Building Democracy: Pluralism and Community Space in the History of the Dayton Arcade

Abstract

Building DemocracyPluralism and Community Space in the History of the Dayton Arcade James Todd Uhlman (bio) In 1938, when humanity stood in the shadow of one of the past's darkest alleys, the famed historian of urban life, Lewis Mumford, contemplated the role of the city in determining the nature of civilization. In the city, time becomes visible: buildings and monuments and public ways, more open than the written record, more subject to the gaze of many. … Layer upon layer, past times preserve themselves in the city until life itself is finally threatened with suffocation; then, in sheer defense, modern man invents the museum. … Cities arise out of man's social needs and multiply both their modes and their methods of expression. … And here, through the concentration of the intercourse in the market and the meeting place, alternative modes of living present themselves; … Mind takes form in the city; and in turn urban forms condition mind. For space, no less than time, is artfully reorganized in cities. … The dome and the spire, the open avenue and the closed court, tell the story, not merely of different physical accommodations, but of essentially different conceptions of man's destiny.1 Cities are not just collections of wood, brick, metal, and mortar, but the exoskeleton of a vast organism composed of living individuals that are born, thrive, and die within it. These people, Mumford is suggesting, shape that built [End Page 19] world.2 In turn, they are shaped by it and come to embrace the diversity, creativity, and imagination that moves civilization forward. Writing in 1938, as he was, Mumford was not just speaking with clinical detachment but with a sense of urgency produced by the Great Depression, the threat of fascism, and the impending war. He was arguing that the ongoing decline of the urban culture, upon which civilization of tolerance and understanding had been built, was a reason that the world faced these varied crises at that moment. "Today our world faces a crisis: a crisis which, if its consequences are as grave as now seems, may not be resolved for another century. If the destructive forces in civilization gain ascendancy, our new urban culture will be stricken in every part. Our cities, blasted and deserted, will be cemeteries for the dead."3 If the destructive forces louring over the world, as Mumford wrote, were allowed to destroy our cities, he suggested, it would take our civilization a hundred years to recover. In 2022, it is worthwhile to recall Mumford's warning in The Culture of Cities. Many of America's cities have aged badly over the last half century. Dayton, Ohio, is one of those cities. It is arguably also true that, as Mumford warned, the decline of America's cities has come with significant social and civic cost. In this article, I use the fate of the Dayton Arcade, the city's turn-of-the-century shopping complex, in combination with the wider history of the city itself, as a case study to explore that question. The decline of the Dayton Arcade gives us an example of what happened in the last half century and what we lost along the way. Following Mumford's lead, I will argue that the Arcade was not just a building, but the material manifestation of a democratic culture based on concrete human interactions and collective social relations. It is beyond the scope of this study to demonstrate that Mumford was correct and that the awareness of interdependence is, in fact, a key civic ingredient in a healthy democracy, although this is in fact the argument that Alexis de Tocqueville, among many others, have made.4 Nor can this study show that Mumford was right in believing that the loss of civic spaces such as the Arcade could produce the sort of dangers we now face in our democracy. What this study does undertake to [End Page 20] demonstrate is that, based on the nearly 60 oral history interviews of Daytonians taken from diverse populations within the city, many Daytonians were reminded by working at and visiting the Arcade of their interdependence with others inside their community. Furthermore, the Arcade's imperfect...