My Redacted Life: Chapter Six

Back at work, I spent spare time during lunch break watching Capitol Avenue. Something was going on. Something bad. Really bad.

Each day at noon, there was a show going on at the intersection of Capitol and Main streets. I finally asked someone what was happening.

“Preparing to save Downtown,” someone said.

“Getting ready to make Main and Broadway into a downtown mall,” another said.

Had I been a prophet, had power, and had courage to act, perhaps I could have stopped them, but I doubt it. Americans are a hard-headed bunch at times. They believed in “downtown malls,” And American cities all over, including Little Rock, were about to make one of the biggest mistakes in the history of urban planning.

Downtowns across the country experienced many problems back then. We blamed their decline on all sorts of issues, mainly centered around the idiotic presumption that malls were the main problem, and by using what Sir James Frazer called, “Imitative Magic,” the solution would prove simple.

Yeah, I know. It was like the bull entering the bull ring, going into “analysis mode,” concluding that his main problem is the red cape, and making what he thinks is the right decision. As we all know from the first, the red cape wasn’t his problem after all.

In the happy, happy Land of Hindsight and Retrospection, the main enemy in the fall of the central business as the primary retail center of commerce may have been something as simple as the Law of Gravity, and its antithesis.

That’s what formed downtowns in the first place: gravity. With townsfolk relying on travel by foot, public transportation, and slow-moving wagons, there was a great motivation to concentrate commercial activity in as small a place as possible, often around the train station or the intersection of other major traffic arteries.

The actual shops for the conduct of retail crammed themselves into an even smaller area, as near as possible to the “100 percent corner.” That would be at Capitol and Main in Little Rock. Cities located the warehousing of goods for the shops a short distance away in an area set aside for the purpose. In fact, one of the first zoning attempts involved the desire to prevent New York City’s garment district from getting too close to the ritzy shops and high-class clientele concentrated in the city center.

All worked fine until the automobile became a staple of the American family, and General Motors began buying public transit systems throughout the country and either closing them down or allowing them to deteriorate into such a state of filth and unsightliness that an unremovable stigma clings, in America, until this day, upon their use.

Then, “anti-gravity,” what we sometimes call “centrifugal force,” took over. Why should retail costumers fight their way all the way to Downtown when they could jump in the family car, drive a short distance, and buy things? The things they bought would become increasingly cheaper as national firms cornered what had been a free-market retail phenomenon in so many ways. As residential suburbs proliferated, centrifugal force slung retail businesses out toward them, away from Downtown.

At any rate, the future of Downtown as the dominant retail center faced inevitable doom. Turning it into a mall with few customers, and little of the necessary parking required, wasn’t going to change that. If a city didn’t have a suburban mall, a neighboring city did. We wept and wailed, and threw money at the issue. It didn’t work. Shopping centers and strip-centers ruled commerce, and the subterranean monsters we now call “big-boxes” hadn’t even yet been released from their noxious lairs.

The big-boxes would later take care of neighborhood businesses and now face their own “economic matadors,” but those are stories for another day.

Downtowns would have to evolve in order to survive. Given the vast number of Americans who refuse to accept the realities of natural evolution, it’s not surprising how many would refuse to accept a concept involving urban evolution. As I say, Americans are a stubborn folk, clinging to images in crumbling stones .

The evolution of the central business district was a solution that would grow into an inspiration only in recent times. During the interim, many downtowns would crumble and fall, despite the benign, but devasting, efforts of a long line of urban planners and urban designers who yearned for immortality,

Back in the day, I stared through the window at Capitol Avenue and was quite willing to play my part in the carnage.

Somehow,  central cities survive
our best efforts to destroy them.