| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It. By Alison Isenberg. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. xviii, 441 pp. $32.50, ISBN 0-226-38507-8.)
This history of urban commercial districts from the 1890s goes beyond standard narratives of downtown's rise and fall by presenting a picture of an area constantly being remade. Focusing on the main street commercial corridor of all urban places, Alison Isenberg's nuanced history chronologically traces diverse groups and their plans to remake this area. These groups include clubwomen, urban planners, postcard manufacturers, retailers, landowners, marketing and real estate analysts, federal and local governments, and downtown developers.	1
By the 1890s, middle- to upper-class white clubwomen played significant roles in so-called municipal housekeeping; focusing on aesthetics, they sought improved paving, clean streets and sidewalks, and removal of billboards and signs, and they supported the emergence of professional planning in the 1910s. As planners' roles grew, the planners distanced themselves from clubwomen's efforts, referring to them as "pink ribbons on lampposts" (p. 37); by the late 1920s, the role of clubwomen "was largely forgotten" (p. 40).	. . .

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