The Battle of Downtown

If yours hasn't been done in by sprawl, two Iowa towns show how to keep a sense of place

by STEVE LOPEZ

"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.

My rules on what makes a town work are nonnegotiable. Gimmicky re-creations, especially those involving period costumes, are disqualifiers, as are any businesses beginning with the name Ye Olde. Functionality is what I look for, an authentic, practical intersection of commercial and social life, and I knew the moment I turned right on Avenue G.—Fort Madison's five-block business strip—that I was home.

A young boy on his mother's hand stepped brightly out of Jo-Lynn Shoe Shoppe—with a springy gait that said his whole world had changed simply because he had been reshod. They turned left and headed for Lampe Drugs, a family operation since 1940. Across the street at Faeth's, the third, fourth and fifth generations of the Faeth family catered to customers in a cigar shop where you can sip a cold Pabst for a buck, buy a box of shotgun shells, find out where the catfish are jumping, play a game of billiards or drop the kids off for a soda and know they're safer than if you'd tied them to a tree. Just up Avenue G., Patty Tucker, a 66-year-old widow who moved down off the bluffs and into an incredible loft above the old bank building four years ago, is peering from her window to see if her girlfriends at the Ivy Bake Shoppe can use an extra hand with the lunch crowd.

So what's Fort Madison's secret? A healthy economy for one thing, with blue- and white-color jobs at Sheaffer pens, Dupont, Dial, Wabash National and a state prison. A sweet, leafy residential area within walking distance of downtown and the riverfront park, for another. And Fort Madison has the dumb luck of being too small to attract the kind of super discount stores that work like neutron bombs on downtowns, leaving the buildings standing but destroying all life forms.

But even at that, nearly 30% of the storefronts are empty. A lot of people are willing to drive half an hour north to the mall and strip stores near Burlington, and a proposed highway bypass will route traffic around Fort Madison. So the true secret of the town's success, then, can be found every Thursday morning at the sinfully addictive Ivy Bake Shoppe, where Martha Wolf and Susan Welch Saunders' blackberry scones make the sorry impostors at a certain ubiquitous coffee-house chain taste like clay pigeons, and where a juiced-up group of local retailers and other die-hards plot strategies for the town, not just for it to survive but to prosper.

"It takes constant vigilance," says Skip Young, 39, who runs the jewelry store founded by his late grandfather Dana Bushong, who was famous around here for being the man who engraved names on Sheaffer pens. Skip's wife Michele, 37, headed up the local Main Street program for two years, serving as the lieutenant who passed on the National Trust's decades of know-how regarding renovation, business loans, retail niches and the marketing of downtown. "We're not where we want to be yet, but in the 15 years I've lived here, it's got a little better each year. You should see the droves that come in for our trick or treat on Avenue G., and the lighted Christmas parade brings tons of people."

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 façade 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.