From a Dry Goods Store to Downtown
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It has always been my presumption that “downtown” was a Manhattan specific coinage that other cities picked up. In “A Small Boy and Others,” Henry James wrote of accompanying his aunt to A.T. Stewart’s store on Broadway and Chambers Street. James wrote that it represented “the enjoyment of our city as down-towny as possible.” Stewart’s, which opened in 1846, helped redefine the scale of “dry goods” emporiums, and in so doing drew vast numbers of female shoppers and promenaders to the city’s central business district, formerly a masculine preserve.
The historian Gunther Barth, in his excellent book “City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in 19th-Century America” (1980), wrote of how this “feminization” of our center-city areas gave rise to the modern “downtown,” the pulsing retail heart of the metropolis – what the architect Louis Kahn later resonantly termed “the cathedral of the city.” In the 1850s,an ice-cream parlor and lunchroom called Taylor’s opened at Broadway and Franklin Street; its building still stands on the northwest corner. Historians claim that Taylor’s may have been the country’s highest-volume restaurant at one time. It also admitted only women. Later, bigger and bigger dry-goods stores – soon called “department stores” – opened, beginning with a new Stewart store, at Broadway and 10th Street. Vast emporiums opened in a northward march to 23rd Street, and the area earned the appropriate moniker “Ladies’ Mile.” Similar stories played out in other cities, for example on State Street in Chicago.
This 19th-century prehistory, if you will, of downtown does not figure in Alison Isenberg’s new book, “Downtown America” (University of Chicago Press, 441 pages, $32.50). Among my few cavils about this book is that its title should have indicated that this is a book about the 20th-century downtown. Such names as those of Stewart or of Potter Palmer, the entrepreneurs who reimagined America’s center-city areas, do not appear in this book. And it might be helpful for this book’s readers to know a bit of this 19th-century background in order better to appreciate Ms. Isenberg’s narrative of the vicissitudes of 20th-century downtowns.
Cavils aside, I found on every page something I did not know and am glad to know.
I am old enough to remember from my early childhood a time when Chicago’s State Street reigned as the magnetic and magical hub of retail trade, the most exciting place in the world. I also remember our neighborhood “downtown,” West Madison Street on the city’s West Side, as an exciting microcosm of downtown State Street – until in the wake of the 1968 race riots the street became a burnt-out husk of its former self. I pine for such places – seek their ghosts in all the cities I visit, and revel when, as on occasion in Brooklyn or Queens, I encounter rare examples of the real, old thing.
Yet, as Ms. Isenberg informs us, I knew those places only in one phase of their history. For downtown – by which term Ms. Isenberg also includes neighborhood and small-town main streets – has long been a battleground of ideas and conflicting visions.
Ms. Isenberg begins with an examination of the “municipal housekeeping” movement of the early 20th century, when women’s organizations campaigned to spruce up downtown streets in a manner strikingly analogous to recent work by some of our “business improvement districts.” The ladies eventually yielded to professional planners like Charles Mulford Robinson and John Nolen, who flitted from city to city to make presentations and prepare reports on the rational planning of downtown districts. Downtown businessmen and municipal governments, fired by planners’ notions as well as the often unacknowledged adoption of the women’s groups’ precepts, sought to create ideal visions of downtown, in part by commissioning postcard companies to produce idealized downtown images – “airbrushed,” so to speak.
Ms. Isenberg’s most fascinating chapter is on these postcard companies and how they went about making lovely images of cities large and small. She tells us (without drawing this specific parallel) that the postcard views were an idealization of downtowns in the way “Leave It to Beaver” idealized late-1950s family values, serving less as deliberate falsifications than as value touchstones that indicated the direction in which many people wished things to move.
Next she writes of the 1920s and the dominant role of real-estate consultants, with their private-investor newsletters and buzzwords like “100% location.” She’s excellent on the effects on downtown of the 1930s Depression. One finds it amazing to see the extent to which many of our downtown streets still bear the scars of Depression-era demolition, in which substantial buildings often yielded to parking lots and taxpayers. The 1950s brought “urban renewal,” and the 1960s brought, in many places, physical destruction and changing uses that resulted from racial discord. One does well to see that some downtown streets that common wisdom says have been laid waste to, like Brooklyn’s downtown Fulton Street, in fact thrive, with nary an empty storefront (though their businesses cater exclusively to an African-American clientele). Ms. Isenberg’s final chapter deals with such “downtown revival” phenomena as James Rouse’s “waterfront festival marketplaces.” Now cliches, such developments in fact were rather radical when proposed, and the success of them surprised even their promoters.
My problem with academic studies lies in their language, their “academese,” with portentous repetitions and scare quotes. Ms. Isenberg provides a gloss of academese. (If I never read the word “gendered” again, it will be too soon.) Still, it doesn’t get in the way, and readers of any ideological persuasion may profit from Ms. Isenberg’s careful research and sober analysis.
This is a book that I will be recommending and referring to often in the years to come.
Mr. Morrone’s “Abroad in New York” column appears each Monday in the New York Sun.