CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - In discussions of the recent economic downturn by politicians, journalists and their followers, it's been next to impossible to dodge the phrase "Wall Street versus Main Street.
Cliché though it may be by now, the phrase is effective in part because of the instant images both locales evoke. But when John Jakle, a professor emeritus of geography and of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois, references Main Street, it's impossible for him to see past the one icon still standing in many a downtown across America: the landmark hotel.
By the 1930s, few U.S. towns and cities - no matter their size - were without one, according to Jakle, co-author of "America's Main Street Hotels: Transiency and Community in the Early Auto Age" (University of Tennessee Press/Knoxville).
The book, written with long-time collaborator Keith A. Sculle, a recently retired historian and educator with the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, is loaded with postcard and photographic images of hotel exteriors and interiors, plans, diagrams and ephemera from hotel trade journals. It is the latest in a series of books the pair has co-authored focusing on elements of "roadside America." Others in the series have considered the written, oral and visual histories of gas stations, fast-food restaurants, motels, signs, parking and the broader theme of "motoring."
As was the case when most "Main Street hotels" were built, beginning in the 1910s and into the early 1930s, it's still hard to overlook the imposing, usually well-built edifices, which were usually planted prominently in the center of a town or city. They typically defined the skyline. Most were built by financial syndicates or other local community boosters and entrepreneurs eager to promote the character of the community to would-be transplants or the rising class of tourists passing through in that new-fangled technological marvel - the automobile.
"Nothing has been more fundamental to the American experience in an environmental sense, certainly, and even in a social sense, than the impact of auto mobility," said Jakle, who describes himself as a historical and cultural geographer. "The automobilist was viewed as an affluent market around which new hotels could be configured in small towns and small cities."
And while downtown hotels were heralded as regional or even national landmarks by the new touring class, Jakle said the structures became a source of pride and identity within communities as well. In addition to providing temporary housing to a transient population, Main Street hotels also functioned as prominent social centers for the community. Before and after prohibition, local men gathered to fraternize in the hotels' bars, sometimes referred to as "men's grills," while local civic and social organizations held regularly scheduled luncheons and other meetings in hotel dining rooms.
"No town could be (regarded as) progressive if it didn't have the venue where you could promote a modern contemporary life for your community," Jakle said.
Over time, the downtown hotel became regarded as "a kind of place or structure that we Americans have come very much to take for granted," he noted. "They were pretty much everywhere in one form or another, one size or another. Most of them went through the same lifecycle - a very quick one in terms of profitability initially.
"But," he added, "many were so well developed and built that they were a resource that communities or localities couldn't ignore."
As the Great Depression gripped the nation, many hotels struggled to survive. And when motor courts, and later, chain motels, began to sprout on town fringes closer to highways beginning in the 1930s, offering greater affordability and a place to park cars right outside the rooms, the Main Street hotel saw its cachet decline further.
"A few like the Terre Haute House in Terre Haute, Ind., were ignored and ultimately demolished," Jakle said. However, in recent years, many of them have been rescued by preservationists and other entrepreneurs - often with the aid of local, state or federal grants, and after sitting vacant for years.
"Most have been converted either as residential housing or office buildings, or revived as transient hotels or conference centers, depending upon the nature of the town itself."
A few of Jakle's own photographic images of Main Streets across the Midwest - sans hotels - are among those included in another recent book. "My Kind of Midwest: Omaha to Ohio" was released earlier this year by Columbia College's Center for American Places' as part of its new "My Kind of" series. The series emphasizes humanistic orientations to understanding landscape and place and is published by the University of Chicago Press.
"This is my personal take on the Midwest and the region," said Jakle, who noted that another forthcoming book in the series - about growing up on a family farm in northern Illinois - is being written by his neighbor, U. of I. biochemist Robert Switzer.
In his book, Jakle fondly characterizes rural and urban spaces and places he has grown to know and love over a lifetime in the country's mid-section. Through his narrative text and collection of annotated photographs and postcards, Jakle produces a wealth of evidence to dispute the oft-portrayed notion that the region is little more than a "fly-over zone."
According to Jakle, part of the problem with how outsiders perceived the region lies within.
"We don't do a very good job of promoting ourselves," he said.
Nonetheless, there's plenty to mine from the vast landscape that encompasses a dozen states and thousands of square miles.
"There's a little bit of every part of the country in the Midwest, so consequently, it's easy for us to take the Midwest for granted as 'plain Jane' ... commonplace. But you take all those different strains - a little bit of the south, the east, the north woods, the west - and it gives them not only diversity but full, integrated synthesis symbiotically as a distinctive place itself.
"Many Americans think of the Midwest as corn and soybeans and roads meeting at right angles ... and distant horizons. But some of the most cosmopolitan landscapes in the country are to be found in places like Chicago."
Jakle suggested that "the idea of the Midwest as the essential American heartland is something community promoters throughout the region might better emphasize to enhance their localities' images across the nation and the world."