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

by Alison Isenberg

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.
 
 

 

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Cities, Urban Planning, American History, Heritage Preservation

464 pages, Paperback

First published July 15, 2004

Reviews

[Carlos · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was going to be generous and give this 3 stars, but then I read the Conclusion, and yeah... It really brought together all the issues bubbling in this book. So let’s start there.

The theoretical “argument” Isenberg leaves the reader with is that it is people and not the “natural or organic condition” who shape the downtown. Now, if you haven’t fainted from the novelty of that revelation, you may ask yourself: “who exactly are the people shaping downtown?”. According to Isenberg this depends on the historical era we are looking at. Fair enough.

The book starts strong by centering the work of reformist middle/upper class women (white and black) in promoting urban beautification generally and setting the stage for the City Beautiful movement specifically. There wasn’t as much gender theory as one would want from an analysis implementing a gendered lens of urban history, but there was enough here to surprise the reader in who exactly was creating the classic idyllic city image. Isenberg then takes a literal turn and discusses the postcard illustrators who created our images of downtown. It was cool getting a glimpse into this limited historical profession, but much of the analysis here felt shallow and needed more theory to really convince the reader that these people were the Oz hiding behind the curtain. Especially since Isenberg explicitly specified that this early 1900s trend succeeded the influence of the women reformers.

Then we get to the roaring 20s and ugh…. The book really takes a turn as Isenberg decides the rest of urban American history are defined by the people behind the investments. Don’t disillusion yourself though, Alison is hardly proposing a Marxist reading of urban history or any critical growth machine narratives. Instead she favors detailing the history of the real estate industry and snipping out the sections not pertaining to downtown. If you think this leads to a shorter chapter, you would again be mistaken. Isenberg rolls out the red carpet of business major vocabulary, engaging in lengthy (incredibly uncritical) discussions of Reilly’s Law and the 100% District. Isenberg dedicates the briefest of discussions to urban racial segregation (hope that doesn’t come up after the 20s because Alison doesn’t bring them up again), while deigning the idea of bottom-up influence on urbanism.

However, I must point out that henceforth Isenberg only ascribes two roles to the common citizen in shaping downtown: consumption and rioting. The inhabitants of these downtowns only matter as agents in so much as they direct their dollars to different businesses of urban environments and between city/suburb. She neglects to include sources of citizens taking in these trends and their thoughts on the matter. There are zero references to non-business stakeholder engagement in town halls. She doesn’t even bother identifying sources discussing the small business owners, hope you like Woolworth and hotshot urban planners!

As you may imagine, the Depression chapter was insufferable. This is the one chapter that would genuinely justify over analyzing real estate developments, but it was still painful to read. Isenberg overemphasizes the role of window dressing (of all trends) in affecting downtown commerce. Isenberg also has (somehow) the least critical reading imaginable of the tendency for roaring 20s skyscrapers to be demolished in the Depression era in favor of (barfs) parking structures or even just concrete lots (read as: parking lots). It’s not like those buildings can be used for anything else aside from the exchange value of those large landowners, oh sorry, accidentally used a Marxist term, big building makes a lot of money. There are no discussions of how the citizens viewed this trend, because heaven forbid we include a non-elite source. It’d be one thing if there were no sources available and she admitted that, but I’m sure there were some sources available (remember, this is when the federal government was paying academics to get the scoop on everyday life in America). How Isenberg failed to find such sources in the 10 YEARS it took for her to write this, I do not know. Also, there is like no mention of how the newly established zoning laws might have effected skyscraper clearance in the 30s, which is just… baffling.

But maybe that shouldn’t be baffling. This is the same author who wrote 300+ dense pages of the history of downtown America while only including…. Actually, I don’t know. I don’t know how many times the word “gentrification” appears in this book because it does not appear in the index (embarrassing!). I don’t recall ever running into the term in this book, so we’ll just take my word for it because I am a person, and it is people who shape downtown and not the “natural or organic condition”. And don’t think that this is just because she prefers another term, she never describes a phenomenon of capital influx in an urban space directly leading to the pricing out of marginalized populations from said spaces. Again, 10 YEARS, what was she doing that whole time?!? This is intro to urban studies material!

The urban renewal chapter was confusing. I felt like Isenberg was purposefully confusing the periodization and lumped together a lot of developments that felt cohesive but operated under different temporalities (e.g., urban renewal, Interstate construction, suburbanization, feminist movement, dogwhistle politics). It did not help that this was the shortest chapter, or maybe it did, I don’t know…

Isenberg implicitly agrees with a framing of civil rights victory in downtown America as a “hollow prize”, which… is a choice. To be fair, she does complicate the victory narrative by pointing to statistics of black ownership of local businesses (where are the statistics for the other chapters?!?), but hardly enough to justify the explicitly pro-capital sentiments of this chapter. Isenberg devotes the most writing (I won’t legitimize this with the term “thought”) of the 60s to racial riots. While, yes, racial riots are an important topic to cover, the framing here was so one-sided. Here we do get some ordinary people, the ones who sided with the business owners over the protestors. Reading this chapter would make you think that America’s cities were nuked by the protests. Even if we grant that Isenberg stands for civil rights (this review would not even be worth writing if she doesn’t), it is clear that the big takeaway she has for the whole thing is “yeah, but at what cost?”.

We then get to the nostalgia chapter of the 70s, and also 60s because by this point Alison is very much done with periodization. Having read “History comes to Life” (fantastic book), I know that nostalgia really picked up in the “me decade” of the 70s. This was the beginning of the collapse of the public and increasingly introspective and retrospective America that would lead to the neoliberal 80s/beyond of constantly repackaging the same crap. This is a crude summary of ample historical/geographic/urban/economic theory, not a crumb of which appears in Isenberg’s book. Instead, we get a narrow discussion of festival marketplaces, how Gaslight square (a good alternative name for this book) failed and Ghirardelli square didn’t. She makes the correct call in identifying the success of each experiment by the local context/actors (hardly a novel observation), but then immediately goes too far in this direction by claiming that there were no national winds fueling these movements.

Perhaps she could get away with this if she had been adopting a bottom up reading of urbanism this whole time, but her wholly elitist conception of downtown makes this claim especially egregious. When you hire the same consultant to design multiple cities, and have sources specifically say they all would take inspiration from this program (national trust for historic preservation) or this success story (Faneuil hall), you aren’t going to have much in terms of diversity. Isenberg establishes a straw man argument when she distills the argument of a homogenous urban America to people noticing red bricks everywhere. It’s more than the bricks, Alison! Sure, the type of national trend/program that Ashland, WI and Seattle, WA might be different, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t national. And just because you didn’t come across homogenous features of urban America in your 10 YEARS of researching this book, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It could be ignorance, but I think it’s just malpractice that Isenberg makes this claim while then pivoting to the disappearance of the lunch counter of Woolworth in downtown. Could this, I don’t know… be because this was the same period that saw the rapid proliferation of fast food chains across downtown America (see Chatelain’s amazing “Golden Arches in Black America”)? Just what exactly is different about these downtowns? It must be the people. Remember it’s okay if the “natural or organic condition” is different because those don’t have any bearing on downtown America.

Which brings us to the conclusion. Writers often have a chance to reflect on their theories and make bold commentary on the issues of their time. So what does Isenberg have to say about post-9/11 New York: people will decide.

I don’t normally go this harsh on reviews, but this is a worst nightmare of a history book. It has just enough recognition and official gloss to be a course textbook, but all the failings of bad research. I understand certain strands of the history discipline are uncritical cudgels for power, but I expected more from urban historians. There isn’t an ounce of critical content in this gaggle of pages. While there may be some value in drafting a top-down narrative of urban history, Isenberg doesn’t do anything interesting or say anything insightful in that manner. The text seems to be allergic to bottom-up urbanism, and it seems that Isenberg just throws out names like Mike Davis and Michael Sorkin just to feel like she’s covered her basis of the gargantuan literature of critical urban theory (you had 10 years Alison, couldn’t you have at least looked up a Mike Davis work to add to the source notes?). It genuinely disturbs me that someone spent 10 years drafting all this, reading so much, writing so much, and saying so little. All this information exists in other, better, urban history books, I cannot think of anything this contributes to justifies its existence. Academics who write stuff like this, shouldn’t be academics, they should be real estate agents. Selling their stock elsewhere.