Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made it
By Alison Isenberg
University of Chicago Press, 441 pages, $32.50
America’s downtowns, if the daily papers and the local chambers of commerce are to be believed, are tottering on the brink of destruction once again. Marshall Field’s was sold over the summer. WalMarts and Targets nibble at the periphery of the urban core. Malls spring up like noxious mushrooms after an acid rain. Developers are suing one another over the right to plant crops of big-box retailing in the few remaining cornfields on the peripheries of Chicago and Kansas City and Minneapolis. “Main Streets everywhere,” says Rutgers University historian Alison Isenberg, “have been portrayed as living organisms facing the end of eventful lives.”
As such, the elderly emporiums of Michigan Avenues across the land are headed for the bone heap of history, muscled aside by malls, traffic jams, racial and ethnic prejudice, and disparities of wealth. The Frango mint and the giant Christmas tree will soon be nothing more than distant memories, urban legends in the making.
Yet Isenberg holds out a ray of hope in “Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It.” Her endlessly fascinating book argues that Main Street has always been an idealized dreamscape, a kind of Shangri-La of perfect civic bliss that never did quite measure up to its own image. Or what photographer Walker Evans, who immortalized its signage and show windows for more than 30 years, once called ” ‘a beautiful mess.’ “
Evans collected postcards of the urban scene, and one of Isenberg’s most compelling bits of evidence comes in the form of the picture postcards of commercial America produced in huge numbers from the Progressive Era through the end of World War II. Collectors’ items today, these Main Street postcards show strange, unnatural places: few cars, fewer pedestrians, weird colors and odd angles that create a kind of corridor effect, with the pavement receding in one swift, uninterrupted swoosh toward an empty horizon.
By examining the records of Curt Teich Co., the largest of the postcard manufacturers, Isenberg shows how local photographs were doctored by the printer according to the explicit instructions of the stores and civic groups ordering the cards. That emptiness, she argues, is purposeful. The desolation gives the city a certain dignity, befitting a site that has both commercial and civic overtones. Mud streets could be paved by Teich artists, curbs raised, dangling power lines erased and things generally prettified according to a City Beautiful aesthetic dimly reminiscent of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. So purged of its real-enough imperfections, Main Street on postcards served as a kind of Platonic ideal of what an American city ought to look like–but seldom did.
If city leaders liked orderly, empty Main Streets in the abstract, they actually preferred sidewalks filled with lady shoppers whose “job” was to prowl the stores in search of bargains. The women, in turn, demanded amenities: trash cans for refuse otherwise left to dirty the sidewalks, restrooms insulated from the gaze of impertinent males, and a genteel segregation of pool halls, barrooms and cigar stores far away from the “ladies’ side” of shopping thoroughfares. Although male reformers recognized the economic wisdom of giving the women what they wanted, there were still widespread fears in the first several decades of the 20th Century that women would go too far with their downtown housekeeping. The common complaint was that they aimed to put “pink ribbons on the lampposts” everywhere and feminize the city beyond all recognition.
That didn’t happen, although lots of other things did: The arrival of chain stores, like Woolworth’s, where working people, the poor and the elderly could satisfy their particular needs. The Depression, when it became more profitable to tear down skyscrapers than to pay real estate taxes on them, and the low-rise block of store-fronts joined the Main Street corridor. The 1940s, when competing for business meant streamlining facades with panels of Vitrolite glass in eye-catching colors, throwing up a forest of neon signs and creating a visual cacophony that looked the way jitterbug music sounded. And finally, in the 1950s–when the housewife’s “job” was shopping, again–comprehensive Main Street megaplans drawn up under the aegis of urban renewal.
The chief theorist of retail redevelopment was, perhaps, Victor Gruen, whose Midtown Plaza, built in the heart of downtown Rochester, N.Y., became the flagship for the new Main Street. An urban mall constructed atop ample off-street parking and topped off with a mini-skyscraper for offices, Midtown turned out to be a colossal bust. Architecture, however visionary and accommodating, was not the solution to the problems of downtown. Gruen had more luck with malls, like his Southdale, completed in a suburb of Minneapolis in 1956. With a mixture of hassle-free parking, art, climate control and a tidy indoor plaza, Southdale gave suburbanites just what they were looking for: comfort, convenience and a certain aura of exclusivity.
Meanwhile, downtowns were caught up in the throes of the civil rights movement. Isenberg takes particular note of the fact that the most volatile confrontations of the era took place on the Main Streets of the South, where black shoppers had been denied equal access to the very chain stores in which they could afford to shop. It was no accident, indeed, that the ubiquitous Main Street lunch counter, long a Woolworth’s fixture, became a key focal point of the drive for integration.
But what about today’s downtowns? Can they survive the long-term shift toward 9-to-5 cities, population donuts in which the empty centers belong to office workers and folks too poor to go elsewhere? Downtown America holds out real hope that the magnetism of Shangri-La might still draw us to Main Street. The kind of festival retailing pioneered by James Rouse at Boston’s Faneuil Hall and Baltimore’s Inner Harbor has made an impact. And although Isenberg does not discuss them, new sports arenas in the shadow of city hall, light-rail transit systems with downtown depots, warehouse-style condominiums and a fresh sense of the delights of the variegated sights and challenges of urban spaces have played important roles in making cities attractive again, especially in the Midwest. Perhaps the delights of Walt Disney’s Main Street USA have had their greatest impact outside Disneyland, in slowly awakening the nation to the appeal of awnings and polished glass and pedestrianism.
Today, downtowns have acquired a new significance as symbols of regional economic viability. Every urban agglomerate aspires to be a “world-class” city, a feat tentatively achieved by an infusion of tall buildings, convention centers, hotels and tourist amenities along the old Main Street. But success is always in doubt. In my hometown, Minneapolis, the slightest change in the urban fabric sends shivers of fear through the downtown crowd. Unless we’re careful, we might wind up being nothing more than a “cold Omaha,” heaven forbid! Yet Hennepin Avenue and Michigan Avenue and Broadway Street and Market Street are still there, amid the trendy restaurants and shops. And if you squint a little and pay no attention to the logos on the signs, our downtowns could be the ones emblazoned on the postcards from 1918 or so. Today’s picture postcards would have lots of shoppers and secretaries and conventioneers. Lawyers and bankers. Buses. Benches. Street markets. Baskets of flowers hanging from lampposts, like so many bunches of pink ribbons. Main Street is an organism, but a remarkably sturdy one. And clearly, there’s life in the old girl yet.
