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Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950
Winner of a Lewis Mumford “Extremely engaging reading for those interested in the history of cities and urban experience.” —Booklist Written by one of this country’s foremost urban historians, Downtown is the first history of what was once viewed as the heart of the American city. It tells the fascinating story of how downtown—and the way Americans thought about downtown—changed over time. By showing how businessmen and property owners worked to promote the well-being of downtown, even at the expense of other parts of the city, it also gives a riveting account of spatial politics in urban America.Drawing on a wide array of contemporary sources, Robert M. Fogelson brings downtown to life, first as the business district, then as the central business district, and finally as just another business district. His book vividly recreates the long-forgotten battles over subways and skyscrapers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And it provides a fresh, often startling perspective on elevated highways, parking bans, urban redevelopment, and other controversial issues. This groundbreaking book will be a revelation to scholars, city planners, policymakers, and anyone interested in American cities and American history.“A thorough and accomplished history.” —The Washington Post Book World"Superlative . . . a vital contribution to the study of American life.” —Publishers Weekly“A superbly thorough analysis of the causes of inner-city blight, congestion, and economic decline in mid-20th century urban America.” —Library JournalIncludes photographs
516 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2001
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291 people want to read
About the author
Robert M. Fogelson
11 books5 followersA specialist in urban American history, Robert M. Fogelson is professor emeritus in history and urban studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught from 1968 until his retirement. He earned a B.A. from Columbia University in 1958 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1964.
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April 29, 2008Fogelson privileges case studies of northern industrial cities and only pays lip service to US cities in the south. While he persuasively argues that American attitudes and approaches toward using and shaping downtown spaces undergo similar evolutions in cities across the country, Fogelson fails to cite many examples from the south, instead emphasizing commonalities between patterns of development in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. As I am far less familiar with the development of urban areas in the south, I am left wondering if Fogelson's narrative holds true for all areas of the United States or only for those he selected for intensive scrutiny.
Fogelson cites an incredible array of sources and engagingly chronicles lively debates between downtown and outlying building, transportation, and business interests throughout the 19th century and first half of the 20th century. The book is easy to read and features some photographs.
Fogelson cites an incredible array of sources and engagingly chronicles lively debates between downtown and outlying building, transportation, and business interests throughout the 19th century and first half of the 20th century. The book is easy to read and features some photographs.
August 13, 2012
Downtown is a thorough and interesting look at urban America, but it's in need of an editor. Excessive detail and dry anecdotes make this book a slog. With that said, I learned a lot. I just wouldn't recommend it unless you are extremely interested in urban history and issues.
June 11, 2007
Even the automobile makers knew that highways would destroy downtowns as we knew them.
September 25, 2013
Very enlightening book.
January 30, 2016
Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city!
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
-- how can you lose?
The lights are much brighter there, you can forget all your troubles, forget all your care...
("Downtown", Petula Clark)
When Petula Clark sang that she knew a place you can go, she may have well been speaking of downtown, for it used to be the place to go. Downtown chronicles the decline of American city centers, from Gilded Age preeminence to steady 20th century decay. Though ostensibly concerning the local politics of major cities (New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles especially), this is in a sense a social history, the complete transformation of how Americans lived, shopped, and traveled told through the decline of city centers. The author writes without any apparent agenda, something of an accomplishment given the central subject of public policy. Despite the role played by city, state, and the national government in hastening the disintegration of American cities, even unintentionally, Fogelson's conclusion is that the state of urban development in the United States has more to do with an instinctual aversion to crowded city centers than public policy. While that's an unsatisfactory explanation of suburbia, it doesn't diminish Downtown as a gold mine of information about the gradual transformation of transportation, housing, and public policy.
A city is nothing less than an economic engine, a place formed by the coming together of producers and merchants to trade. So it was with American downtowns; commercial enterprises preferred to congregate one another. The reasons were simple: prior to telecommunications and rapid transportation, business transactions were handled in person, and companies preferred to be close to their supporting services -- to their bankers and insurance agencies, for instance. What transportation systems existed at the time favored central locations for streamlined delivery and sales. Given the eagerness of enterprises to acquire land close to the action downtown for commercial purposes, land values there rose, and residents who could cashed in to settle in the country. From those elevated land prices grew elevated buildings, when the arrival of industrial steel manufacturing allowed for it: landowners wanted to maximize the use of the land they were paying so dearly for, and so the towers soared. Downtown was not exclusively commercial; apartment buildings took equal advantage of the Bessemer process to compete with offices in the climb toward the sky. Though some city-dwellers complained about the towers blocking light, few attempts to limit the height of buildings took; even what scant regulations appeared were quickly riddled through with variances.
The commericial life of the city would involve political meddling, however. The attempt of an entire a metropolitan area to conduct its shopping, banking, and theater-going in one relatively small area lead to chronic congestion. This is a congestion beyond levels appreciable by Americans today, even those who sit in LA traffic jams. Photos show pedestrians shuffling down sidewalks cheek-to-jowl, trolleys crammed like sardines and the streets utterly filled with these as well as horse carriages, rag-wagons, and delivery carts. That traffic was the economic life of the city, but the thought of competing in such crowds could fill some with despair: was it really worth it? What it was worth is a question pursued by city governments who attempted to find some better way of transportation in and to the city center, either elevated or underground train lines. (Trolleys were nice, of course, but the glorious chaos of city streets meant they were frequently slowed and altogether blocked by pedestrians and carts.) Such prospects were expensive undertakings for private enterprise, and required considerably more politcking -- getting permissions from landowners to dig under them, for instance -- and so city governments themselves often had to take on the burden of attempting them. The el-lines were not altogether popular, casting a constant gloom over the streets and treating pedestrians to showers of sparks and cinders. Subways were much more expensive and time-consuming to build, a daunting fact given periodic economic downswings, but little by little the major cities edged into using them.
Change was in the air, however. Frustrated with the chronic congestion of the city center, made worse now by construction in the rights-of-way, some urbanites began shopping closer to home when they could. Soaring land values also tempted start-up businesses into offering their goods outside the city center, as well; other residential areas might not deliver as much traffic, but concentrated near the trolley lines as they were, a go could still be made. Soon downtown apartment stores were joining them, sending out colonies -- branches -- to do business to residents who didn't want to come to them. Technology was allowing for more distance between residents and businesses, too; a man could now telephone his accountant, or extend his traveling range in a relatively cheap automobile. The arrival of automobiles into the downtown core only worsened congestion, however, consuming much more space than pedestrian traffic, especially when parked. They arrived at the worst possible time, too, when the economic life of American cities was threatened by the worse economic disaster in its history. The Great Depression, which would break the back of American urbanism, arrived in 1929.
The calamitous effects of the Depression were not limited to the economic havoc itself. Land values fell, and under unrelenting property taxes -- constituting the bulk of municipal budgets -- more than a few landowners torn down their towers to build parking lots instead. Requiring zero labor and taking in fees from automobiles, such holes in the urban fabric were known as 'taxpayers'. As people continued to shop on the outskirts instead of the center, downtown merchants decided their problems were two-fold. First, there was there was the problem of accessibility; no one wanted to come downtown because it was too crowded, as Yogi Berra might have put it. Elevated lines were too unpopular, trolleys increasingly in dire straits because of overzealous expansion and a public that didn't want to pay for the privilege of traveling like a mobile sardine, and subways too expensive. Secondly, as the upper and middle classes drifted out of the city into the rail suburbs, they left a vacuum filled with the kind of riff-raff that scared off good customers. Who would come downtown when they had to pass through tenement blocks filled with gangs of working men, immigrants, and mobs of un-supervised youngsters? Several factors conspired against these tenements: Reform movements, which saw the tenements as unfit for human life; the downtown businessmen, who wanted to distance the rabble from their shoppers, and the government, which needed to create jobs. Together a plan was born: seize the land, tear down the tenements, and build things like freeways and 'modern' housing projects. Government involvement was now quite beyond municipalities: the Federal government itself was active in urban areas, deciding what buildings should go and what kind should remain. FDR's new government programs effectively encouraged urban decentralization by subsidizing developing outside the city, and impeding private development within it by refusing such largesse, especially when minorities were involved. The damage done by this kind of improvement -- the erection of wall-like freeways gutting the city and directing activity into the suburbs -- continued to sap the strength of the once dominant city center. It had already fallen from THE place to do business to merely the main place for business; now it lost even that as the future of America became written in interstates, parking lots, and strip malls.
Downtown is a a wealth of information, and remarkably varied -- covering in different chapters the politics of subway construction or housing policy. It is a dispassionate obituary, even if it misdiagnoses the cause of death.
Related:
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America, Kenneth Jackson
Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton
Getting There: The Epic Struggle Between Road and Rail in the 20th Century, Stephen Goddard
Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
-- how can you lose?
The lights are much brighter there, you can forget all your troubles, forget all your care...
("Downtown", Petula Clark)
When Petula Clark sang that she knew a place you can go, she may have well been speaking of downtown, for it used to be the place to go. Downtown chronicles the decline of American city centers, from Gilded Age preeminence to steady 20th century decay. Though ostensibly concerning the local politics of major cities (New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles especially), this is in a sense a social history, the complete transformation of how Americans lived, shopped, and traveled told through the decline of city centers. The author writes without any apparent agenda, something of an accomplishment given the central subject of public policy. Despite the role played by city, state, and the national government in hastening the disintegration of American cities, even unintentionally, Fogelson's conclusion is that the state of urban development in the United States has more to do with an instinctual aversion to crowded city centers than public policy. While that's an unsatisfactory explanation of suburbia, it doesn't diminish Downtown as a gold mine of information about the gradual transformation of transportation, housing, and public policy.
A city is nothing less than an economic engine, a place formed by the coming together of producers and merchants to trade. So it was with American downtowns; commercial enterprises preferred to congregate one another. The reasons were simple: prior to telecommunications and rapid transportation, business transactions were handled in person, and companies preferred to be close to their supporting services -- to their bankers and insurance agencies, for instance. What transportation systems existed at the time favored central locations for streamlined delivery and sales. Given the eagerness of enterprises to acquire land close to the action downtown for commercial purposes, land values there rose, and residents who could cashed in to settle in the country. From those elevated land prices grew elevated buildings, when the arrival of industrial steel manufacturing allowed for it: landowners wanted to maximize the use of the land they were paying so dearly for, and so the towers soared. Downtown was not exclusively commercial; apartment buildings took equal advantage of the Bessemer process to compete with offices in the climb toward the sky. Though some city-dwellers complained about the towers blocking light, few attempts to limit the height of buildings took; even what scant regulations appeared were quickly riddled through with variances.
The commericial life of the city would involve political meddling, however. The attempt of an entire a metropolitan area to conduct its shopping, banking, and theater-going in one relatively small area lead to chronic congestion. This is a congestion beyond levels appreciable by Americans today, even those who sit in LA traffic jams. Photos show pedestrians shuffling down sidewalks cheek-to-jowl, trolleys crammed like sardines and the streets utterly filled with these as well as horse carriages, rag-wagons, and delivery carts. That traffic was the economic life of the city, but the thought of competing in such crowds could fill some with despair: was it really worth it? What it was worth is a question pursued by city governments who attempted to find some better way of transportation in and to the city center, either elevated or underground train lines. (Trolleys were nice, of course, but the glorious chaos of city streets meant they were frequently slowed and altogether blocked by pedestrians and carts.) Such prospects were expensive undertakings for private enterprise, and required considerably more politcking -- getting permissions from landowners to dig under them, for instance -- and so city governments themselves often had to take on the burden of attempting them. The el-lines were not altogether popular, casting a constant gloom over the streets and treating pedestrians to showers of sparks and cinders. Subways were much more expensive and time-consuming to build, a daunting fact given periodic economic downswings, but little by little the major cities edged into using them.
Change was in the air, however. Frustrated with the chronic congestion of the city center, made worse now by construction in the rights-of-way, some urbanites began shopping closer to home when they could. Soaring land values also tempted start-up businesses into offering their goods outside the city center, as well; other residential areas might not deliver as much traffic, but concentrated near the trolley lines as they were, a go could still be made. Soon downtown apartment stores were joining them, sending out colonies -- branches -- to do business to residents who didn't want to come to them. Technology was allowing for more distance between residents and businesses, too; a man could now telephone his accountant, or extend his traveling range in a relatively cheap automobile. The arrival of automobiles into the downtown core only worsened congestion, however, consuming much more space than pedestrian traffic, especially when parked. They arrived at the worst possible time, too, when the economic life of American cities was threatened by the worse economic disaster in its history. The Great Depression, which would break the back of American urbanism, arrived in 1929.
The calamitous effects of the Depression were not limited to the economic havoc itself. Land values fell, and under unrelenting property taxes -- constituting the bulk of municipal budgets -- more than a few landowners torn down their towers to build parking lots instead. Requiring zero labor and taking in fees from automobiles, such holes in the urban fabric were known as 'taxpayers'. As people continued to shop on the outskirts instead of the center, downtown merchants decided their problems were two-fold. First, there was there was the problem of accessibility; no one wanted to come downtown because it was too crowded, as Yogi Berra might have put it. Elevated lines were too unpopular, trolleys increasingly in dire straits because of overzealous expansion and a public that didn't want to pay for the privilege of traveling like a mobile sardine, and subways too expensive. Secondly, as the upper and middle classes drifted out of the city into the rail suburbs, they left a vacuum filled with the kind of riff-raff that scared off good customers. Who would come downtown when they had to pass through tenement blocks filled with gangs of working men, immigrants, and mobs of un-supervised youngsters? Several factors conspired against these tenements: Reform movements, which saw the tenements as unfit for human life; the downtown businessmen, who wanted to distance the rabble from their shoppers, and the government, which needed to create jobs. Together a plan was born: seize the land, tear down the tenements, and build things like freeways and 'modern' housing projects. Government involvement was now quite beyond municipalities: the Federal government itself was active in urban areas, deciding what buildings should go and what kind should remain. FDR's new government programs effectively encouraged urban decentralization by subsidizing developing outside the city, and impeding private development within it by refusing such largesse, especially when minorities were involved. The damage done by this kind of improvement -- the erection of wall-like freeways gutting the city and directing activity into the suburbs -- continued to sap the strength of the once dominant city center. It had already fallen from THE place to do business to merely the main place for business; now it lost even that as the future of America became written in interstates, parking lots, and strip malls.
Downtown is a a wealth of information, and remarkably varied -- covering in different chapters the politics of subway construction or housing policy. It is a dispassionate obituary, even if it misdiagnoses the cause of death.
Related:
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America, Kenneth Jackson
Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton
Getting There: The Epic Struggle Between Road and Rail in the 20th Century, Stephen Goddard
Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay
June 26, 2017
: Fogelson argued until 1950, the downtown was thought of as the economic hub of metropolitan areas, and imagining a city without that powerful center was unthinkable. Therefore, the powerful city planners and developers shaped the downtown business district, of which every major city had one. Debates continued whether to further centralize the downtown with radial highways and transit, construct subways/elevated rail, and construct high rise apartment buildings, or decenter downtown to a network of economic zones by building more highways which walled off parts of the city, limiting the height of buildings in order to bring more sun into the city, and clear slums in order to construct modernized public housing. By the 1920s, with the advent of the automobile, middle and upper classes began to move out to railroad suburbs and streets began to be horrible congested. Cities constructed light rail to ease the congestion, like subways and els and zone places with denser populations, but the problem continued as business interests wished to clear out working class and poor people away from their shoppers. Economic hubs began to develop uptown, away from the cities. The Great Depression exhausborated the problem as many office buildings became vacant. By 1950, downtown’s domination was over as suburbanization drained population out of the cities and urban renewal of seizing land, building highways, and clearing slums radically restructured cities.
Key Themes and Concepts
-Book is about how Americans shaped downtown, not perceptions.
-Top down history of the powerful.
-Rivalry between cities was normal, rivalry between downtown and uptown, or city and suburbs was unheard of.
-Two themes:
1) how city planners and reformers spoke of city was that of downtown as the heart and streets as the arteries, which needed to be kept clear.
2) Downtown was that of spatial politics, with businesses of one street and industry competing for structure of the business district.
-The ideology of the middle class became an aversion to crowded city centers.
Key Themes and Concepts
-Book is about how Americans shaped downtown, not perceptions.
-Top down history of the powerful.
-Rivalry between cities was normal, rivalry between downtown and uptown, or city and suburbs was unheard of.
-Two themes:
1) how city planners and reformers spoke of city was that of downtown as the heart and streets as the arteries, which needed to be kept clear.
2) Downtown was that of spatial politics, with businesses of one street and industry competing for structure of the business district.
-The ideology of the middle class became an aversion to crowded city centers.
May 29, 2023
This book was a very useful history of the downtowns of US cities during the 20th Century, and its second chapter was the most detailed history I've ever seen of rapid transit construction—and, more importantly, its absence or failure—in US cities outside of the Big Four (New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia) during the early 20th Century. I was also a bit surprised, though perhaps I shouldn't have been, to learn that the parking-craterization of US downtowns was a product of the Great Depression, not the late 1940's and early 1950's as I'd assumed. I'm definitely going to refer to it, and its references, a lot in the future.
That said, I feel like the one big, essential hole in the books—whether it counts as beyond or within its scope—is that Robert M. Fogelson doesn't examine in much depth the question of why US downtowns became so purely-commercial in the late 19th Century when those in European countries did not. I'd long assumed that the creation of a commercial core surrounded by residential suburbs was a technologically determined consequence of streetcars and the appearance of public transportation, but it seems that US cities developed quite differently from European ones, and that this "inevitable" shift may have been an explicit Americanism. In which case, we are left with the dual questions of why it happened in the US but not in Europe, and of just how dispersed uses are in European cities, and how they manage high transit usage despite this.
That said, I feel like the one big, essential hole in the books—whether it counts as beyond or within its scope—is that Robert M. Fogelson doesn't examine in much depth the question of why US downtowns became so purely-commercial in the late 19th Century when those in European countries did not. I'd long assumed that the creation of a commercial core surrounded by residential suburbs was a technologically determined consequence of streetcars and the appearance of public transportation, but it seems that US cities developed quite differently from European ones, and that this "inevitable" shift may have been an explicit Americanism. In which case, we are left with the dual questions of why it happened in the US but not in Europe, and of just how dispersed uses are in European cities, and how they manage high transit usage despite this.
January 11, 2019
Easy to get bogged down in details because the author is a historian, so lots of bookmarks and quotes. I knew going in the narrative ended in 1950, which was generally considered the high-water mark for urban America - at least the older "rust-belt" urban America, before the rise of the sunbelt. I wonder what the author (honestly, I don't even know if he is still alive - I could obviously find out if I wanted to) would make of the back-to-the-city movement of the post Great Recession years. I've lived in downtown Chicago for 11 years and have NEVER seen downtown Chicago and its immediate environs as lively, active, and busy as today. This masks significant demographic contraction in the larger city and MSA, but again - American downtowns are currently in a growth period.
March 3, 2020
Got about halfway through this book. Though the topic was interesting, the authors writing style made it difficult for me to complete this book. To me, it seemed that the author kept repeating himself.
April 24, 2012
The book is well-researched and on a few topics, presenting information that was rather new to me (early history of transit, pre-zoning height limits). But it's just a mess methodologically and it gets into trouble. Fogelson's goal (clearly conservative) is to tell a history of downtown that he thinks has been missing amid all the stories about suburbanization and low-income urban residential. Fine so far. He also wants to tell a top-down history, rather than bottom-up: dicier, but valuable. Finally, he wants to tell a universal story about downtowns across the country, rather than a local case study.
But by setting that up as his agenda, he ends up telling a story that is missing all context. It neither has a detailed pluralist account of how power worked in a particular city nor a structural account of how its working nationally. He wants to tell a story about downtown interests -- property owners and department stores, essentially -- but they just weren't powerful enough to be the relevant actors. So it's in many cases flat and in some quite confusing. It's a technocratic telling of a story that's intertwined with race and immigration and WWII and so on. He'll note how highways were less cost-efficient than subways but then say subway plans failed b/c they were too expensive. It's just not analytically strong.
Even so, I learned a lot. Fogelson is right that the focal point for a lot of urban history is on residential development, not commercial, and where he looks squarely at the CBD as CBD, he's adding real value.
But by setting that up as his agenda, he ends up telling a story that is missing all context. It neither has a detailed pluralist account of how power worked in a particular city nor a structural account of how its working nationally. He wants to tell a story about downtown interests -- property owners and department stores, essentially -- but they just weren't powerful enough to be the relevant actors. So it's in many cases flat and in some quite confusing. It's a technocratic telling of a story that's intertwined with race and immigration and WWII and so on. He'll note how highways were less cost-efficient than subways but then say subway plans failed b/c they were too expensive. It's just not analytically strong.
Even so, I learned a lot. Fogelson is right that the focal point for a lot of urban history is on residential development, not commercial, and where he looks squarely at the CBD as CBD, he's adding real value.
January 3, 2013
"It was 'unthinkable' that the cities should build freeways without setting aside space for rapid transit, wrote Charles D. Forsythe, chief engineer of the Chicago Transit Authority, in the early 1950s. It might have been unthinkable in Chicago, which had already incorporated railway lines into the Congress Street Expressway and would later incorporate them into the Ryan and Kennedy expressways. But it was not unthinkable in Detroit. No provision was made for rapid transit on the John C. Lodge Expressway - 'a costly error in judgment,' said the Detroit Rapid Transit Commission. And though the commission urged the authorities to incorporate rapid transit into Detroit's freeway system, no provision was made for it on the other freeways either. Nor was it unthinkable in Los Angeles. Despite pressure from the downtown business interests, the Los Angeles County delegation to the state legislature voted against a proposed metropolitan transit district that would have had the authority to levy taxes for rapid transit. The L.A. council voted against it too. As a result there would be no rapid transit on what would become the country's largest freeway system. The story was much the same elsewhere. Indeed, nowhere but in Chicago was rapid transit incorporated into the freeway system. By the late 1950s it was clear that a golden opportunity was gone. And gone for good."
October 24, 2007
A lengthy book but one I would recommend to all those with an interest in how US cities transformed to the extreme state of dispersal defining them today. Covering the late 19th century up to the 1950s, Fogelson details (and I mean details) how multiple variables (transportation issues, urban decay, business interests) evolved/devolved to a point that caused an inexorable flight to the perimeter. The penultimate chapter regarding "blight" was exceptional in exposing issues of statistics, dubious criteria, semantics, etc. that formulated approaches towards "urban renewal" in neighborhoods that often weren't "slums" nor were typically the worst hoods in the city (a detailed yet more encompassing account of these issues that Jane Jacobs perhaps initially exposed in Death and Life). For the great many who take simplistic views towards decentralization - "the flight to the suburbs really only started after WWII", "everyone lived downtown 100 years ago", "Mass transit would have survived if GM hadn't dismantled it single-handedly" - then this is a must read!
September 27, 2015
some of the chapters in this book were fascinating, but I felt like the amount of detail was a bit overdone. it would have been better to provide more synthesis of the evidence rather than pages and pages of details. it was annoying how the author continued to present two sides to every single argument, regardless of the merit of the position. either way, it was cool to see that the challenges that cities face during their development are similar to the challenges that cities face today, specifically congestion, how to fund public transportation, parking, and slums and blight. the books scope ends in 1950, and it left me wanting more of the story through the second half of the last century.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews