History: Fort Madison, Iowa: The Battle of Downtown

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"More and more people are seeing that every place in America looks like every place else, and that means every place looks like no place." --Richard Moe, president, National Trust for Historic Preservation

Mr. Moe, I can personally assure you, is onto something. I have been to no place. In 3 1/2 years, my job has taken me to 40 states. Throw out the obvious exceptions--the San Franciscos and Ann Arbors, the Chicagos and Charlestons--and I can count on one hand the places I have any distinct recollection of. The rest is a low-slung, conglomerized blur of obliterated history--of forgotten downtowns ringed by cake-box superstores with aircraft-carrier parking lots and terrific discounts on six-packs of socks.

If my bias isn't clear enough, let me come clean. I am the son of a bread-truck driver who taught me never to enter a restaurant or store in which I couldn't shake the hand of the owner. Only with great pain do I admit that the every place/no place that Moe speaks of--an America built in strips and spurts and without hesitation or nearly enough shame--has one thing going for it. It works. Location, value, convenience--the retail superhighway has got all that. On rare occasions, I suppose, you can even find quality and service there.

But it's not for me, and I'm reminded of this as I drive past the predictable sprawl of franchise outlets and architectural felonies along Highway 61 in Southeastern Iowa. I'm a nostalgic coot who likes the history and surprise of old friends in a chance meeting outside a building older than their combined years. I like the rumor and sass of regulars at the corner luncheonette. I'm tooling north along the great muddy Mississippi in search of these very things, and I'm not the only one looking.

Last April, in a quest to find out how any town can hold on to something special in the age of such nihilistic homogenization, I went to Boston for an education. The National Trust for Historic Preservation helps towns reclaim their heritage through its Main Street program, and most of the 1,500 communities on board sent representatives to workshops in Boston, where the opening ceremony turned into a pep rally for the resurrection of the American downtown. The room was filled with stories of vacant storefronts reopening, of hard-fought triumphs over ridiculous zoning restrictions and blockheaded indifference to architectural heritage, of seniors moving like yuppies into hip lofts above Main Street shops. "We're a discard society," Moe told me that day. "But a lot of people are now seeing the value of preserving the best of what we had."

Burlington, Iowa, was my destination. Kennedy Smith, director of the National Trust's Main Street program, said I'd find what I was looking for in this 167-year-old railroad town of about 27,000 built along the banks of the Mississippi and once known as Catfish Bend. I would eventually get there, but I got sidetracked. Eighteen miles to the south, I came upon the town of Fort Madison (pop. 11,618) and liked what I saw.