Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950

This is a work of synthesis, thoroughly grounded in published primary sources and secondary literature, describing the roles played by business owners and business organizations, politicians, and planners, backed up by a supporting cast of newspaper editors, community activists of diverse types, and city voters in shaping the history of America's downtown districts. Robert M. Fogelson warns readers that some may find his book unfashionable, because he does not describe the experience of ordinary people on the sidewalks of New York or represent the discourse of subaltern slum dwellers in Chicago. Instead he aims to identify the ideas and the interests of the power brokers and political movers and shakers whose activities shaped the history of Downtown USA. The author previously explored city building along these lines in The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (1967), a book that was reissued by the University of California Press in 1993 in its Classics of Urban History series. Now, Fogelson describes big cities across the nation and argues that their history is the product of a complex process that defies determinism, whether of the cultural or economic, structural or functional variety. Fogelson explores numerous causal dynamics, including the ups and downs of national and regional business cycles, technological innovation, decisions about where to invest, what to invest in, and what to do when investments go bad, the interplay of private business decisions and public policies, the belief in spatial harmony among the various components of the city, concepts of racial hierarchy, and the widespread preference for automobiles over mass transit and for singlefamily suburban homes over multiple-unit downtown apartment buildings.