Grow quickly. Live better.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, from the perspective of urban sociologists and planners, at least, major discount retailers such as Walmart have thrived on the destruction of commercial activity in traditional town centers.  No doubt my assertion borders on exaggeration, but it would have to, considering I’ve cribbed Jane Austen’s famous (and equally ironically hyperbolic) first seven words to Pride and Prejudice, in which a man’s search of a wife sets a blithe tone for much of what follows.  By contrast, the unceasing diatribes against Walmart from urban advocates are rarely whimsical.  And while not every high-profile writer/blogger on urban affairs excoriates Walmart, the general tenor of the discussion ascribes much of the decline of downtown retail to the much-maligned megachain.  After all, virtually every freestanding small city in America over 20,000 people that is not part of a larger metropolitan agglomeration can claim a Walmart, perched at the edge of the municipal limits.  And yes, the burgeoning of Walmarts does more or less coincide with the near abandonment of historic, pedestrian-scaled main streets in favor of car-oriented commercialization consolidated into big-box department stores.

But did a corporation—or the corporation—really cause all this?

If the average American consumers genuinely cared enough about Main Street or the courthouse square, wouldn’t they have shunned this commercial cataclysm before it radically altered the entire landscape?  Wasn’t it the consumer that ultimately fueled Walmart’s meteoric growth, by opting for the convenience of everything under one roof, abundant free parking, and (perhaps the most objective factor) those famously low prices?  Some might argue that I’m unreasonably throwing Walmart a bone, since the folks at the boardroom table clearly knew what would happen to Main Street, as department-store big-box shopping encroached on communities that commercial developers had previously perceived as too modest in size to support this retail typology.  And, yes, I recognize the firm’s historic opposition toward unionization, its eventual reneging on a long-standing “Made in America” pledge, and even the management of logistics/merchandising favoring the automatization of functions that once provided communities with stable jobs.  Maybe I am cutting Walmart some undeserved slack.  But I also think the corporation’s biggest critics fail to recognize that Walmart didn’t become a leviathan overnight, any more than these towns devolved from flourishing to failures with the flick of a light switch. 

My own articles on main street America have explored the topic routinely.  But it took a visit to Bentonville, Arkansas to develop a more nuanced understanding of Walmart’s approach to community engagement right at the belly of the beast.

My suspicion is that, until probably around the year 2001, 98% of Americans hadn’t heard of this well-scrubbed little municipality in the northwest corner of the state, just a stone’s throw from the rugged topography of the Ozarks.  Even today, if people are familiar with the town, it is only because it hosts the corporate headquarters for the world’s largest retailer.  And there’s nothing wrong with this seemingly simplified association: after all, one would be hard-pressed to find anyone in Bentonville who would argue that the city is better known for something else.  But what sort of impact has Walmart’s presence exerted on what otherwise would likely be a nondescript, mid-southern county seat?

Not surprisingly, the influence has been formidable.  I mention the year 2001 because, upon publishing the results of Census 2000, the nation learned that the Northwest Arkansas Metropolitan Statistical Area (consisting of the primary cities of Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers and Bentonville) had become the sixth-fastest growing region in the nation.  While a Census update isn’t the sort of news item that necessarily grabs the public by its lapels, it can flirt salaciously with the unconscious and, eventually, through mimetic repetition, penetrate to the conscious.  With each passing year, Bentonville has grabbed the headlines more often, as decisions from the Wal-mart Stores, Inc. Home Office exert a greater impact on the global economy.  I would hesitate to assert that the name “Bentonville, Arkansas” is common knowledge to the same level that a similarly-sized city such as “Beverly Hills, California” might be, partly because the similarities between these two places basically stop there.  But its star is rising on both the national and international horizon, since many of Walmart’s foreign retail ventures have proven just as successful as their domestic efforts.  And Bentonville, predictably, has enjoyed its share of the region’s growth: at over 35,000 people in 2010, it more tripled its population since the 1990 census, and, as recently as 1960, it was a quiet village of barely 3,500 people.

The impact on this growth is obvious, particularly when viewing the street configuration.

The shift from a conventional grid to a more hierarchical arrangement is conspicuous and unsurprising.  The oldest part of the city adopted the grid, which was customary for shaping virtually all communities in the 19^th and early 20^th century.  Yet 80% of Bentonville’s city limits (which extend in all directions beyond the boundaries in the image above) fits the more expansive, automobile-oriented configuration, in which streets curve and wend, sometimes into hairpins, sometimes into full loops.  Often they terminate as culs-de-sac.  For a municipality that remained a modest village until the 1950s, this growth pattern is normal and broadly characteristic of numerous Sunbelt communities.  Thus, the city of Bentonville has decentralized considerably in the last fifty years, in addition to hosting the global headquarters to the retail behemoth most regularly flagged as the culprit in expediting the demise of downtowns.  Given these two factors, one prevailing question remains: what on earth does its beleaguered town center look like?

Chances are, you’d be as surprised as I was.

It looks terrific.  Nearly 100% occupancy, clean sidewalks, a well-manicured streetscape.  And virtually of all the retail mix—from bike shops to brasseries, yoga studios to yogurt cafes, tea rooms to trattorias—caters to an upmarket clientele, suggesting that the leasing rates are fairly high.

The culminating attraction, however, is the humble storefront that spawned it all:

Sam Walton’s original five-and-dime now serves as the Walmart Visitors’ Center and a mini-museum, with interactive exhibits and the recreation of a soda fountain.

These pictures date from a summer festival on the central square, taken a few years ago, in 2010.  Though they are obviously a bit faded by now—not all of the visitor attractions were open yet during my visit—I can say with a fair amount of confidence that downtown Bentonville is even stronger today.  After all, most estimates show the city has continued to grow another 10% since the 2010 Census results, and, considering that it was demonstrating considerable resilience during the peak of the Great Recession, the downtown is likely only to build on a momentum it had established long before the bubble burst.  A detractor might challenge my assertion by arguing that I captured the city during an atypically vibrant time, when out-of-towners had flocked to the city for the summer celebration on the courthouse square.  But how could the downtown support a high concentration of restaurants, cafés and boutiques if it weren’t lively during the other times of the week as well?

The fact remains that downtown Bentonville boasts a number of civic associations that have worked tirelessly to boost its cachet, including Downtown Bentonville, Inc, a nonprofit association that promotes, attracts investment, and plans activities for Bentonville’s historic downtown, as well as the Bentonville Merchant District, which seeks to attract upscale traveling merchants through the provision of Class A office space and furnished loft-style apartments close to the city center.  The city also has a Convention and Visitors Bureau and a Chamber of Commerce.  These organizations have no doubt worked tirelessly to re-centralize investment in Bentonville’s small downtown, even as the vast majority of the population growth over the last two decades has taken place in the purlieus.  By most metrics, their efforts have paid off.  But plenty of other similarly sized cities can claim the same business associations without these results; I blogged about Jefferson City, Missouri earlier this year, a small city whose civic leaders have collaborated to promote the downtown.  However, the results in Jefferson City, while palpable, have been much more modest than Bentonville—and it is nothing less than the state capital.

Bentonville is simply part of a region that is enjoying a persistent economic boom.  The other primary cities in this unusual metropolitan area—Rogers, Springdale and Fayetteville—are also growing like mad.  It doesn’t hurt that the region is home to two other nationally prominent companies: Springdale’s Tyson Foods, the world’s largest meat producer, and trucking giant J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc., based in the town of Lowell, which abuts Rogers.  But the real cog in the wheel remains the world’s largest retailer, headquartered in Bentonville, and I still suspect the corporation and its numerous investments has more to do with downtown’s vibrancy than the tourist bureau.  Walmart undoubtedly prefers to associate its name with a municipality that enjoys a profile of prosperity and high quality of life; the company will do what it takes to maintain that image within Bentonville.

So what is the visual evidence that this isn’t just a run-of-the-mill boomtown?  Beyond from the picture-perfect courthouse square, the air of plentitude permeates the city.

However, it isn’t just the park spaces that distinguish the more recently developed outer reaches of Bentonville; all the spaces in between have received above average treatment as well.

So a city street has sidewalks.  Big deal, some might say.  But it is out of character for low density, hierarchical, auto-oriented development in the South to make any concession for pedestrians, let alone a full network of sidewalks along all of the major streets.  Compare Bentonville to just about any other city in Arkansas (outside of the Northwest) and you’d be hard pressed to find sidewalks on any arterial or collector roads beyond the historic original street grid.  Both the Department of Parks and Recreation and the Department of Planning in Bentonville have determined that core pedestrian access remains critical, even when the development pattern is sparse, in keeping with the preferences of the majority of people who settle in this part of the country.  The former of the two aforementioned departments reveals that it has conceived network of parks, greenways and biking trails rivals that of a community three times its size.

Meanwhile, the latter-mentioned planning department has several aces up its sleeve as well.  While it isn’t unheard of that a city might support a 76-page Bicycleand Pedestrian Master Plan, a Smart Growth Guidebook, or a Traffic Calming Guidebook, it certainly places the city well outside the bell curve when juxtaposed with its peers.  After all, even the neighboring city of Rogers (pop. 55,000) shows no evidence that its planning department has the resources even to conceive of such initiatives.

The aforementioned features are hardly likely to elevate anyone’s pulse; they aren’t exactly competing with Manhattan’s High Line for infrastructural innovation.  And it’s unreasonable to surmise that Walmart had any real influence on what remain purely publicly owned assets.  But one structure in Bentonville is likely to turn the head of even the most skeptical coastal snob: the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

The structure was not complete when I visited Bentonville in 2010, but it opened to the public in late 2011, and made international headlines for both its novelty (first major American art museum to open in 50 years, and the only one in an over 100-mile radius) as well as its magnitude (over 200,000 square feet of space on 120-acre grounds and a collection valued in the hundreds of millions).  The striking edifice reaches Bentonville courtesy of internationally recognized Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie.  Perhaps most importantly though, it is resolutely the vision of Alice Walton, daughter to founder Sam Walton and heiress to his fortune.  In one of many interviews she offered at the time of the museum’s opening, Walton, who has been an art collector most of her life, acknowledged that she wanted to make a difference in this part of the world by bringing “something we desperately need”.  She contributed over $300 million to the project, built on family land.  Admission to the museum is free, but because of its destination status, visitors will typically linger, travel the grounds, shop, buy a meal.  A Huffington Post article from the museum’s infancy concluded that the museum would skyrocket past its estimated 250,000 first-year visitors, based on the success after just three months open to the public.

If Crystal Bridges Museum lives up to its promise as an attraction of national or even international caliber, Bentonville clearly needs the tourist infrastructure to support those visitors.  But it would appear it already has it.  Just down the road, in neighboring Rogers, an Embassy Suites Spa and Convention Center flanks one side of the interstate; the Pinnacle Hills lifestyle center sits on the other.  And, earlier this year, the sleek 21c Museum Hotel, famous for the prominent positioning of contemporary art, opened right off of Bentonville’s courthouse square - only the third of its kind in the country.  (Louisville and Cincinnati claim the other two.)  Many of the amenities that have sprouted across Northwest Arkansas over the last twenty years are in keeping with a metropolitan area of nearly a half million people; of course it has a mall, convention center, and a seasonal symphony orchestra.  But while growth trajectory of the metro might resemble that of Phoenix or Las Vegas, no single municipality has spawned everything here in Arkansas.  As of 1950, only college town Fayetteville had even 10,000 people.  The other towns—Lowell, Rogers, Bella Vista, Johnson, Springdale, and of course Bentonville—were isolated villages that boomed simultaneously, swelling their incorporated boundaries until they touched one another.  As a result, Northwest Arkansas may be the country’s youngest conurbation: a 35-mile string of small cities—a microlopolis.  (The only comparable phenomenon I can think of domestically would be the Texas border towns along the Rio Grande, but even Brownsville and McAllen were more than villages fifty years ago, and they’re big cities over 100,000 people now.)

The rapid ascension of these communities into a regional economic powerhouse—with the amenities one might from a single, medium-sized city—may very well neatly manifest the multiplier effect.  But it still doesn’t explain how Bentonville, the epicenter of Walmartlandia, has managed to hold its own with a lively downtown, when plenty of other fast-growing big cities struggle to keep it all centralized (Houston, for example).  After all, in one of the most famous journalistic explorations of Northwest Arkansas, Financial Times’ “The Town that Wal-Mart Built”, Jonathan Birchall observed in 2009 that he always found it “hard not to be hit by the irony in this Bentonville Renaissance. Wal-Mart’s football-stadium-sized supercentres are, after all, the epitome of the chain store culture that has destroyed small town centres and homogenised communities all over America in the past three decades.”  But it sounds like he took the bait.

The town that Walmart built has either proven itself immune to the main-street-murdering forces that afflicted most American cities, or it has recovered from that ailment magnificently.  Bentonville also boasts a regional airport that offers year-round, nonstop daily service to New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago; Alice Walton’s money helped build the terminal, which serves a population that had no regular airfare until 1998.  Bentonville Public Schools have offered the prestigious International Baccalaureate program since 2007.  And yes, Bentonville has a Walmart not so far away, in what probably was the edge of town not too long ago.

By this point in such a lengthy analysis, it’s obvious what has happened: Bentonville has responded to the fact that it hosts a multinational corporation by offering the sort of amenities needed to attract talent to the region—talent that, its current leadership presumes, will propel Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. to another fifty years of unprecedented growth.

Most MBA grads trained at Harvard, Wharton or Kellogg are going to need enticement to move to an area not recognized for its urban offerings.  On top of all the talent in multinational retail, Bentonville and its neighbors most also graciously host the satellite offices of 1,300 suppliers whom Walmart has lured due to its vast trade network—ranging in size from one sales exec to something as large as Procter and Gamble, for whom a few hundred employees call Northwest Arkansas home.  The elite business class that routinely visits the Walmart headquarters expects top-tier hotels and shopping, while many of the executives who make it their permanent home will inevitably seek sophisticated eateries in an attractive, walkable setting.  How much of all this was funded directly by Walmart is anyone’s guess (though I’m sure at least someone out there has the numbers).  The fact remains that the corporate culture in Bentonville fueled a demand for a Parks Department that builds a network out of its green space, or a Planning Department that performs traffic calming studies.

The hardened cynics can read about this serendipity in the Ozarks and offer an acerbic rebuttal: of course Walmart is going to prop up its hometown, but does that absolve it from the devastation that has taken place virtually everywhere else?  This assertion would be valid if every town with a Walmart suffered an equally moribund Main Street.  But they clearly haven’t.  And there remain villages too small or too remote for a Walmart, which have confronted the exact same decline of entrepreneurism in their historic centers.  Arguing from that same angle, the City of Bentonville did not enjoin Walmart to revitalize downtown—or force Alice Walton to build Crystal Bridges—any more than existing laws compelled Cornelius Vanderbilt to endow a university in Nashville, the capital of a state he never even visited.   No doubt some of Walmart’s boosterism in Bentonville is self-serving, since a desirable community only helps to improve Walmart’s reputation as both an employer and corporate citizen, which in turn can attract further investment.  However, viewing all corporate altruism as suspicious requires a labyrinthine recontextualization that is just as distorted as saying “Walmart killed our downtowns”.  Or its equally hyperbolic counterpart: “Walmart has had no impact on the way we shop on main street”.  Clearly it has, but the forces compelling consumer behavior remain complicated—baffling even.  For while most of us can understand that we abandoned our old downtowns out of convenience and lack of foresight, no one will ever truly be able to explain want prompted many American consumers to give up their cars so they could return to bicycles.  And if you don’t think I’m concluding ironically, I’ve got a Jane Austen novel to sell you.

MONTAGE: Curbing destruction by rethreading the button.

I'm back from a lengthy time away from Afghanistan and have been trying to plug away at another blog article that incorporates infrastructure from several different countries, as well as the implications on American energy efficiency. But, as is often the case, a shortage of good, specific photos has become my Achilles' heel. I will acquire the remaining photos that I need before too long, and that article is already more than halfway complete, but until then I offer a novelty for my blog: a montage in which I didn't take a single one of the many photographs. I must give heaps of credit to Nici English for providing me not only with the pics—taken hastily from her car through the driver's window, just as I would do—but also with the background information on a subtle but interesting subject: curb jumping.

Notice anything? I probably wouldn't have either. But our star photographer understands the trucking industry firsthand and can clearly spot what I would have completely ignored.

More than one vehicle has attempted to negotiate the turn into this Cracker Barrel outside Caseyville, Illinois, but it would take a heck of a heavy car—and a painfully inept driver—to cause the sort of skimming of the edge of the concrete that you see here. But for a trucker, it's much more understandable. The weight they support and the extensive spatial judgment that they require will inevitably result in some slip-ups. The truck parking in the background of the above photos indicates that the area consciously accommodates truckers; no doubt the property owner also expected the sharp turns would pose problems for some in the industry and paved a curb in order to minimize landscaping damage—which, in turn, results in a damaged curb.

Most corner-cutting and curbside damage comes from a single culprit: the inexperienced trucker, negotiating a space that is simply too small. Understandably, a trucker's ability to handle such a lengthy vehicle only grows through time and experience; more surprisingly, the vast majority of truckers do not last six months in the industry after an initial training. According to English, my online expert, even among the largest trucking companies (Swift, JB Hunt), it would be reasonable to assume that 50% of the drivers have less than half of a year of experience. The result? Lots of scratched curbs, stripped corners, and shredded landscaping.

Many property owners in high truck traffic areas have learned to anticipate these vehicular assaults on their pavement, grass, and landscaping; they have devised a sort of defense. Not surprisingly, a Motel 6, also in the Caseyville area, obviously has to contend with curb jumpers quite a bit.

Large rocks planted at the corner serve the same purpose that they do in residential neighborhoods—to deter motorists who make that turn carelessly. In some cases, these boulders do more than just preserve landscaping aesthetics; they save a valuable piece of infrastructure, such as the fire hydrant below.

The above photo shows the Motel 6 from a different angle—one with a visible drop yard for trailers in the background, which explains the need for such extensive fortification. On the other side of the street, the property owner has chosen a more aggressive—and, in my opinion, uglier—barrier for curb jumpers. They look like overturned bollards, and they seem to be safeguarding what is likely a fragile little wetland.

Not surprisingly, these rocks are particularly prominent at motels along highways that would prove popular destinations for truckers. Here's an installation near Grenada, Mississippi, where the more prominent positioning of the rocks suggests that they are not there just to deter curb-jumping but to alert truckers of a tight corner—which, I'll admit, pretty much amounts to the same thing semantically.

The absence of barriers can often prove more harmful than merely tearing up a patch of grass. A particularly clumsy trucker clocked this light post outside a Caseyville hotel while trying to turn a corner.

Viewed from a different angle, it is clear many other drivers scoured the grass along the curb before one took it an increment further.

Understandably, state and local governments have not improved every road in these often rural environments to the degree that it has a curb. The absence of one would make it difficult if not impossible for a trucker to notice when he or she has turned too sharply.

The example below, again from Caseyville, shows what appears to me like a more serious accident waiting to happen: a curbless street near a trailer drop yard, in which the drivers skimming over into the verge can come within a hair's breadth of clipping that thick yellow cable.

The cable could be stabilizing a number of tall objects—a power line among them. Bollards or rocks placed right along this curve would be a cheaper and most likely more effective solution than building a curb: the introduction of an unexpected obstacle is far more likely to attract attention than a continuous curb that a trucker could cross complacently.

Putting the alliteration aside (in a minute), the trucking technique that tries to terminate the tendency for curb jumping is known as button hooking. We've all seen it on the back of trailers: “Caution—this vehicle makes wide right turns.” The blog entry on Hub Pages by Omniscient Nomad illustrates this effectively:

As Omniscient Nomad explains, in Figure A, the driver did not allow himself or herself sufficient time and space to prepare for the right hand turn. In these instances, the fishtailing trailer may cross into three (if not all four) lanes in an intersection of two-way streets, forcing other drivers to back up to give enough room. Figure B shows a correct button hook, minimizing the likelihood of curbing or concurrent calamity by colliding with cars nearby.

The trucking industry may seem like it owns the road, but, as all of us have seen (even if we don't always notice) trucks are generally subject to many higher restrictions than conventional automobiles, whether it be through weigh stations, restricted tunnels, lower speed limits, or just outright prohibitions, such as this mildly ironic sign near Durant, Mississippi.

The owner of the gas station has determined the space is too constrained to allow for trucks—but not for livestock trailers, which are approximately half the length of a conventional 53-foot commercial trailer.

And another bit of near irony with trucks and signage rests outside Osceola, Arkansas:

Alas, it was a storm and not a curb jumper that took this one down. How do we know? The landscaping below it, while unkempt, is hardly mangled. Trucks are not exactly the most benign presence on America's roadways, but they would likely prove a lot more threatening if they could ascend, accelerate, maneuver, or halt with the same freedom and abandon as virtually every smaller vehicle can do. Rocks, curbs, and bollards are a modest remedy to a curbing problem that is equally modest, especially in light of trucks' capacity for both destruction and amazing productivity across American roadways. The gestures of trucks are big, so it is apt that something so comparatively simple could be explained metaphorically through a mere button.

Vestigial Judaism, Part III: Urbanization Along the Cotton Belt.

The first two parts of this lengthy exploration of southern Judaica attempted to re-acquaint the readers with what in this day and age may defy typical expectations: Jewish enclaves in small towns throughout the rural Deep South. From approximately 1850 to 1950, in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama—as well as the other southern states—immigrants from Germany, France, and Eastern Europe forged new enterprises through department and variety stores along the main streets of towns that barely earn a dot on the map today. The evidence of their influence in these communities often survives through cemeteries with eastward-facing gravestones, temples, synagogues, and old commercial buildings downtown with unmistakably Jewish names. Today, the Jewish population in towns such as St. Francisville LA, Port Gibson MS, or Selma AL is at or near zero (precisely what most of us would expect them be), and sometimes the remnants of their settlements in these communities is buried so quietly that the search almost becomes an archaeological endeavor.

By today’s standards, the idea that the rural South should host Jewish communities seems bizarre, and it’s true that Jews exert far less of a demographic or cultural influence in Dixie than they do on the coasts. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, Jews comprise approximately 2.2% of the nation’s population; but the only states in that region commonly perceived as the American South where the percentage exceeds the national percentage are Maryland (4.2%) and Florida (3.7%). Of the remaining states, only Delaware (1.6%), Georgia (1.4%), and Virginia (1.3%) exceed 1% Jewish. And among these five states, it is commonplace to find people from Maryland and Delaware who do not identify themselves as southern. Most of the remaining states in the South have populations that are less than .5% Jewish. Thus, the notion that the South has a relatively small Jewish population is, by many metrics, true: Jews tend to concentrate heavily in a few southern metropolitan areas, such as Atlanta or Miami, while large Jewish enclaves elsewhere in the South are uncommon.

But Jews are certainly not impossible to find in cities like Little Rock, New Orleans, and Jackson. In fact, most of the Jews of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi now reside in or near these largest cities in their respective states. Perhaps many of the Jewish families in those smaller communities such as Donaldsonville or Port Gibson migrated to the urban regions over the past fifty years, where employment opportunities have been more abundant, reflecting the steady urbanization of American settlement. And within these cities, the Jewish community has often migrated en masse from one part of town to another. New Orleans claims a number of buildings with discernible Jewish origins in neighborhoods that are devoid of Jews, yet the Jewish population in the metro remains over 10,000. These telltale indicators of a formerly thriving Jewish community further illuminate the migration patterns of a religious faith which remains a statistical blip across most of this region of the US.

The Goldring Woldenberg Institute for Southern Jewish Life chronicles the emergence of New Orleans’ Jewish population, from the first arrivals in the mid 18th century, when the Code Noire laws prohibited Jews from settling in the French colony of Louisiana—a fiat that local colonists blithely ignored in their zeal to trade with commercially savvy Jewish merchants. For much of the next century, as Louisiana shifted to Spanish control, then back to French, then American, Jews made no effort to forge an organized religious culture in the city, no doubt due to the shifting laws and public acceptance of Judiasm (particularly low under Spanish rule). Most of the Jews in the nascent southern towns were male, and they overwhelmingly intermarried. By the time Louisiana became part of the United States, they flourished under the political freedoms enshrined in the Constitution; the population of New Orleans exploded after the Louisiana Purchase, and Jews from Germany and France took great advantage of New Orleans’ critical role as the pre-eminent southern port. Many of these successful entrepreneurs forged retail businesses, whose names remain familiar to most Louisianans over the age of twenty—Godchaux’s, Maison Blanche, and Krauss all survived until the end of the 20th century. Jews were generally accepted in the city’s social and political life, with a population that burgeoned in the two decades prior to the Civil War. For a city that flourished on the slave trade, it should come as no surprise that most of the white citizens—including the Jews—supported the Confederacy, including (and contrary to many smaller southern towns) some of the rabbis.

After the war, a new wave of Jewish immigration elicited a bifurcation in the Jewish population: the successful German and Alsatians moved further Uptown, along with the rest of city’s old money; the newcomer Eastern Europeans settled much closer to the Central Business District. By the late 19th Century, the Dryades Street corridor served as the highest concentration of Jewish congregations in region; it may have been the single most intensely Jewish neighborhood in the entire South. It boasted shuls (Yiddish for “synagagoues”) from Galicia, Lithuania, and Poland, among others. Like many other Jewish settlements in cities across the Northeast and Midwest, the Dryades Street commercial district served a mixed race population, catering to African Americans as well.

But neighborhoods change, and while the Uptown area three to five miles from the CBD remains a stronghold of the Jewish and Gentile elite, the portion of Uptown closest to the historic center of New Orleans has followed a different economic trajectory. Today, the neighborhood of Central City, just upriver of the CBD and only blocks away from the popular, touristy St. Charles Avenue streetcar corridor, is one of the most heavily disinvested portions of the entire metro. The purple outline on the map below approximates the very loose boundaries, which extend off the edge of the frame.

Much of this area did not flood during Hurricane Katrina, and yet the area is so depopulated that parts of it appear as though a disaster hit just yesterday. But I’m not going to dwell on abandonment, especially when the area closest to St. Charles is starting to benefit from newly constructed affordable housing. Among the surviving structures on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard (formerly the aforementioned Dryades Street, and indicated on the map above by the red outline), many of them obliquely or overtly reference the heritage of this once ostensibly Jewish neighborhood. Handelmann’s was one of several successful dry goods stores when Dryades/Oretha Castle Haley served as the main street to this bustling Jewish enclave.

As was the case in towns like Selma and Port Gibson, a number of other commercial enterprises show clear Jewish origin, judging from the last names climbing up the sides of the buildings.

An apartment building just a block or two away from O.C. Haley Boulevard features a decorative Star of David as a relief pattern against a backdrop of gray bricks.


But the most prominent structure in this section of Central City is the old Beth Israel Synagogue, built in 1924 on Carondelet Street (two blocks away from Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard), though the congregation predates the structure by about 20 years.


I drove past this structure more than 100 times over the course of year before I noticed all the Jewish details.



The synagogue still references its city of origin on the capitals of the columns, with subtle fleur-de-lis abutting a seemingly Byzantine-inspired crown molding pattern.

Despite all these ornamental gestures, I’m willing to give myself a pass for not recognizing the structure for so long: it hasn’t been a synagogue for forty years. Throughout most of the 1950s and 1960s, the Jewish population in the area dwindled to nearly nothing, with many of the Orthodox Jews moving further Uptown or to the large suburb of Metairie. The congregation bought property in the affluent Lakeview neighborhood in the mid 1960s and relocated in 1971. (Incidentally, Hurricane Katrina badly flooded the newer Beth Israel Synagogue, while the structure featured here suffered minimal damage.) Today, the building houses New Home Full Gospel Ministries, a principally African American congregation. Both the old Beth Israel Synagogue and this neighboring building in the photo below remain among the best maintained structures in this impoverished neighborhood:

According to online documentation, this less striking edifice held the Menorah Institute, built in 1925 to accompany the Beth Israel Synagogue as a Hebrew school. The fact that the façade only features Hebrew lettering suggests that the neighborhood was once so intensely Hebraic that English signage was unnecessary. I have been unable to determine what the building’s use is today. It could be sealed most of the year and used minimally, though, like the synagogues in Port Gibson MS and Selma AL, it shows all evidence of diligent caretakers, while most other vacant buildings in the area have been left to decay.

New Orleans, famed for its evocative cemeteries, not surprisingly hosts Jewish burial grounds far larger than its rural counterparts. Most of the cemeteries are tucked away in the Uptown, Lakeview, and Gentilly neighborhoods, though one in Mid-City, at the end of the Canal Street streetcar line, has blended in with many of the city’s popular cemetery tours, no doubt due to its age and proximity to some of the most elaborate burial grounds of wealthy Uptown families.

The majority of Gates of Prayer Cemetery is in better shape than this Perpetual Care Tablet; it no doubt helps that this and the other cemeteries in this cluster sit along Metairie Ridge, keeping the area above sea level while surrounded a part of town that flooded badly after Hurricane Katrina.



As is expected, all the graves face in the direction of Jerusalem to the east, evidenced by the sunset photo below:



Other corners of the town, long disassociated from any Jewish community (if there ever was one to begin with), still feature apocrypha through none-too-subtle architectural features.


My apologies for the swirled appearance of these photos, but it shouldn’t be so hard to make out a Star of David art window in the attic of these shotgun homes. Nothing about this area, near the intersection of Napoleon and Claiborne Avenues, remotely suggests that it would sit in a Jewish neighborhood today—New Orleanians would most likely perceive it is an extension of the impoverished Central City area, even though it sits well over 2 miles from the old Beth Israel Synagogue featured earlier, and on the other side of Claiborne sits the much wealthier Broadmoor neighborhood. But many old Jewish neighborhoods hide their pulses.

The homes from the rain-soaked photos above sit in the area I indicated with the green oval on the map, while the Chevra Thilim Synagogue sat at the point indicated by the red “A” marker. According to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, this site was the second location for the Chevra Thilim congregation, which operated there from 1948 until 1998, when declining membership forced it to merge with another and form a new congregation, Shir Chadash, now located in suburban Metairie. Today, this strip of Claiborne Avenue forms a powerful socioeconomic divider, with a generally affluent population to the north and working class to the south. The Jewish embellishments on these humble shotgun homes suggest that Chevra Thilim may have accommodated an economically diverse population at the time.

Most significant within the context of this lengthy examination, though, is the fact that the current manifestation of Chevra Thilim is now in its third location since 1948; its first was at the intersection of Baronne and Lafayette Streets, right near the city’s Central Business District. Thus, over the course of the lifetime any 65-year-old, the synagogue has moved steadily away from the heart of town, first from downtown to its inner city location on Claiborne Avenue, then out to the ‘burbs. Nothing new here: Chevra Thilim’s move simply parallels the decentralization and suburbanization of just about any constituency that had the financial ability to migrate away from the city center. But is there anything different about Jewish migration patterns from that of the white, gentile (often Anglo-Saxon and Protestant) majority? I have drawn my own conclusions, many of which are clear generalizations based largely on observations, but empirical evidence is the lynchpin of most of my blog articles, and I always welcome others to refute my assertions, either with credible research or more astute observations. Here’s what I have noticed:

1) Jews are settlers but not colonizers; they are not usually the first one in the door. When Alsatian, German, and Eastern European Jews first started arriving to the American South in discernible numbers in the early 19th century, they confronted an area dominated by plantation homes and small villages—a tremendous contrast from the rapidly urbanizing North. But despite the extreme discrimination these immigrants often encountered in Europe, they nonetheless sought to assimilate into mature networks with American gentiles, and they found this in the scattered small-town markets throughout the South. Rather than forging their own new, all-Jewish towns certifiably free of prejudiced goyim, they gravitated toward thriving communities such as Port Gibson, Selma, Donaldson, and Natchez, where their business acumen helped the towns grow. I also find very little evidence of Jews who moved to the south to establish a slavery-dependent plantation in the middle of vacant, uncultivated land; Jews were generally merchants, not farmers, and thus their role in the economy often derived from distribution rather than production, from services rather than manufacturing. In addition, Jews may have been more attuned to the injustices of slavery than gentiles, having experienced personal restrictions of freedom in their respective countries across the Atlantic. Though the attitudes of southern Jews towards African Americans’ rights were mixed, few Jews demonstrated open support for slavery by actually owning slaves. Through most of the South, slaves were a rural enterprise, and Jewish settlement patterns have proven unequivocally urban across the past two centuries.

2) As mobile as most Americans are, Jews take it to an extreme. It doesn’t seem like a very flattering term, but it may only be apt to call Jews “hyper-mobile”. The Jewish outmigration from towns to the big cities is now more or less complete: virtually no Jews live in rural south. Even Mississippi, with an infinitesimal Jewish population of 1,500 today, hosts the vast majority of the remaining Jews in Jackson, the state’s capital and largest city. Understanding Jewish mobility depends upon understanding the ability or capacity to move; it takes money. Jewish merchants were routinely among the wealthiest persons in their southern towns, so as the economic fortunes of these communities deteriorated and people left for the big cities, Jews often seemed to lead the way. The depopulated old Jewish settlements throughout the neighborhoods of larger cities, whether in New Orleans’ Central City or West Philadelphia, reveal the capacity for Jews to relocate as the economic climate of their part of town took a turn for the worse. Jews consistently have among the highest rates of educational attainment of any religious or ethnic group, and in meritocratic America this usually equates to wealth. Wealth endows a person with the ability to move.

3) Jewish relations with American pluralism proved both a catalyst toward their prosperity and a threat to their survival. Jews often sailed across the Atlantic to escape persecution in Europe. American gentiles could be anti-Semetic and likely barred Jews from visiting some of their most exclusive/exclusionary institutions, but the populace was generally relaxed about Jewish-Gentile parings, no doubt in part because southern business leaders have long recognized Jews as savvy entrepreneurs. Though scandalous if not forbidden in much of Europe up until World War II, the idea of intermarriage between Jews and gentiles rarely aroused suspicion in the US. The ability to marry outside of one’s religion supports the notion that Jews were accepted into mainstream Southern society, and it often proved the only opportunity for male immigrants alone in the US to find a bride—a Christian one. If intermarriage galvanized the networking capacity of Jews in America, it also diluted their religious identity. Jews resided in cities such as New Orleans and Selma decades before they could establish a temple, mainly because intermarriage only weakened religious self-identification, so fundamental aspects of Jewish culture remained neglected. Regions with a large percentage of Catholics (such as south Louisiana) seemed the most amenable to crossing religious lines through tying the matrimonial knots. Jews flourished in cities such as New Orleans, but population through natural growth was slow, since many husbands assumed their wife’s Christian faith or became non-observant altogether. Intermarriage rates can serve as a proxy variable for public acceptance of Jews in general, and it is highly possible that the Southern towns with visible Jewish history were among the least prejudiced as well (at least not prejudiced against whites). To this day, Jews routinely intermarry and often eventually repudiate their faith, but a country such as America, founded upon religious freedom, generally fosters a more peaceful co-existence between the general public and religious minorities. Unlike Europe, anti-Semitism has rarely driven policy in the US, so Jewish immigrants most likely always found southern communities perfectly acceptable compared to what they had experienced before—and they remain to this day in the cities with high economic opportunities.

This bird’s-eye scan of Jewish settlement across the South hardly accounts for nuances or even exceptions. But it reveals that a small but influential religious minority, persecuted in Europe, may prove the best example of American restlessness. All across the country, plaques and historical markers remind us of what building used to stand in X location, and all too often that ghost building is a church. Just as we change religion or religious denomination routinely, the physical incarnation of our faith sometimes seems like a pawn in our often fickle spirituality. Churches, cemeteries, storefronts, and even housing have emerged and then disappeared, as the population that animates them grows fidgety. I conclude with three handsome black & white photos (the first time for this blog) of yet another example of vestigial Judiasm, this time in Concordia Hall, an old building in central Little Rock. The photos are courtesy of Nicolette English.


Ever mobile, we abandon the old and obsolete, and, for those aspects of our heritage we care about the most, we erect a sign. This may seem like a cynical statement, but that’s mostly because, as I mentioned earlier, I prefer that my search for Jewish heritage to resemble an archaeological dig, free of written clues or overt references. A good writer knows that showing is always better than telling.