Aaron Cowan. A Nice Place to Visit

In A Nice Place to Visit: Tourism and Urban Revitalization in the Postwar Rustbelt, Aaron Cowan focuses on hotel openings in Cincinnati, Ohio, convention center development in St. Louis, Missouri, stadium construction in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and harbor renovation in Baltimore, Maryland, to reveal “how tourism gained a central role in the post–World War II American city and how tourism development reshaped cities and altered their meaning and function” (vii). These particular revitalization efforts drew national attention and, more importantly, inspired copycat schemes nationwide. Cowan’s concentration on Rust Belt cities reveals how industrial powerhouses transformed themselves as racial rioting, white flight, and deindustrialization threatened their economic viability. Tourism offered positive branding as well as essential tax revenue and jobs. A few cities, such as New Orleans, Los Angeles, and New York, pioneered tourism as an economic pillar during the early twentieth century. Rust Belt cities, however, crafted tourism industries from “whole cloth” during the mid-twentieth century as they struggled to sustain their industrial base (viii). Cowan’s vignettes are skillfully situated within the broader context of urban American trends. Through the prolific use of federal government subsidies dedicated to urban renewal projects, business and political leaders increasingly utilized private-public partnerships, in conjunction with the power of eminent domain, to push tourism-friendly projects. In 1943, Richard King Mellon of the Mellon financial empire created the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, based in Pittsburgh. It provided a “model for corporate-led renewal” (23). The Greater Baltimore Committee’s proposal during the 1960s to reinvent the Inner Harbor epitomized tourist development in postwar cities by mixing office, retail, and residential complexes. President Richard Nixon’s New Federalism supplied federal block grants to local governments. This galvanized tourism-focused projects, especially after enactment of the State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act in 1972. Though Cowan does not explore this, the extent to which Rust Belt cities copied Sun Belt cities, which often pioneered tourism ventures even while stealing some industries from the Rust Belt, deserves some attention.

Archaeology · Context (archaeology) · Deindustrialization · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Political science · Tourism · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Public Administration · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies