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Article Excerpt
It is difficult to find a major American city today that has not used ethnic-theme neighborhoods in a revitalization strategy. "Little Italys" play major roles in the personalities of New York City, Boston, Massachusetts, Baltimore, Maryland, Cleveland, Ohio, San Diego, California, and a number of other cities. Columbus, Ohio, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, have German villages. Detroit, Michigan, and Chicago, Illinois, have Greek towns. Chinatowns are common from Philadelphia and New York in the East to San Francisco, California, and Vancouver, British Columbia, in the West. San Antonio, Texas, Los Angeles, California, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, celebrate a Mexican heritage. Even black neighborhoods, long seen as nothing to be proud of--the Harlem Renaissance notwithstanding--are now recognized as important places; Sweet Auburn in Atlanta, Georgia, and Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, are notable examples. More recently, Little Saigons have appeared from Washington, D.C., to Orange County, California. Nearly all of these cities view ethnic districts as cultural and economic assets. The districts are places to be promoted in the tourist literature as interesting places to eat, shop, and be entertained. They are places that enrich local culture and add to the spice of urban life.
Sometimes, entire towns have been completely transformed in an effort to create--and often invent--ethnic landscapes. Solvang, California, used a Danish village architectural theme to attract investment and filled nearly every building in the center of town with Nordic shops and restaurants. Leavenworth, Washington, has used many of the same procedures to make itself totally Bavarian (Frenkel and Walton 2000). Meanwhile, Santa Fe has been plastered into a replica of Taos-style pueblos. Throughout the United States there are Amish towns and "Wild West" towns, most with some variation on the ethnic identity theme. Despite the obvious inauthenticity, most of these places have some sort of kitschy charm and are economic assets for their regions. Indeed, Dydia DeLyser suggested that place authenticity, not adherence to an accurate architectural history, is what works for people on the ground (1999).
Our purpose in this article is to explore the idea that American-style ethnic-theme districts can serve to help revitalize declining central-city districts in Europe. European cities are now experiencing two trends that make them more like their U.S. counterparts. First, many of them have an increasingly large, exotic, non-European immigrant population, and, second, growing numbers of marginal, if not skid-row, central-city neighborhoods could benefit from focused revitalization efforts. We use the examples of Little Italy in San Diego, California, and an emerging Chinatown in Trieste, Italy, to compare possible procedures for using the celebration of ethnic identity in the promotion of marginal central-city districts.
CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF AMERICAN ETHNIC DISTRICTS: THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM
The positive view of the role that ethnic districts can play in American cities has not always prevailed. As most students of urban history know, it was not that long ago that ethnic diversity in the United States meant inevitable conflict and turf battles (Ward 1971). Beginning with massive Irish immigration during the 1840s, many cities practiced extreme discrimination, exclusion, and even organized violence to suppress "un-American" ethnic groups. The Irish, Russian Jews, Chinese, African Americans, and Mexicans had some of the worst experiences, but it was not uncommon for everyone from French Canadians to Poles to have their cultural identities suppressed. Even the Germans, arguably the largest group of "foreigners" to populate the American continent, were often seen as an undesirable element, especially in times of war. In Columbus, for example, a solidly German neighborhood that had its start as early as the 1820s became extremely suspect during and just after World War I. The German-language newspaper was shut down, and cultural and musical groups ceased to function. The city changed several street names, and many German businesses became less ethnically visible or died (Darbee and Recchi 2005). By the 1930s the neighborhood was on its way to becoming a slum. Similar stories could be told about ethnic neighborhoods throughout North America.
Although the change was very gradual at first, hints of the new priorities to come emerged in the 1950s. Perhaps spurred on by the guilt associated with the Japanese internment camps of World War II, San Francisco's Chinatown ceased to be simply a den of poverty and crime known as the "International District" and became a colorful and lively place celebrated in films such as Flower Drum Song (Koster [1961] 2006). Grant Avenue became a major tourist destination. Later, during the late 1960s, a new Japan Town emerged on the ruins of the old one. Meanwhile, Los Angeles' Olvera Street, which some scholars have argued was the model for the commercial district in Tijuana, emerged as a Mexican-themed tourist destination (Arreola 1999). This story too could be repeated for cities in nearly all parts of the continent. Very often, however, ethnic neighborhoods barely escaped the wrecking ball.
Urban renewal was in vogue during the immediate postwar years, and plans were made in a variety of cities to sweep away the old and build new, modern cities of gleaming glass boxes and freeway interchanges. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, cleared and rebuilt the confluence known as the "Golden Triangle"--the first of many--during the early 1950s, which helped to change the image of the city from a smoky hell to a prosperous metropolis. Many cities aimed to follow suit. Boston tore down its West End, a move that many critics later considered a major mistake (Teaford 1990). Sterile public-housing projects went up in near-downtown neighborhoods in Saint Louis, Missouri, Chicago, Illinois, and Detroit, Michigan, and new freeways decimated neighborhoods in nearly every city. In New York City, the now-trendy neighborhoods of SoHo and Greenwich Village barely escaped the building of a crosstown freeway (Huxtable 1970).
ETHNIC IDENTITY AND THE SEARCH FOR A SENSE OF PLACE
As the reaction against the excesses of urban renewal increased, many urban scholars, led by authors such as Jane Jacobs, began to argue for less drastic procedures that could be used to bring economic and social vitality to declining neighborhoods (1961). Large numbers of people were displaced in Boston's West End and other "renewed" neighborhoods, and, after awhile, the tide began to turn against such wholesale clearance projects (Gans 1962). The twin themes associated with a newer, calmer approach were historic preservation and the celebration of real and/or romanticized ethnic identity. As late as the 1960s, very few historic
districts existed in the United States, and only the French Quarter in New Orleans, the old city of Charleston, South Carolina, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, received much attention (Weinberg 1979). As threats from total clearance diminished, Society Hill in Philadelphia and Greenwich Village in New York City joined the ranks of lively and protected neighborhoods.
Although architecture alone was enough to save the day in superbly cute cities such as Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, a combination of building style and "urban life" was called into play in neighborhoods with a more jumbled aesthetic. In Boston's North End, for example, the charm of the place was largely a function of its Italian ambience. Small shops, street markets, and bistros were common, and visitors could hear lively conversations on every corner. The place was worthy of, in Jane Jacob's famous phrase, "gradual money" to improve its infrastructure and housing stock over time. Of course, success occasionally brought high rents and intense tourist pressures that made it...
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