The center didn't hold.('Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950')(Book Review)

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 passe 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.