A Nice Place to Visit: Tourism and Urban Revitalization in the Postwar Rustbelt by Aaron Cowan (review)

Most of the authors writing about postindustrial cities agonize over the remaking of downtowns for middle-class consumers. They lament that authentic urban spaces have become mere fantasy cities, Disneylands, or variations on a theme park. Aaron Cowan’s A Nice Place to Visit is a refreshing corrective to that literature. In chapter-length case studies of four Rust Belt cities—Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore—Cowan offers much-needed historical context, showing how tourist-led renewal might have been the best of limited options for deindustrializing cities. Convention centers, stadiums, hotels, and festival marketplaces may have failed to restore cities to their former glory or ameliorate most social ills, but, even so, attracting middle-class tourists has become a crucial strategy for urban revitalization since the 1960s.

Before examining each city in detail, Cowan provides an introductory chapter on American urban decline after World War II—an excellent standalone survey of a sprawling historical field. Rust Belt cities faced similar woes in those decades, as manufacturing jobs, downtown commerce, population, and federal funding evaporated, leaving behind an impoverished and segregated urban core ringed by middle-class suburbs. Between 1967 and 1977, retail sales fell by 48 percent in central Baltimore and 44 percent in St. Louis, while manufacturing employment dropped by 32 percent and 30 percent. Early renewal efforts—slum clearance, expressway building, and the erection of substandard public housing—only intensified racial segregation and contributed to the mounting sense of decline. Planners were desperate to bring people, jobs, and capital back to the central city.

Cowan argues that given those conditions, using public funds “to remake downtowns as tourist locales for an increasingly leisure-minded middle class” should be understood as “a reasonable decision” (32). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, disillusioned with the liberal vision of interventionist social welfare programs, cities searched for other options. Meanwhile, new federal priorities helped incentivize the transition to tourist-led development. President Nixon relaxed restrictions on urban aid dollars, allowing cities to shift funding from antipoverty agencies to developer-friendly renewal schemes. Tourist-oriented projects, figured civic and business leaders, might provide trickledown benefits in the form of jobs and tax receipts. At the very least, they would represent a brick-and-mortar rebuke to narratives of irrepressible urban decay.

Yet renewal rarely proved so simple. In Cincinnati, the construction of several downtown hotels may have attracted visitors, but the “bland and locally insignificant infrastructure of the convention industry” left a downtown more suited to out-of-town tourists than to permanent residents (64). A series of new skywalk tunnels connecting hotels, restaurants, and conference facilities offered visitors a sense of safety, but it impoverished street life in Cincinnati’s business district.

In St. Louis, efforts to complement the fabulously popular Gateway Arch—which drew 2.3 million visitors in 1965—were similarly quixotic. Mayor Alfonso J. Cervantes tried and failed to attract tourists to the Mississippi waterfront, first with a Spanish Pavilion and later with a replica of Columbus’s Santa Maria, both recycled from the 1964 World’s Fair. Next, Cervantes rallied local businessmen and developers to support the construction of a convention center on the city’s impoverished north side. After an initial defeat by working-class and poor blacks whose neighborhoods were imperiled by the plan, pro-convention center forces redoubled their sales pitch. Only this project, they proclaimed, could restore prosperity and prevent St. Louis from heading down what one newspaper editorial warned was a “dark road to nowhere” (77). More important was their coopting of the city’s African American political and professional class, which precluded chances for cross-class opposition to the project. In a fitting coda, construction on the convention center began in 1974, just a few blocks from where the city was demolishing the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing project. As an icon of postwar liberalism...