Part 2: What we Lost/What Changed - Downtown is (not currently) for People
It’s not too hard to get a little sad when you look at old pictures of Galesburg. We had so many beautiful buildings that are now just gone. Many were lost due to fires, but then also a good many were torn down as they were abandoned and left empty for many years.
We can look back and see that Downtown Galesburg used to be a thriving place. It used to be bustling with people and activity. Here’s my obligatory posting of the video from 1912 once again. It is my view that we can someday have a downtown that is once again thriving. But what made it thriving in the first place? And why isn’t it now?
What Downtowns Were
Historically, downtowns were almost a natural result of when communities formed. What caused this? The way cities develop very heavily comes down to transportation choices. You have to be transported one way or another from your living place, to where you work, and to where you shop. Whether that transportation is by foot, a bike, a tram, a subway, a train, a car, a plane, a gondola, or a helicopter it will change how and where people build their buildings for both living and doing business.
In the pre-car world, cities would build out only about as far as it was comfortable to walk to downtown. This was because if you were only able to walk then there was only so far away you could live before it was a real burden to get to work or do your shopping. Since in the earliest eras most people walked for transportation, if they walked a long distance somewhere they would want to do all of their business nearby without having to walk even further. This is why downtowns were originally built up. If everyone had to walk downtown and everyone did their business downtown, then there was a real reason for most businesses to be downtown. If you were walking a long way to get to downtown, then it was very unlikely you were going to walk to the other side of town as well to do more business because walking takes time and energy.
For the businesses that weren’t downtown they would only cater to the neighborhood around them. Such as the fact that Galesburg once had 134 grocery stores in town as late as 1928. This was because people had to walk to the grocery store and then could really only take home what they could carry, so people would shop in their neighborhood. There was no way to go across town, buy a week's worth of groceries, haul it back, and then be set.
After the walking and horse era came streetcars and trains, but these preserved or even enhanced the value of downtown. Streetcars/trolleys/trams still relied on walking to get to them, but that was only to the streetcar stop and not all the way downtown. This allowed people to live further away from downtown while also still being able to relatively easily get to it, as long as they lived within walking distance of a streetcar stop. But once the trolley dropped them off in downtown they’d still want to do all their business because they didn’t want to have to walk even further or get an additional tram ticket to go somewhere other than home because it could be costly. Similar goes for trains. They are great for getting between cities, but once you get off you are on foot. It makes sense that all the businesses and attractions that the train rider would want would be near the train station. Sure you could hire a ride or ride further transportation, but that costs time and money. So the street car and train both strengthened the value of downtown, and we saw this in Galesburg for sure.
In the walking/streetcar/train era it made economic sense for businesses and homes to build up around downtown. From my studies in economics one of the key insights is that generally businesses do what is profitable over the long term. And an insight I personally have found in so many things in life is this: the longer you have a set of rules, the better people are going to be at playing to those rules and maximizing their results. This can go for anything; politics, sports, business, school, careers, anything that people do continuously over the years. The longer you have a set of rules people will find out how to get the most out of their situation given those rules and will over time find new ways to maximize what they get out of it. The economics of town business and economics were pretty settled. If you wanted to have a profitable business you needed to be downtown, whether you pay high rents or pay to build your own building you needed to be downtown to be profitable.
But then that all changed…
What Changed?
If you’ve read any of my other work you know what I’m going to say next. What changed? THE CAR!
Before the car there was great value to having a central business district where most business happened. This was due to the relative cost of walking or other transportation being relatively high. While walking is free in terms of money it has human costs in time and energy. Street cars and trains didn’t take much time or energy, but they had a money cost to the user. But the street cars didn’t just cost the customer money, they were quite expensive for the streetcar companies to operate. The tracks were pretty expensive, so they’d only go places where they were sure to make their money, and everyone wanted to go downtown so there were as few tracks to get the most people downtown as possible. Because of these costs this meant that if someone was going to make that trip downtown, they wanted to do everything there.
Any business that didn’t locate downtown or near transportation made it very hard to be economically viable. These factors came together to make living, bustling downtowns with high land values that funded the city government at a sustainable level and built wealth in the community that helped lead to long term prosperity. The government didn’t have to incentivize this, it didn’t take efforts to the community, this is just how cities naturally developed.
But cars changed the whole game.
Cars are pretty expensive upfront, I’m sure almost everyone reading this has at one point been involved in buying a car. Once you’ve spent the money to buy a car, each trip you take using it is actually pretty cheap, especially if it’s around town. And if you paid the large sum to have a car you naturally want to use it because otherwise why did you buy it?
Once you own a car, doing any number of short trips is relatively trivial in terms of time it takes and cost. The biggest headache of driving most of the time is finding parking at your destination. Cars created a new set of rules. Whereas the supreme rule of the pre-car era was “if people are walking somewhere to do business then they most likely aren’t going to want to walk elsewhere, so you better have your business where they are walking to”. The new rules for businesses when their customers have cars generally follow as this:
Must be within driving distance, doesn’t necessarily need to be by anything else
Customers with cars prefer free, abundant, close parking at their destination
People will drive further away for lower prices
Now early on in the age of cars, business owners hadn’t learned how to maximize their returns with these new rules. Downtowns kept humming along as central business zones but had new challenges related to cars. Downtowns aren’t great places for cars naturally because downtowns really break rule 2 in terms of parking. Some cities decided to bulldoze much of their downtowns in an attempt to “save” it and keep people coming in their cars, but all that did was destroy why downtown was a place to go. Also due to the high cost of land, the businesses downtown also couldn’t follow rule 3 either since the land was so valuable that prices just had to be higher to cover the cost of the location.
You can see as late as the 50s, 60s, and 70s that downtown Galesburg was still a living place even though the car had become the dominant force. But during that era business owners started to experiment. They found that they could build on the edge of town where space was plentiful and cheap. This meant that stores could be bigger, carry more products, and could also have massive parking lots. It’s interesting that the shopping mall, one of the most popular forms of retail in the second half of the 20th century, was essentially creating an indoors version of downtown with a massive parking lot surrounding it.
But it’s not even just shopping, other businesses that did manufacturing, production, or provide services no longer needed to be downtown either. They could be wherever it is cheapest to be, they no longer had to fight for space downtown or within walking distance for their employees and customers as long as everyone had cars.
So during the second half of the 20th century we saw the slow innovation by business owners to the new rules and some finding tremendous success. The epitome of this is Walmart. Walmart is within driving distance of the whole town, has an absolutely massive parking lot, and keeps all of its prices cheap. It has a massive selection so that you can do all of your shopping there at one stop. In a previous era where you’d walk to your neighborhood store for regular groceries and then walk downtown to do all of your other business at many small local businesses, you can now drive to Walmart to do most of your shopping in one weekly trip. And if you want to do any other business on top of that you’ll just drive wherever it is, with no issue, as long as the parking situation is easy.
This is what Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns calls “The suburban experiment” and we as a city tried it in Galesburg. I don’t fault anyone for going along with it because it happened all over the country and was deeply incentivized by the State and Federal governments. But it ended up having real impacts on our downtown and our city’s finances.
It’s interesting to see cities that were truly developed for the car. Like I used to work in Pleasant Prairie WI, which for a long time was an unincorporated area outside of Kenosha WI. It has since become a village that is home to many warehouses and suburban shopping experiences. There is no downtown because the town never developed under any of the old rules that would have made a downtown appear naturally. In fact they actually have discussions of developing and building a “downtown”. So a world that caters to peoples cars doesn’t naturally make a thriving downtown.
What Successful Downtowns are Today
Now the exact years of this may be off because I am a young person and can only infer about the past from what I’ve read/heard.
It seems after the 60s the old vision of downtowns was decidedly dead, or at least very much on the decline. Most downtowns were no longer bustling epicenters of towns even if they were still the central business district. As noted in the Seminary Street website (for those who are not local, Seminary Street is our little historical revitalized area downtown) downtown took a considerable nose dive after the mall opened on the edge of town.
In the wake of this change a new vision for downtowns came about. There are three pillars of what current downtowns generally can be:
Service people who choose to live in an urban environment and will walk downtown for their needs
Act as a central gathering area for large offices for large businesses
Offer unique/boutique shopping, dining, and entertainment options as a draw to bring people from the outside in
Galesburg was an early adopter of trying for the 3rd pillar, offering unique experiences. The half-century long work on turning Seminary Street into a destination for small boutique shops. The movement gathered steam at the end of the 1900s and started to take off more in the early 2000s in many communities.
But just as this model for downtown revival was starting to take off elsewhere we were hit with a huge setback, and that was when Maytag and the other factories left Galesburg. The survival of unique/boutique stores often relies on people having extra income that they can spend on unique experiences. So when the Galesburg area was essentially in a local recession for about 15+ years starting in approximately 2002, that meant that the downtown revival wasn’t able to happen. We missed the wave of downtown rebuilding that many communities were able to ride.
It is my opinion that our path forward is mainly focusing on the 3rd pillar, offering unique experiences. But if we don’t want our downtown to just be a tourist attraction we also need to focus on the 1st pillar so that local people are actually living there. And then maybe if those two progress well then maybe pillar 2 will happen but that may be a ways out.
Regardless, we have to coax downtown into being a place people want to go for food, drink, entertainment, and unique shopping while also a place people want to live in to access all of that regularly. But as it stands our current roads, sidewalks, and public spaces make most of downtown not very great places to start these small businesses that make up this new vision of downtown.
But this is possible, I’ve seen several towns do it. Like I mentioned in the last article there is Historic Galena which turned a decaying old downtown into a very successful tourist destination. That didn’t happen overnight, it had to be deliberately worked towards.
Or there’s downtown Champaign along with downtown Campus town. Downtown Campus town saw growth due to a large increase in the student population. Downtown Champaign seized the opportunity and is now its own thriving entity separate from campus. With its many bars, restaurants, breweries, music venues, and some boutique shopping it is a lively area on weekend nights. By contrast, downtown Urbana is not nearly as happening due to most of their downtown getting leveled years ago to make way for a mall that is basically dead now. (Although I haven’t been by in years so maybe it has changed)
But you may be saying, we aren’t a quaint 19th century town like Galena and don’t have a large state university to help prop us up like Champaign does. But I’ve seen a town similar to ours that has seen success. I’ve had the fortune of spending a couple of weekends in Northampton Massachusetts recently and it can be a bit of a model for what we could be. The town has a population around 30k, similar to us. They also have a small liberal arts college, Smith College, anchoring the town. It has an enrollment about twice that of Knox College but that’s not a massive difference. Their downtown is absolutely thriving with unique shops and restaurants and entertainment venues. It may be that in that community there is more of a market for these sorts of places, but it shows it can be done. Building a better downtown for Galesburg wouldn’t only be good for the city but would also be good for Knox College, making our town more attractive for students and increasing enrollment.
But all of this is to say that there is a new model of what downtown can be. It is something that is achievable if we work at it, there is a real hunger for places like I described above. We not only need to incentivize positive changes like new businesses, but we also need to reduce the harm caused by the factors that drag down downtown. Chiefly among those is US Route 150, which I will discuss in Part 3.
Great post as usual Joe, but I do take issue with comparing Galesburg to a city only 8 miles away from the edge of a metro area with 700,000 people (Northampton to Springfield metro) and a dozen state parks and natural areas immediately nearby. I imagine you will talk soon about the impact of online shopping and the lack of tech industry businesses that would be great candidates for downtown. Yes to incentivizing though!