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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


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.


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.


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


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.


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.



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


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.


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


Figure 6: General Electric Advertisement in The Saturday Evening Post, June 5, 1943SOURCE: General Electric.


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,



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


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.


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



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


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.


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



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


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.


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


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.


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


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.


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


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.


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-




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.


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,



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.



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