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

Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It. By Alison Isenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. xvii plus 440 pp. Cloth $32.50 Paper $20.00).

The closing of the last downtown Woolworth stores in the 1990s provoked markedly different responses in downtown customers. Shoppers who had patronized their local stores for decades, through changing urban economic fortunes and social unrest in Durham, North Carolina, were "'almost reverent'" leading up to store closings. However, Allison Isenberg juxtaposes this with the view of a flip college student from Ithaca, New York, without those roots to downtown commerce: "'It's tough for mankind. Where are you going to get flip-flops and stuff?'" (p. 4)

These reactions are indicative of the types of customers that downtown commercial interests have tried to attract throughout the tumultuous lives of twentieth century downtown. Bringing together a wide variety of sources, Isenberg constructs a narrative encompassing American urban centers large and small. She eschews a model of decline and an idealization of public space; instead she finds, during decades of Depression, modernization, urban renewal, desegregation, suburbanization and historic preservation, an ongoing debate on the cultural meaning of downtowns, their economic importance and their preferred patrons. In attempting to create a national narrative synthesized from local and trade sources, Isenberg claims "this national scope derives from the nature of Main Street investment," characterized by locally, regionally, and nationally shared strategies, from the City Beautiful movement to the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Main Street initiative. (p. 9)

In chapter 1 the author begins by detailing urban civic improvement efforts in the Progressive Era. She particularly emphasizes the role of women's civic improvement associations in promoting an image of downtown, including grassroots "municipal housekeeping" and the important role women's groups played in attracting planners like John Nolen to devise plans for their cities.

Isenberg turns her attention in chapter 2 to the artifacts of Main Street postcards. In producing these familiar images from the teens, twenties and thirties--now in great demand at book fairs, paper shows and on eBay--civic leaders touched up the images of their downtowns. They visually paved streets, removed blight and shaped an idealized view of the city for consumers in terms of physical condition and downtown cooperation.

Chapter 3 offers attention to commercial investors' attitudes toward shoppers. During this decade, urban retailers catered to women shoppers who often controlled families' budgets and who increasingly turned to chains to satisfy their desires for the latest styles in the goods they bought. This led to the emergence of chains as downtown anchors in the "100% district," the most desirable locations in cities' downtowns.

The Depression features in chapter 4, leading to storefront modernization as a means of competing with emerging suburban shopping alternatives. Additionally, Isenberg finds strategies of building demolition and developing surface parking lots was a popular method of coping with disappearing revenue downtown. Despite wartime invigoration of industry and federal occupants in downtown office space, gloom and pessimism still informed real estate and retail discussion during the period.

Isenberg explores the impact of urban renewal not only on the urban land-scape, but on the discourse of downtown revitalization in chapter 5. The clearance of slums and rationalization of downtown planning were often interpreted as ways of making urban commerce more attractive to suburban women who might have found a blighted or confusing downtown too intimidating to patronize. The author also introduces racial ideas to the discussion of retail, demonstrating how African American customers were seen as "lower quality" patrons even though urban black customers were increasingly important to downtown retail vitality.

Chapter 6 is entitled "The Hollow Prize?" a reference to the outcome of the battle blacks fought against segregationists for full participation in urban commercial and civic life. The irony is that the political unrest, key to the assertion of black rights in urban life, made downtown Main Streets seem like less desirable places to do shop and business.

Finally, in chapter 7, Isenberg examines early efforts at appealing to nostalgia in attempts to revitalize downtowns. While St. Louis' Gaslight Square ultimately failed--despite early promise in the 1960s--San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square and Boston's Faneuil Hall were resounding successes. She concludes that "the democratic, melting-pot downtown has been an evolving ideal, not a past accomplished reality from which Americans have strayed. Throughout the twentieth century, that democratic ideal has teetered in balance with exclusionary ideals and investment." (p. 315)

Isenberg's emphasis on real estate history, "a remarkably understudied field," illuminates the ideas and people who evaluated and acted on downtowns throughout the country, as well as the trade ideas that informed them. In poring through real estate newsletters like Real Estate Analyst and retail periodicals like Women's Wear Daily, Isenberg draws upon shared knowledge that informed developers and retailers around the country. Missing from this narrative, though, is the dynamic of downtown residences as Isenberg presents downtowns solely as commercial districts. This strand of the narrative could be informed by Paul Groth's Living Downtown on single residence occupancy hotels throughout the twentieth century and discussions of urban residential real estate dating at least as far back as Homer Hoyt's The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities (1939) and Richard Hurd's Principles of City Land Values (1903, 1924). (p. 12)

Despite this lack, Downtown America is not only an interesting look at the history of commercial interests in urban business districts, but in the people and issues surrounding commerce and urban investment--gender and race, economic failure and revitalization. Scholars of women's history, material culture, and urban history will find this book a valuable contribution to their reading lists.

LaDale C. Winling

University of Michigan