival marketplaces. Consumers responded in unpredictable ways to these developments, which ensured the success of some projects but condemned others to a quick death. Ironically, nostalgia could do nothing to save the chain variety store, which had been a crucial fixture of Main Street...