History: Fort Madison, Iowa: The Battle of Downtown

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It's the kind of place where, when I left to go check out Burlington, Wolf and Saunders, 50 and 59, dropped some scones into a care package for my trip. Burlington has tougher challenges than Fort Madison. The much bigger, grittier downtown was built for the industrial railroad hub that Burlington once was, and big, boxy buildings sit vacant now. But just as in Fort Madison, there is something worth saving here, where neighborhoods sweep up gracefully from the banks of the Mississippi to form an amphitheater with terrific views of downtown and the bridge that spokes majestically across the river to Illinois.

On Jefferson, the local main street, Weird Harold's Records survives because Dan Bessine, 52, has found a niche the chains can't match. He sells vinyl records on the Internet (find him at Weirdharolds.com) At Valley and Third, the Hotel Burlington reopened as a senior-housing complex this year after sitting vacant for 20 years. And Schramm's department store, which closed five years ago after 150 years of operation, is reopening piece by piece, as a restaurant, small shops and loft apartments.

John and Susan Randolph, 68 and 61, who owned Schramm's, live in one of those apartments, which means they've never left the office. Their next-door neighbors and pals are Pam and Greg Jochims, 26 and 28. Greg runs a haberdashery; Pam runs the Main Street program. Every evening at 6, the Randolphs and Jochims meet on the sidewalk in front of their downtown homes for cocktail hour.

I am unabashedly partial to a town where gin and tonics are available on the street, and even more partial when I'm invited to the party. I can't say what downtown Fort Madison or Burlington will look like in 10 years, or in 25, but I drank to their future, and to the future of every community that stands up to the steamroller. There is some evidence that as the work force becomes more flexible, more of the people who can work from home are choosing downtowns. Ground-floor and second-floor occupancy rates were up in Main Street towns in 1999, and retail sales jumped 65%.

One day in Fort Madison, while rehabbing a storefront, a workman peeled back an atrocious-looking aluminum facade and found carved wooden columns and stained-glass windows beneath. Several townsfolk heard the news and strolled over to celebrate the discovery of the buried treasure. Later in the day, there was a buzz at the Ivy Bake Shoppe, and upstairs, in Martha Wolf's sprawling Early American loft, the view of the Mississippi, which widens to nearly a mile beneath the old swing-span bridge, was stunning.