Alison Isenberg's Downtown America chronicles the tumultuous path of development, decline, and in some cases redevelopment, followed by central business districts in American cities over the course of the twentieth century. This path has formed a central or peripheral theme of many previous books, including Kenneth T. Jackson's widely acclaimed Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Isenberg's book, national in scope yet local in emphasis, complements this earlier work by focusing on the human dramas that unfolded in the face of the century's inexorable economic changes.

Downtown America distinguishes itself from previous works in several respects. It focuses almost exclusively on retail trade, devoting little or no space to the role of central districts as residential neighborhoods or hubs of commerce. The book's scope is also limited historically, beginning its narrative at the dawn of the twentieth century when central business districts were already well established in many cities. Although the book contains some discussion of public policy, most notably zoning laws and mid-century urban renewal efforts, the primary emphasis is on the local community organizations, small-scale entrepreneurs, and national retailing powers that shaped and reshaped centralized retail trade. Relatedly, the book has relatively few references to mayors or other politicians; instead Progressive Era urban planners, Main Street retail magnates, appraisers, civil rights demonstrators, and real estate developers populate the pages and copious figures. The index contains references to W. T. Grant but not Community Development Block Grants; to Rich's Department Store but not Richard Nixon. Isenberg explicitly intends to pay less attention to the impersonal forces, such as the rise of the automobile, that quite literally drove downtown America on its twentieth-century path, and more attention to the individuals and societal groups, defined most conspicuously along race and gender lines, that interplayed with these forces.

We learn of the prominent role that women's civic groups played in rallying public support for infrastructural and aesthetic improvements downtown, and businessmen's gradual realization that these proposed improvements could actually comprise a profitable investment. In a later chapter, we learn that women, as housewives who made most consumption decisions in their households, influenced the location decisions of many national chain stores, who drove up property values in areas with heavy mid-day pedestrian traffic. Still later, Isenberg recounts many postwar lamentations regarding the increase in both wives' labor-force participation and housewives' tendency to travel by car. Both innovations acted to increase the opportunity cost of women's time. Coupled with the increasing tendency for affluent families to live at some distance from the central business district, these trends boded ill for the success of Main Street retailers.

From an early stage, downtown districts struggled with the management of racial tension. Isenberg discusses early efforts to restrict racial intermingling through zoning laws, and later practices of ignoring the retail needs and preferences of proximate black shoppers in deference to those of suburban housewives. Isenberg devotes an entire chapter to the prominent role played by downtown merchants in the Civil Rights era. This fascinating narrative compellingly describes the difficult situation faced by these business owners, who often faced simultaneous demonstrations or boycotts by integrationists and segregationists alike. The author follows this discussion with a thoughtful analysis of the 1960s riots, identifying the tendency to cite white store owners as partly responsible for the destruction visited upon them by black rioters as an early instance of victim blaming.

Downtown America contains insights well beyond the standard modern discussion of race and gender implications. Isenberg devotes a chapter to the analysis of idealized images of early downtowns portrayed in picture postcards. These romanticized visions of uncrowded, uncluttered, well-maintained streets foreshadowed the suburban shopping centers that would later deprive Main Street of its wealthiest customers. The book also chronicles the difficult process by which architects and real estate developers came to realize that their continuous efforts to modernize and renew central business districts, which began in the depression era and continued through postwar decentralization, may have destroyed rather than created value. The commercial potential of historic preservation went unrealized for many years, before the successful development of destinations such as San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square and Boston's Faneuil Hall pointed the direction toward a profitable formula.

Downtown America occupies an interesting intellectual intersection. In contrast to many other entries in the University of Chicago Press's Historical Studies of Urban America, it is national in scope, drawing on the experiences of countless American cities both large and small. These experiences are drawn together not by their reflection of common broad societal trends, but by a commonality of actors who either helped to create these trends or responded to them. It is a large picture painted with a fine brush. Scholars and students of urban economics and urban history will find it an interesting read.