| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Alison Isenberg. Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It. (Historical Studies of Urban America.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2005. Pp. xviii, 441. $32.50.
"Main Streets everywhere have been portrayed as living organisms facing the end of eventful lives," or as places whose decline is "the product of market forces" (pp. 1–2), writes Alison Isenberg. Arguing against these simplistic formulations, she looks at retail in downtown America from 1890 to the present. Following the editors of Architectural Forum, whose editors asserted in 1939 that "Main Street in a big town is simply a small-town Main Street with added attractions" (p. 11), she traces a national ideal of "Main Street" promoted through local real estate investment decisions. Actors include community activists, designers, planners, investors, consumers, real estate consultants, and government officials.	1
Women of the municipal housekeeping movement gained political influence by cleaning up industrial towns in the "City Beautiful" era. Describing the "hybrid public-private nature of urban commercial life" (p. 41), Isenberg explains the appeal of clean streets, lampposts, benches, and trash cans. To pursue urban design, she looks beyond the work of architects and planners such as Charles Mulford Robinson and John Nolen to commercial artists working for postcard companies. Often hired by the local chamber of commerce, they extended the clean-up campaigns of the municipal housekeepers. Using company archives, Isenberg shows how artists retouched original downtown photographs to remove broken sidewalks, unsightly wires, and traffic and then hand-colored them to add sunny or moonlit skies (pp. 46–47, 68–69). Delving further, she finds clients' notes to the artists such as "Take out ... all old cars in 2nd block" (p. 71).	. . .

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