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http://juh.sagepub.com/Journal of Urban History
http://juh.sagepub.com/content/29/2/87The online version of this
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DOI: 10.1177/0096144202238869 2003 29: 87Journal of Urban
History
Lizabeth CohenIs There An Urban History Of Consumption?
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10.1177/0096144202238869JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January
2003Cohen / URBAN HISTORY OF CONSUMPTION
IS THERE AN URBAN HISTORYOF CONSUMPTION?
LIZABETH COHENHarvard University
It may seem at first take that consumption is not such a new
lens throughwhich to view changes in the cityscape, the physical
look of cities, but I wouldremind you how deeply terms of
production have infiltrated the language andconceptualization of
urban history. We speak most often of the preindustrialcity, the
industrial city, the corporate city, the service city, the
postindustrialcity, and so forth, implying that the crucial engine
generating urban change hasbeen the production side of the economy.
Without discounting the influence ofthe changing nature of
production in shaping the city, by focusing on it exclu-sively we
may miss the significance of consumption trends and choices in
themaking of the city, and the twentieth-century city in
particular.
What follows involves some speculation and the drawing out of
largerimplications from my own work to probe how the history of
consumption mayprovide a helpful organizing framework for urban and
metropolitan history ofthe twentieth century, and probably for
earlier periods, although I will leavethat to other specialists. I
will focus on the United States, but I have little doubtthat the
pressures and challenges of consumption have shaped cities
elsewhereas well. Hopefully, my observations will inspire those who
work on non-U.S.cities to think in new ways about urban life in
other parts of the world and all ofus to think comparatively about
the impact of consumption on citydevelopment.
The history of consumption as a field has focused primarily on
the imagemaking of advertising, on one hand, and consumerssocial
identity and desires,as individuals or as part of communities
usually defined by gender, class, orrace, on the other. For many
scholars, shopping is about more than what peoplebuy, but usually
historians of consumption focus on marketers manipulationsor
consumers preferences, not on the larger impact of consumer
behavior onsuch things as the nations landscape or its political
culture.
87
AUTHORS NOTE: What follows falls somewhere between a photo essay
and a typical article, as it seeksto preserve in printed form some
of the spirit of a presidential address (Urban History Association,
Chicago,IL, January 6, 2001) built around visual images.JOURNAL OF
URBAN HISTORY, Vol. 29 No. 2, December 2003 87-106DOI:
10.1177/0096144202238869 2003 Sage Publications
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I will begin by showing you a series of posters that illustrate
changes in animaginary, but representative, downtown of New
Providence, America. Theseposters were produced by the Townscape
Institute of Cambridge, Massachu-setts, in 1993 for use in
community education. There are seven posters in all,imagining
downtown New Providence on a different day in 1875, 1910,
1935,1955, 1970, 1980, and 1990. I will focus on four posters that
chart typicalchanges in the appearance of American downtowns over
the course of thetwentieth century: in 1910, 1955, 1970, and 1990.
In the images that follow,note the strong connection between the
viability of downtown and the vitalityof commerce and consumption
under way there.1
In 1910, New Providence was flourishing, and its commercial
establish-ments provided some measure of that prosperity (see
Figure 1). Shopping atthe downtown department store Getz &
McClure and smaller specialty shopsnearby took place alongside the
courthouse, banks, motion picture theaters,hotels, restaurants, and
main post office, all clustered downtown. The centralsquare, a park
newly enclosed with a wrought-iron fence and newly shadedwith elms,
created new public space to be enjoyed by pedestrians
attracteddowntown to shop, enjoy leisure, and do business.
By 1955, the development of new suburbs began to have a
significant effecton downtown commerce (see Figure 2). Despite
festive decorations to enticeholiday shoppers, the greater distance
suburbanites had to travel and the retailalternatives emerging in
the suburbs were changing downtown. Note thatspace has been taken
away from the park to create new angled and metered
88 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2003
Figure 1: New Providence, Friday, September 23, 1910SOURCE:
Ronald Fleming, The Townscape Institute.
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street parking, aimed at making shopping downtown as easy as in
the suburbs,and a new gas station has appeared at the end of Main
Street for the conve-nience of drivers. Moreover, Getz &
McClure department store has a shinynew metal grill to make it
appear as up to date as the new suburban stores.
By 1970, downtown was in a major crisis, and its root was
commercial (seeFigure 3). The growing numbers of suburban dwellers
were patronizing shop-ping centers near their homes, and downtown
was struggling to compete byreplicating the suburban mall. Empty
sites have been transformed into moreparking lots and garages. The
intersection of Main and Market Streets has beenturned into a
pedestrian mall, modeled after the typical suburban shoppingcenter.
But without public and private transportation pumping
lifebloodthrough these streets, few pedestrians are visible.
Adjoining the pedestrianmall, a paved, sunken plaza now dominates
the square, intended to make a tree-darkened and menacing park into
more open and safe public space. The newplaza, however, attracts
more graffiti, litter, and crime than the hoped-forpatrons; note
the mugging under way.
By 1990, the central city is in recovery (see Figure 4). The
pedestrian mallhas been removed, and once again public and private
transportation circulates.Storefront renovation is under way. The
central square has been returned topark, and activities like
concerts are offered to attract visitors. A historic build-ing that
had deteriorated across the street has been restored and moved to
thesquare as well. This is the optimistic scenario for downtown New
Providence,even though one might shudder at the old-time, stage-set
quality of the trolley,the bandstand, and the historic house. A
more pessimistic scenario would haveWal-Mart and other superstores
joining existing shopping centers in suburbia
Cohen / URBAN HISTORY OF CONSUMPTION 89
Figure 2: New Providence, December 20, 1955SOURCE: Ronald
Fleming, The Townscape Institute.
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and exurbia and downtown remaining marginal, perhaps still
attracting work-ers by day but without them spending enough money
downtown to sustain thelevel of commerce once transacted there. If
vitality returns, it would probablynot be through the resurrection
of stores like Getz & McClure but instead
90 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2003
Figure 3: New Providence, Wednesday, May 13, 1970SOURCE: Ronald
Fleming, The Townscape Institute.
Figure 4: New Providence, Friday, October 12, 1990SOURCE: Ronald
Fleming, The Townscape Institute.
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through trade dominated by new immigrants running ethnic
restaurants andbargain-priced shops for their compatriots residing
in inner-city neighbor-hoods rather than the suburbs.
The important point is not that consumption explains everything
abouturban change but rather that where it is transacted in
metropolitan areas, whatexpectations people have for it, and how
consumers behavior and expecta-tions are translated into concrete
physical forms have had a profound impacton the shape of
metropolitan America in the twentieth century, particularlyduring
the postWorld War II era. To explore the interconnections of
consump-tion and metropolitan change, I will draw from the book I
have just finished, AConsumersRepublic: The Politics of Mass
Consumption in Postwar America.2
I will be discussing a national phenomenon, but at times I will
pull examplesfrom northern New Jersey, as I do in the book. Not
only was New Jersey aquintessential postwar suburban state, but it
also had an activist state supremecourt that grappled with many of
the social issues that arose from the restruc-turing of the postwar
American landscape, thereby providing illuminatingevidence.
The photograph of Du Pont worker Steve Szekalinski and his
family posedin an A & P cold-storage warehouse in Cleveland,
Ohio, aimed to show thematerial abundancetwo and a half tons of
food worth $1,300, to be exactenjoyed annually by the typical
American household of four (see Figure 5). Itwas one of many
depictions rampant in the postwar period of Americansenjoying the
fruits of postwar prosperity, thereby participating in a
fundamen-tal reconceptualization of the American economy and
culture following WorldWar II that I call a ConsumersRepublic. This
new ideal, embraced by a far-reaching consensus among business
leaders, government policy makers, andorganized labor, had major
consequences for how Americans made a living;where they dwelled;
how they interacted with others; what, where, and howthey consumed;
and the political authorities to whom they felt accountable. Itheld
that an economy built around mass consumption would deliver not
onlygreater material prosperity but also, through that, the
long-sought politicalgoal of creating a more democratic and
egalitarian American society.
A dynamic mass consumption economy was expected to put into
motion acycle of consumer buying feeding greater production and
more jobs, which inturn would create more affluent consumers
capable of stoking the economywith their purchases. As the pie of
income and mass purchasing power grew,the thinking went, all
Americans would benefit, without the size of any of theportions
shrinking; in other words, with an ever-expanding pie, wealth
wouldnot need to be redistributed for more Americans to prosper. In
some ways, thiswas the same Keynesian solutionenhancing purchasing
powerthat NewDealers had seized on to pull the nation out of the
Great Depression in the late1930s. But a decade later, confidence
had soared that private mass consump-tion markets in a growth
economy, not just government spending to stabilize astagnant
economy, could rev up the machinery of demand.
Cohen / URBAN HISTORY OF CONSUMPTION 91
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What I have labeled a Consumers Republic had far-reaching
implicationsfor the physical character of postwar America. I will
look at two aspects: first,how the importance of housing
construction to the economy of the ConsumersRepublic shaped the
character of postwar metropolitan development and, sec-ond, how the
building of new centers of consumption in suburbia redefined
thenature of public space and public life therein and in turn
affected Americancities.
New house construction provided the bedrock of the postwar mass
con-sumption economy, both by turning home into an expensive
commodity forpurchase by many more consumers than ever before and
by stimulatingdemand for related commodities such as appliances and
cars. The scale of newresidential construction following World War
II was unprecedented, fueled bypent-up demand from fifteen years of
devastating depression followed by therestrictions of wartime and
fanned by a powerful message that a proper Ameri-can home was a
single-family, detached, suburban-type house. As the adver-tisement
from 1943 demonstrates (see Figure 6), Americans appetites forsuch
dwellings were fed during the war, through the mass circulation
press,traveling postwar home shows sponsored by the construction
industry, andpopular culture like the song that promised Goodbye
Dear, Ill be back in ayear, Well buy that cottage right out of
town.3 After the war, this massive
92 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2003
Figure 5: A Years Supply of Food, from Alex Henderson, Why We
Eat Better, Du PontCo., Better Living Magazine, November 1951
SOURCE: Courtesy of the Hagley Museum and Library.
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residential building was made possible by a mixed economy of
private enter-prise bolstered by government subsidy in the form of
mortgage guaranteeswith low interest rates and little down payment
directly to buyers as part of theveterans benefits under the GI
Bill of 1944 and indirectly to buyers throughloans to lenders and
developers through the Federal Housing Administration.The federal
government assisted as well through granting mortgage
interestdeductions on income taxes (a mass tax since World War II)
and constructing
Cohen / URBAN HISTORY OF CONSUMPTION 93
Figure 6: General Electric Advertisement in The Saturday Evening
Post, June 5, 1943SOURCE: General Electric.
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highways from cities out to the farmland that overnight was
being transformedinto vast suburban tract developments.
In New Jersey, single-family houses mushroomed from seven
percent of thestates housing stock in 1950 to sixty-four percent a
decade later. In the highlysuburbanized northern New Jersey area by
1960, a full quarter of the dwellingunits had been built since
1950, and high home-ownership rates mirrored thenations; in 1960,
sixty-two percent of Americans could claim they ownedtheir own
homes, in contrast to forty-four percent as recently as 1940, the
larg-est jump ever recorded. The garden state was fast becoming the
backyardgarden state, as the housing subdivision became the New
Jersey farmersfinal crop, in the words of one observer.4
This promotion of private market solutions to boost the mass
consumptioneconomyeven if highly subsidized by the federal
governmentturned adire social need for shelter into an economic
boom. Home building, in fact,became so central a component of
postwar prosperity that beginning in 1959,the U.S. Census Bureau
began calculating housing starts on a monthly basisas a key
indicator of the economys vitality.
The centrality of new, single-family, detached home building to
the healthof the ConsumersRepublic had far-reaching social
consequences. Most basi-cally, suburbs were favored over cities.
Eighty percent of new houses builtwere in suburban areas. And as
millions of Americans concluded that it wascheaper and more
desirable to own rather than rent, they left older housing incities
for the new suburban communities favored by the
VeteransAdministra-tion (VA) and Federal Housing Administration
loan programs and reinforcedby the lending policies of private
banks. Between 1947 and 1953 alone, thesuburban population of the
United States increased by forty-three percent, incontrast to a
general population increase of only eleven percent. Over thecourse
of the 1950s, in the twenty largest metropolitan areas, cities
would growby only one-tenth of a percent, their suburbs by an
explosive forty-five percent.By 1965, a majority of Americans would
make their homes in suburbs ratherthan cities.5
The home ownership at the heart of the ConsumersRepublic did
more thanexpand the numbers of suburbanites over urbanities. In the
process, it advan-taged some kinds of people over other kinds.
Through their greater access tohome mortgages, credit, and tax
advantages, men benefited over women,whites over blacks, and
middle-class Americans over working-class ones.Men, for example,
secured low VA mortgages and the additional credit thathome
ownership made available as a result of their veteran status in
World WarII and the Korean War, while women generally did not.
White Americans moreeasily qualified for mortgages, including those
guaranteed under the GI Bill,and more readily found suburban homes
to buy than African Americans did.
The photograph in Figure 7 represents the ideal that the GI Bill
held outthat all veterans could benefit from government assistance
in buying a home,furthering ones schooling, and starting a
business. In reality, however,
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because of the way the GI was structured, black Americans often
foundthemselves disqualified as poor loan risks by private banks
charged with fun-neling VA mortgage guarantees to veterans, much as
they were deniedentrance into training schools and colleges where
their government subsidizedtuitions supposedly bought them more
education. The workings of the privatereal estate market helped
keep African Americans out of suburbs as well,through seller
resistance, the withholding of listings, realtor steering, and
otherforms of discrimination.
Class distinctions operated in postwar metropolitan America as
well. Whilesome working-class Americans did move into suburbs,
increasingly theytended to settle in cops and firemen suburban
towns quite apart from thosewhere more middle-class Americans
lived. Studies of Levittown, Long Island,in 1950 and again in 1960
documented a shift away from a mixed-class suburbto a more
exclusively working-class and lower-middle-class one, as
white-col-lar residents moved out of Levittown to more affluent
communities nearby.Even when factories moved out of cities into
suburban areas, welcomed bycommunities eager for more ratables to
strengthen their property tax bases,often their workers could not
afford to live there. In northern New Jersey, whenFord workers
tried to move into Mahwah or IBM employees into FranklinLakes,
these communities refused to make the zoning changes necessary
to
Cohen / URBAN HISTORY OF CONSUMPTION 95
Figure 7: Staff Sergeant Herbert Ellison Explaining the Promises
of the GI Bill of Rights toan African American Quartermaster
Trucking Company Stationed in Italy dur-ing World War II
SOURCE: Library of Congress.
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build affordable housing. The National Commission on Urban
Problemsreport to Congress and the president in 1968, Building the
American City,openly acknowledged the reality of a class-stratified
metropolitan Americawhen it stated, Residential segregation by
Income Class has been fostered byFederal regulations, restrictive
codes, and fiscal zoning. Developers cateringto buyers of $50,000
to $100,000 homes . . . can neglect the need for
balancedcommunities.6
Emerging was a metropolitan landscape where whole communities
wereincreasingly being stratified along class and racial lines. As
a home, particu-larly a new one, in the ConsumersRepublic became a
commodity to be tradedup like a car, rather than a lifelong
emotional investment in a neighborhood orchurch parish, property
values became the new mantra. Of course, peoplestill chose the
towns they lived in, but increasingly they selected among
homo-geneous suburban communities occupying different rungs in a
hierarchy ofproperty values. Communities of new homes were
particularly easy to peg.When the annual income required to buy and
retain a typical new home in thenew Morris County suburb of
Parsipanny-Troy Hills was estimated at $12,000in the early 1960s,
policemen and firemen in northern New Jersey earned about$8,000 a
year, while only seventeen percent of all Newark familiesand
onlynine percent of non-white familiesearned more than $9,000.
Local zoningregulations enforcing plot and house size and
prohibiting multiple dwellings insuburban towns contributed to the
sorting out of prospective buyers by socialclass and, implicitly,
by race. Beginning in 1975 with its first Mt. Laurel ruling,the New
Jersey State Supreme Court would try to challenge this
stratificationof communities by ordering the building of affordable
housing in suburbancommunities. As a result, residential
segmentation by wealth was slowed butby no means stopped.
Not only did house prices position a community on that ladder of
prestige,so too did its social profile (see Figure 8). Many
suburban whites leaving citieswith growing African American
populationsdue to white flight as well asmassive black migration
north and west after World War IIfelt that only anall-white
community would ensure the safety of their investment, often
theirlife savings, and they did everything within their means to
restrict blacksaccess to real estate. What one cynical Newark
public official in 1962 labeledsegregurbia flourished, he said,
because the free enterprise system lurkingin many American hearts
has provided more moves to all-white suburbs thanthe billion words
of love have promoted the spiritual advantages of economicand
integrated city living. When William and Daisy Myers became the
firstblack family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, in 1957, a
neighbor whohad joined the ranks of those protesting their
arrivalwith rock throwing,cross burning, and general harassmentmade
the same point to a Life maga-zine reporter: Hes probably a nice
guy, but every time I look at him I see$2000 drop off the value of
my house.7 The increasing importance of property
96 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2003
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values to people whose major asset was now their homes
intensified resistanceto racial integration.
The commodification of home thus contributed significantly to
the con-struction of formidable racial barriers as suburbanization
advanced. TakeEssex County, of which Newark was the county seat. By
1970, in a county thatwas thirty percent black, only thirteen
percent of the residents of towns outsideof Newark were African
American, and eighty-nine percent of those blacksuburbanites lived
in only three municipalitiesEast Orange, Orange, andMontclair.
Outside of this suburban black belt, in the other eighteen
subur-ban communities of Essex County, only two percent of the
population wasblack.8
This increasing segmentation of suburbia by class and race
fueled evenmore damaging social inequality because of Americans
traditional devotionto localism as a critical pillar of democracy,
a conviction that only intensifiedwith suburbanization in the
postwar period. As a result, the quality of crucialservices soon
varied much more than they formerly had when more people
Cohen / URBAN HISTORY OF CONSUMPTION 97
Figure 8: The Author (right) and Her Sister in Front of their
Ranch-Style Tract House inParamus, New Jersey, in 1956
SOURCE: Lizabeth Cohen.NOTE: From this first house, they would
move two more times before graduating from high school,each time to
a somewhat more expensive house in a more affluent community,
typifying the way se-rial home acquisition marked the upward
mobility of many middle-class families in the postwar era.
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lived within larger units of cross-class and interracial cities.
Education, forexample, widely recognized as the best ticket to
success in postwar America,became captive to the inequalities of
the new metropolitan landscape sincein the American system
generally and in New Jersey even more so than otherstateslocal
communities substantially provided, and paid for, their ownschools
through local property taxes. The wealthier the community, the more
ithad to spend and the greater prospect of its children receiving
the kind of edu-cation that led to prestigious college and graduate
degrees and well-payingjobs. (This inequality has in fact led to
intense battling in more than forty statesupreme courts
nationwidefrom New Hampshire and Vermont to Texas andCaliforniaover
equalizing school spending throughout communities in astate. In New
Jersey, two historic sets of decisions, Robinson v. Cahill
andAbbott v. Burke, both calling for greater equity, have occupied
the statessupreme court for more than thirty years.)
Thus, despite a stated commitment to using a
consumption-oriented econ-omy to better the lives of the mass in
postwar America, the market forcesunleashed by the Consumers
Republic created a metropolitan reality of eco-nomic and social
segmentation and, in many cases, inequality.
My second example of how consumption shaped the postwar
metropolitanlandscape concerns the way commerce was organized in
mass suburbia andhow that, in turn, affected American cities. It
took a while to develop distinc-tive commercial structures in
postwar mass suburbia, but by the late 1950s, theregional shopping
center had emerged to challenge existing market towns insuburban
areas and the downtowns of dominant cities (see Figure 9).
Shopping centers may have presented themselves as the new public
space insuburbs, but before very long, a different reality became
evident: that theywere sites of consumption geared to maximizing
profits and to segmentingpopulations into market niches much the
way new residential development did(see Figure 10). Moreover,
legally there was even less ambiguity: Shoppingcenters considered
themselves privately owned spaces over which propertyowners fully
controlled access.
Although shopping centers generally launched themselves in the
1950s asaiming at middle-class consumers, very quickly they began
to differentiatetheir market identities. In Paramus, for example,
the Garden State Plaza overtime went more upscale, while its
competitor a mile away, the Bergen Mall,appealed to a less well-off
customer base. Transportation, too, helped segmentmarkets. Shopping
centers expected most people to drive there, requiringpatrons to
have a car. There was some bus service, but routes were
carefullyplanned to bring nondriving women from suburban towns, not
urban dwellers.(In 1966, for example, a daily average of only six
hundred people came to theGarden State Plaza by bus, compared to a
midweek average of eighteen thou-sand cars, many carrying more than
one passenger.)9 Moreover, being legallyprivate space, shopping
centers were not hesitant about employing and flaunt-ing a police
presence to weed out those considered undesirable, loosely
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defined to include African Americans, teenagers, vagrants, poor
people, andpolitical activists. When faced with a choice, managers
decided that control-ling access was more important for business
than mirroring the greater open-ness of more truly public
downtowns.
Finally, and most significantly, free speech and free assembly
in shoppingcenters became limited in most states, as the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled thatweighing citizens rights of free speech
against the rights of private propertyowners to control access was
a matter for states to decide. New Jersey
Cohen / URBAN HISTORY OF CONSUMPTION 99
Figure 9: A View of Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey,
Showing How ShoppersMoved Along Open-Air, Pedestrian Streets
SOURCE: Garden State Plaza Historical Collection.
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eventually became an exception, along with five other states,
when the NewJersey State Supreme Court again stood at the forefront
of liberal jurispru-dence in protecting free speech, although even
then it allowed shopping cen-ters to issue constraints.
The commodification of home and the commercialization of public
space inpostwar suburbia, then, led to greater privatization of the
civic sphere and newinequalities resulting from segmented
metropolitan living and consuming. Bydefining residential
communities through socioeconomic exclusion, byspawning privately
owned suburban centers whose economic viabilitydepended on
practicing social exclusion, and by fostering other spaces such
asgated residential communities where private ownership gave
license for evenmore explicit discrimination and restrictions of
free speech and assembly, theshapers of the landscape of mass
consumption undermined their own commit-ment to serving a mass
public.
Were this only a phenomenon of postwar American suburbs, as fast
as theygrew and as troubling as that has proved to be, it would be
one thing. What hasmagnified the problem, however, is that city
leaders have coped with population
100 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2003
Figure 10: Community Club Room at Garden State Plazas JC Penney
StoreSOURCE: JC Penney Archives & Historical Museum.NOTE: This
community club room, offered to civic groups, epitomized shopping
centers effort tolegitimate themselves as viable public space not
unlike the public parks and municipal buildings indowntowns like
New Providence.
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decline, the flight of retail trade, and the publics fear for
its safety on increas-ingly unfamiliar urban streets by trying to
beat the suburbs at their own gameby modeling the renovation of
urban public space on the suburban model, mak-ing urban downtowns,
too, more commercialized and privatized.
There is no denying that suburban shopping centers had a
negative impacton urban commerce; note how the county seat and
chief market town ofBergen County, Hackensack, fared after two
malls opened nearby in 1957(see Figure 11).
As the poster of New Providence from 1970 suggested (Figure 3),
the rise insuburban shopping and subsequent decline in urban retail
fueled a copycatresponse by cities. Many embraced the mallification
of downtown, turningstreets into pedestrian walkways closed to
vehicles and creating enclosedshopping emporiums and festival
marketplaces to lure new customers, allaimed at making downtown
more like the suburban shopping mall. Moreover,in many cities,
access roads were reconfigured to deliver shoppers directly
intodowntown parking garages, from where they entered privately
policed, com-mercial centers without stepping on to city
streets.
Urban downtowns have also mimicked the increasing privatization
of pub-lic space in the suburbs, blurring the lines between what is
public and private,and civic and commercial, and threatening
individuals civil rights. For exam-ple, in Stanford, Connecticut, a
Starbucks coffee shop has opened in the cityspublic library,
modeled after the increasingly ubiquitous cafe bookstores
likeBorders and Barnes & Noble, commercializing the
quintessential symbol of
Cohen / URBAN HISTORY OF CONSUMPTION 101
Figure 11: Per Capita Annual Retail Sales,1939 to 1967,Paramus
and Hackensak,New JerseySOURCE: U.S. Census of Business: retail
trade-area statistics, 1939, 1948, 1954, 1958, 1963,1967; U.S.
Bureau of the Census: Census of Population, 1940, 1950, 1960,
1970.NOTE: Calculated as (total retail sales/consumer price
index)/population for nearest year.
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public accessthe free public library. In another example, the
ubiquity of cellphones among those who can afford them has made
public phone booths in cit-ies all the scarcer and more
expensive.10
Furthermore, the proliferation of self-taxing, private business
improvementdistricts (BIDs) since the mid-1970s have aimed,
literally, to clean up down-towns to make them more competitive
with well-patrolled and well-kept sub-urban malls (see Figure 12).
But as BIDs do the work that public agencies oncedidstreet and
sidewalk cleaning, policing, and upgrading neighborhoodsthey do so
free of the municipal oversight and public accountability that
tradi-tionally has protected the rights of all citizens in those
spaces.11
Finally, the restructuring of consumption patterns in the
postwar period didnot just involve a recalibrating of the balance
between downtowns and suburbsbut affected neighborhood shopping
districts in cities as well. Newarks Cen-tral Ward, the site of a
catastrophic, five-day-long racial rebellion in the sum-mer of 1967
that devastated blocks of Newarks major African Americancommercial
center, provides a good example. Obviously, neighborhood
102 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2003
Figure 12: An Employee of the Alliance for Downtown New York, a
Privately Funded Busi-ness Improvement District, Helping Out a
Pedestrian in Lower Manhattan
SOURCE: Alliance for Downtown New York.NOTE:As useful as the
districts assistance may be, the presence of uniformed personnel
and offi-cial police-type booths on city streets that are not under
municipal oversight is potentially subver-sive of public
authority.
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residents who participated in the rebellion were driven by many
deep-rootedfrustrations common in other northern cities: high
unemployment, police bru-tality, deteriorated housing, and little
access to political power and city jobs. InNewark specifically,
protesters also rejected the citys decision to provide landfor the
expansion of the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry by
con-demning dozens of acres, which would have displaced many black
residents.But alongside these complaints, discrimination
encountered everyday in thestores of the neighborhoodover what they
could afford, the prices they werecharged, and the way they were
treatedserved as a constant reminder toblack residents of their
second-class economic citizenship. Accordingly, thecommission that
President Lyndon Baines Johnson appointed to investigatethe urban
rebellions of the 1960s, the Report of the National Advisory
Com-mission on Civil Disorders, documented that retail storesthe
inescapabledaily evidence of ghetto residents economic
deprivationsuffered a muchgreater proportion of damage from
trashing and looting than public institu-tions, industrial
properties, and private residences.
Not only did the unfulfilled desire of inner-city consumers to
get a fair shareof postwar consumer prosperity fan the rebellions,
but also their devastatingeffect on the neighborhoods where they
took place had a profound impact onthe future commercial viability
of those communities. Although after therebellion of 1967, state
and federal money was finally pumped into Newark toimprove schools,
housing, and health care, commerce atrophied. White mer-chants
departed, and aspiring black entrepreneurs found it almost
impossibleto get loans from financial institutions and insurance
from insurance compa-nies to open up new businesses. Years would
follow with no supermarkets andfew other viable businesses in what
had once been a vital commercial districtin the heart of the
Central Ward. As late as 1982, the thirteen hundred familiesliving
in a high-rise housing project nearby had only one grocery with
limitedstock and high prices, one family cafe, and a few summertime
vegetable ped-dlers as immediate sources of food; other goods were
even scarcer. Not until1990 did ninety-three thousand Central Ward
residents finally get a supermar-ket, when a Pathmark store was
built in partnership with a nonprofit commu-nity development
corporation.
Figures 13 and 14 are two photographs, one taken during July
1967 and theother thirty years later, both at the corner of Prince
Street and Springfield Ave-nue in Newarks Central Ward. Newarks
downtown suffered a similar declineafter the riots. As one measure,
all of Newarks major department stores closedbetween 1964 and 1992.
Monsignor James Linder, a Roman Catholic priestand community
activist in Newark, told the New York Times reporter writingthe
article that accompanied the 1997 photo of Ms. Foy,
Prime office space is that with garage parking, and they are all
built like for-tresses, with their lobbies up on the second floor
and retail space in atriums andcourts. They were all built with the
riots in mind, and its not very pedestrian-
Cohen / URBAN HISTORY OF CONSUMPTION 103
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104 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2003
Figure 13: A National Guardsman Asks Foy Miller for
Identification in Newarks CentralWard during July 1967
SOURCE: Benedict J. Fernandez.NOTE: Although damage to stores
can be seen, the vitality of the commercial district is
stilldiscernible.
Figure 14: Thirty Years Later, in 1997, Ms. Foy Stands at the
Same IntersectionSOURCE: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times.NOTE:
Now, vacant lots have replaced retail establishments, depriving the
areas residents ofplaces to shop near their homes and the community
of the economic benefits of a dynamic com-mercial district.
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friendly and inviting. The result is you have two cities
downtown: the one in andaround the offices, and the one on the
streets where the people are.12
In the later city, the fruits of American prosperity too often
still remain out ofreach.
In conclusion, I hope I have made a case for the value of an
urban history ofconsumption that examines the mutual influences of
cities and consumptionpatterns on each other. An urban history that
recognizes that changes in con-sumer behavior have been as
significant as shifting modes of production indetermining
metropolitan development offers a more complex analysis ofurban
change. Specifically, for the United States in the post-World War
IIperiod, attention to consumption offers a way of conceptualizing
the evolvingrelationship between cities and their suburbs in the
metropolis, both how sub-urban areas have developed as well as how
cities have been remade in responseto changes in the periphery of
the suburbs. Moreover, attention to the linkbetween cities and
consumption will not only enrich urban history. It also
con-tributes another dimension to consumer history, taking it
beyond questions ofproducers sales pitches and customers responses
to root the dynamics ofmass consumption in physical space.
1. Renata von Tscharner and Ronald Lee Fleming of The Townscape
Institute, A Changing AmericanCityscape (Palo Alto, CA: Dale
Seymour, 1993).
2. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers Republic: The Politics of Mass
Consumption in Postwar America(New York: Knopf, 2003).
3. Radio Theatre Productions, Ltd., The Home Front, 1938-1945
(Petaluma, CA: The Minds Eye,1985), Program, 2: London Calling
(Radio Theatre Productions, Ltd., 1985).
4. Susanne Hand, Making the Suburban State: Teenagers, Design,
and Communities in New Jersey,in Kathryn Grover, ed., Teenage New
Jersey, 1941-1975 (Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1997),
13-16; untitled handwritten notes, with heading The Regions Housing
Stock, n.d. but c. early 1960, ErnestErber Papers (Erber), Newark
Public Library (NPL), Box B, loose papers; statistics on
single-family housesfrom New Jersey Department of Conservation and
Economic Development, Bureau of Commerce, Censusof Housing, 1960,
Research Report No. 140 (Trenton, NJ: 1965), quoted in Hand, Making
the SuburbanState, p. 16. National figures from Historical Census
of Housing Tables, Ownership Rates,
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www.housing/census/historic/ownrate.html,
consulted January 16, 2002.
5. The editors of Fortune, the Changing American Market (Garden
City, NY: Hanover House, 1955),76; The Lush New Suburban Market,
Fortune (November 1953), 128-31.
6. National Commission on Urban Problems, Building the American
City (Washington, DC: Govern-ment Printing Office, 1968), 7.
7. Daniel S. Anthony, Some Psychological Implications of
Integration, Brookings Institution Com-mittee on Problems of the
American Community, Newark, New Jersey, February 23, 1962, Daniel
Suther-land Anthony Papers, NPL, Box 3, pp. 9, 12; Integration
Troubles Beset Northern Town, Life (September2, 1957), 43-46.
8. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Population: 1970.9. The
Wonder of Routes 4 and 17: Garden State Plaza, brochure, file
Bergen County Shopping
Centers, Johnson Free Public Library, Hackensack, NJ; Notes on
Discussion Dealing with Regional(Intermunicipal) Planning Program
for Passaic Valley Area (Lower Portion of Passaic Co. and
SouthBergen), n.d., Erber, NPL, Box A, Folder 3; Memorandum to DAJ
and WBS from EE, November 22,
Cohen / URBAN HISTORY OF CONSUMPTION 105
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1966, Erber, NPL, Box B; also see National Center for Telephone
Research (a Division of Louis Harris andAssociates), A Study of
Shoppers Attitudes toward the Proposed Shopping Mall in the Hudson
CountyMeadowlands Area, conducted for Hartz Mountain Industries,
February 1979, Special Collections ofRutgers University
Library.
10. Tracy Challenger, AGORA COALITION, Network member update,
February 8, 2000, onStarbucks in the Stanford, Connecticut Public
Library; on public telephone booths disappearing, seeCellphone
Users: Options Abroad, New York Times, October 14, 2001; Pay phones
to Cost 50 Cents asUse Falls, Boston Globe, September 8, 2001.
11. On the growth of self-taxing business improvement districts,
see Council Reports Abuses inImproving Districts, New York Times,
November 8, 1995; Mayors Rules Aim to Rein in City Districts
forBusinesses, New York Times, April 2, 1998.
12. In Riots Shadow, a City Stumbles On, New York Times, July
14, 1997.
106 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / January 2003
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