The Center Didn't Hold
By Philip Langdon

Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950
By Robert M. Fogelson
Yale University Press, 493 pages, $35

At first I simply couldn't believe this book's subtitle. Had American downtowns already "fallen" by 1950? If you'd ridden the passenger trains into Cleveland and disembarked at the impressive Terminal Tower in the early 1960s, as my parents and I used to do twice a year from western Pennsylvania, the idea that downtown was passé would have seemed absurd.

Lines of buses belching diesel exhaust --to my small-town sensibility, the very odor of urbanity--ran continually along Euclid Avenue, transporting legions of people to the offices, department stores, theaters, and other attractions of downtown Cleveland. 

But after finishing Robert Fogelson's carefully constructed history of American cities, it's clear to me that the MIT professor, author of several earlier books on urban topics, is right. The nineteenth-century idea of a downtown--a single hub around which an entire metropolis revolves--began to lose force before WW II, and is not going to be revived.

Fogelson emphasizes that from the late 1800s into the 1920s, downtown was not just a center; it was the center. It was where offices clustered, where stores concentrated, where theaters and pleasure spots lit up the night, where cultural pursuits brought out the cultivated and the curious. The suburbs offered no competition to the energy of downtown.

Downtown achieved its preeminence because America valued physical proximity. Large-scale enterprises, which emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century, needed specialized professional and business services, and those required a compact central place. Transportation systems converged on downtown, ensuring that it would be a convenient location for merchandisers, entertainment impresarios, and other orchestrators of metropolitan life. 

There was a strong belief in what Fogelson calls "spatial harmony"--the idea that the crowded downtown and the lower-intensity outer districts would never fight each other. City dwellers frequently complained about annoyances such as slow-moving streetcars and noisy, unsightly elevated railways, but they accepted the idea of a metropolis made up of two mutually dependent parts connected by mass transit. 

Incredible as it now seems, many city dwellers in the early twentieth century did not take pride in the modern city's most visible achievement, the ambitious, upward-thrusting skyline. Critics derided skyscrapers as "eyesores." Boston, dependably conservative in many of its instincts, decreed that buildings must rise no higher than 125 feet. By contrast, New York rejected height limits and instead enacted the zoning ordinance of 1916, which required buildings to taper back as they rose--thus creating a strikingly energetic and beautiful silhouette.

Which approach was better--New York's or Boston's? I wish Fogelson had offered more of a verdict, because the issue has been revisited in recent years by Leon Krier, the godfather of neo-traditional architecture, who argues that buildings only a few stories high make a much more habitable city. Perhaps Boston's attempt to retain a low- to medium-height urban fabric, though eventually compromised, is one of the reasons the Massachusetts capital now ranks among the most enjoyable and thriving big cities in the U.S. 

Fogelson astutely identifies the many false notions that have periodically clouded urban thinking. One was that expressways would be good for cities because they would help people reach the center. In fact, expressways consume so much land that they are inherently at odds with dense cities. Fogelson points out that it would take "roughly 20 four-lane elevated highways to move as many people as one two-track subway." Instead of saving the cities, expressways literally paved the way for the suburban exodus. 

Tenement-house regulation and demolition, which had avid supporters early in the century, eliminated the worst housing offenses, Fogelson says, "but raised the cost of construction, by as much as 10 to 15 percent in Boston, so that far from stimulating the production of much-needed new housing, they deterred it." The idea of "spatial harmony" turned out to be patently false. By the 1930s, the outer districts of cities rebelled against the down- town interests, refusing to support center-city proposals such as new subway lines. 

The departure of much of the old business base, the middle-class migration to independent suburban communities, the arrival of impoverished and poorly educated rural blacks, and the shift of decision-making to the federal level ultimately made it difficult for cities to right themselves. The New Deal, though it initially benefited cities, poured federal money into building the infrastructure of the South and West, eventually making it easy for companies to leave high-wage Northeastern and Midwestern cities behind. 

Yet the story is not over. Downtowns are now re-envisioned as places where people live. Colleges and universities are infusing round-the-clock vitality into formerly 9-to-5 areas like Chicago's South Loop. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani proved that big cities can be orderly. 

Nonetheless, Fogelson is right. Downtown is only one of many centers in today's spread-out metropolis. This book tells, in fascinating detail, how that once-unthinkable situation came about. 

—TAE contributing writer Philip Langdon is associate editor of New Urban News.

Democrats Rising?
By George Marlin

The Emerging Democratic Majority
By John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira
Scribner, 213 pages, $24

In 1969, political analyst Kevin Phillips announced that a new coalition of voters was emerging that would end "New Deal Democratic hegemony" and create a Republican/conservative lock on the electoral college for years to come. 

Sure enough, repulsed by the flower children rioting in the streets and their Democratic allies, southern Protestants, working-class urban Catholics, and rural westerners flocked to the Republican party. These voters turned to Richard Nixon in 1972 when he ran against "acid, amnesty, and abortion." In 1980 they gave Ronald Reagan a decisive mandate to downsize government, cut taxes, and defeat communism.

In a new book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, liberal analysts John Judis and Ruy Teixeira now argue that the conservative national majority is disintegrating, and that a new coalition committed to the Democratic party is rising.

The offspring of many World War II-era cultural conservatives have left ethnic city neighborhoods and rural areas for suburbia. Having achieved upper-middle class status, some are embarrassed by the traditional moral beliefs of their forefathers. According to Judis and Teixeira, this emerging class of metropolitan professionals is joining blacks, Hispanics, and working women in an embrace of "progressive" politics that will guarantee the Democratic party a national electoral majority.

In my home state of New York, the traditionally Republican suburban counties surrounding New York City have been flooded over the last generation with socially liberal professionals who are changing the political demographics. In 1998, Chuck Schumer beat three-term incumbent U.S. Senator Al D'Amato by making dramatic inroads in suburban areas. Schumer actually received 47 percent of the vote in D'Amato's home county on Long Island. Two years later, Hillary Clinton whipped Rick Lazio by carrying even affluent Westchester County and the upstate Republican stronghold of Onondaga County.

Democrats show rising strength in metropolitan regions where "the production of ideas and services has either re-defined or replaced assembly-line manufacturing," state the authors. Artisans, musicians, craftsmen, and technology experts often support liberal social and environmental causes, and are becoming more numerous as America becomes richer.

Judis and Teixeira analyze 263 metro counties that Reagan carried with a cumulative 55 percent of the vote. In 2000, Gore carried these same regions by 55 percent to Bush's 41 percent. If these trends continue, the Democrats will indeed command the 270 electoral votes needed to control the White House.

Judis and Teixeira haven't come up with an airtight case. Two possible scenarios could upset their prognostications. First, many Democrats elected as centrists could revert to their true colors and start promoting big-government schemes that would put off suburbanites. Bill Clinton's shift to the left after his election as a "New Democrat"--marked by a proposed nationalization of health insurance, abandonment of his pledge to cut middle class taxes, and his championing of gays in the military--permitted the Republicans to gain control of both houses of Congress in 1994.

Another alternative to a Democratic control depends on great efforts by Republicans, but I'm not sure they're up to it. Throughout the urban deserts of America's inner cities are patches of green: stretches of tidy, well-kept houses populated by new immigrants and civic-minded minority citizens committed to family, education, self-discipline, and hard work. These new Americans--Koreans, Hispanics, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, and Middle Easterners--are repopulating abandoned communities, improving dreadful schools, and building productive businesses and neighborhood shops. If the Republican party is to counterbalance the growth of natural Democratic constituencies, it must reach out to these individuals. The Republican party must become a part of their lives, and promote their beliefs and interests, from City Hall to Washington. Conservatives must prove again, in the words of Michael Novak, that a "politics based on family and neighborhood is far stronger socially and psychologically than a politics based on bureaucracy."

If Republicans try to imitate Democrats by buying off the leaders of these communities with political plums, they will fail--because they can never outspend or outpromise the Democrats. Instead, they must convince these voters that their future success as citizens rests with basic Republican principles. By making inroads in urban communities, Republicans could offset Democratic suburban gains and maintain electoral competitiveness. Such a strategy could make the difference in Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey, and other states that George W. Bush lost in 2000.

If Republicans fail, Judis and Teixeira will be hailed as prophets of the new political order dominating American life.

—George J. Marlin is author of Fighting the Good Fight: The History of New York's Conservative Party.

The Frontier Fed Ex
By Bill Croke

Stagecoach: Wells Fargo and the American West
By Philip L. Fradkin
Simon and Schuster, 250 pages, $27.50 

One of the certainties of American life is the perennial inefficiency of the U.S. Post Office. In the nineteenth-century West, mail delivery could take months. That left an opening for the private Wells Fargo delivery service, similar to the niches occupied by UPS and FedEx today. In Stagecoach, former Los Angeles Times reporter Philip Fradkin presents a history of the legendary express and banking enterprise. 

Henry Wells and William Fargo became partners in 1845. Their delivery company started off servicing small cities and farm hamlets in upstate New York. As America's railroads spread through the East, the two entrepreneurs decided to seek virgin territory across the Mississippi. The 1849 California Gold Rush offered them a perfect opportunity. Wells Fargo stagecoaches delivered to mining camps scattered all across the Sierra Nevada mountains. The true mark of a new town's civic ascendancy in Gold Rush-era California was the opening of a Wells Fargo branch office.

Wells Fargo was also a partner with American Express in the ill-fated Pony Express, a mounted mail service that operated between St. Louis and Placerville, California for 18 months in 1860 and '61. A series of express riders covered the 2,000-mile route in 11 days. Fresh horses and men were provided at regular "way stations," though bandits and Indians occasionally harried the riders. At 15, William F. Cody--later known as Buffalo Bill--got his start as a Pony Express rider. 

Though the Pony Express lost money, it blazed routes later traveled by stagecoaches carrying passengers, freight, and bullion--Wells Fargo's bread and butter. The legendary Concord coaches manufactured in New Hampshire to ingenious Yankee designs were made specifically for speedy travel over rough roads. Rewards prompted drivers to break speed records, and tight logistics eventually permitted a traveler to go from St. Louis to San Francisco in 24 days. 

The young Samuel Clemens traveled the route in 1861 in the company of his older brother Orion, heading to a job as secretary to the new governor of Nevada. Sam went along for the adventure, and for material to feed his literary aspirations. He ended the journey as a Nevada newspaperman, writing as Mark Twain. 

Fradkin also tells how New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley rode the stage west in 1859, enduring the dust, lack of sleep, bone-aching jolts, and bad food at way stations. Writing with his typically jaundiced eye, Greeley commented on one landscape that "if Uncle Sam should ever sell that tract for one cent per acre, he will swindle the purchaser outrageously." The man who famously editorialized "Go west, young man" detested the "desolation" of what he saw from his stage window, and made his return trip from San Francisco via steamship. 

By the 1860s, Wells Fargo was the main carrier of bullion mined in the West. One record-breaking day in 1864 saw the company haul three tons of silver bullion from the mines of Virginia City, Nevada alone. As stage robbery became popular. Wells Fargo devoted considerable resources to security precautions. But even armed guards didn't stop desperadoes from hitting remote coaches. From 1870 to 1884 Wells Fargo suffered 378 robberies and burglaries, resulting in 33 deaths, 240 court convictions, and losses of $928,000 --$16 million in current value. 

The company's dogged security policy was that "Wells Fargo never forgets" offenses against its prosperity. James Hume, for 30 years the company's tough and efficient chief of security, relentlessly tracked down Wells Fargo robbers. His wiliest fugitive was "Black Bart," an intelligent elderly gentleman who robbed 28 stages in eight years, disguising himself and always escaping afoot rather than mounted, thus making it difficult to track him. Hume finally nabbed him living a genteel life in San Francisco, and sent him to prison. At a time when there was no FBI, Wells Fargo actually provided the best crime statistics on the American West.

Wells Fargo is lucky to have its story told by Philip Fradkin in great form. 

—Bill Croke is a writer in Cody, Wyoming.