ABSTRACT
On 25 June 1955, a New York institution, the roof garden which crowned the Astor Theatre in Manhattan, was closed to be replaced by a series of penthouse offices. 1 Just three weeks later, on 17 July, Disneyland Park opened its gates in Anaheim, California. In tandem, these two events represent a microcosm of the forces which were to drastically alter the pattern of urban commercial culture over the next twenty-five years. Once the leading purveyors of popular culture, entertainment zones in city centers fell on hard times, losing their clientele to the new medium of television, to a host of outdoor leisure-time activities and to new suburban and exurban theme parks, movie theaters and shopping malls. Urban downtown areas became synonymous with images of physical blight, vice and escalating crime, prompting suburban commuters to stay away. By 1967, as inner-city riots swept across Detroit, Newark and Los Angeles, according to one Gallup poll less than one in five (22 percent) of Americans desired to live in a city ( Peter 1967).
