Alison Isenberg

In Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It, Alison Isenberg argues, “Throughout the twentieth century, decisions about Main Street’s mundane material conditions revealed broader cultural and economic values…Together, these values have shaped the contours, meaning, and experience of many journeys downtown” (pg. 12). Isenberg works to problematize the narrative of Main Street, U.S.A. from one of decay to a more dynamic story in which women, African-Americans, and others were continually reinventing the space. Isenberg draws upon developers own plans, advertisers documents, as well as extensive visual records documenting the changing face of various downtowns.
Isenberg begins with the City Beautiful movement of the 1890s, which sought to modernize cities through promotional materials emphasizing paved roads, straight corridor-like lanes, and buried wires. Women played a key role in this movement, though “women’s downtown initiatives paved the way for men’s commercial organizations to take up the cause of Main Street beautification too – by carefully defining such work as civic and public, rather than political” (pg. 15). Women may have defined the scope of these projects, but social mores of the time required them to step aside when businessmen took over the projects. Postcards of various downtowns during this period helped sell the image of City Beautiful by removing sidewalk obstructions that business owners feared would limit pedestrian traffic and cleaned up roads and wires that they feared created an uninviting atmosphere.
During the early twentieth century, “Commercial real estate investors…became preoccupied with women shoppers because they recognized that women’s behavior underpinned not only peak downtown real estate values but also alarming developments such as the apparent decline of small-town Main Streets and the unpredictable scattering of stores throughout city outskirts and residential neighborhoods” (pg. 79). Even with their focus on women shoppers, they limited their attentions to white, middle-class women. This attention affected perceived land values, with the most valuable land comprising the prime retail sector of the city. Zoning during this time hearkened back to the City Beautiful movement. Isenberg writes, “Advocated legally justified all land-use segregation on the basis of the state’s police power to protect public health, safety, and welfare, but they also pledged that zoning would contribute to the prosperity and convenience of the citizenry, protect land values, and infuse city-building with ‘common sense and fairness’” (pg. 102).
During the Great Depression, business owners and realtors recycled unused spaces into parking lots or gave buildings facelifts to reflect more modern sensibilities. Isenberg writes, “To reassure themselves, their clients, and the public, appraisers began to demand of one another a detailed documentation of city character and projected development – incorporating what might be called a city planning approach into their reports” (pg. 131). This focus stressed harmony in the overall aesthetic of streets and business districts.
Discussing the role of race and gender in shaping the downtown cityscape, Isenberg writes, “Postwar commercial aesthetics, sharpened in competition with new suburban shopping centers, were determined by concerns over who would be the ideal consumer – who would reinvigorate downtown property values and profits or breathe life into the malls” (pg. 167). To this end, “investors resurrected some of the same arguments invented by female municipal housekeepers in the 1890s to justify women’s participation in civic affairs and urban design. In the 1950s, however, mostly male downtown interests invoked women’s housekeeping standards in the name of mostly female consumers” (pg. 176). This afforded women an opportunity for a public voice, though one narrowly circumscribed by men’s views of women’s desires. According to Isenberg, Race played a role, as “the racialized fears that downtowns might become ‘lower-class ethnic islands’ of commerce added urgency to the calls for urban renewal and articulated a preference for who should be downtown” (pg. 189). These racial tensions shaped Americans’ views of downtown spaces during the Civil Rights era. Ironically, businesses often suffered from boycotts led by both segregationists and civil rights activists. The former sought to punish those businesses considering integration while the latter pressured businesses to abandon segregation (pg. 217). Later riots gave credence to white suburbanites’ fears of the city and downtown, leading to economic stagnation.… (más)

The particular interest of this book is that the author addresses the evolution of the American city through the prism of business and retail interests; people who kept their collective eye fixedly on the pursuit of the affluent white female suburbanite and were prepared to move heaven and earth to cater to this class. This is at the expense of the working-class and non-white communities who did make up much of the actual urban shopping clientele. Perhaps the most interesting portion of the book deals with the contrast between the blue-sky business plans of the Twenties, the golden age of "Downtown," as compared to the various survival modes that the owners of urban real estate have had to adopt in the decades since; all very relevant in the wake of the current real estate bust.… (más)