Word: madisons
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...nonnegotiable. Gimmicky re-creations, especially those involving period costumes, are disqualifiers, as are any businesses beginning with the name Ye Olde. Functionality is what I look for, an authentic, practical intersection of commercial and social life, and I knew the moment I turned right on Avenue G.--Fort Madison's five-block business strip--that I was home...
...what's Fort Madison's secret? A healthy economy for one thing, with blue- and white-color jobs at Sheaffer pens, Dupont, Dial, Wabash National and a state prison. A sweet, leafy residential area within walking distance of downtown and the riverfront park, for another. And Fort Madison has the dumb luck of being too small to attract the kind of super discount stores that work like neutron bombs on downtowns, leaving the buildings standing but destroying all life forms...
...even at that, nearly 30% of the storefronts are empty. A lot of people are willing to drive half an hour north to the mall and strip stores near Burlington, and a proposed highway bypass will route traffic around Fort Madison. So the true secret of the town's success, then, can be found every Thursday morning at the sinfully addictive Ivy Bake Shoppe, where Martha Wolf and Susan Welch Saunders' blackberry scones make the sorry impostors at a certain ubiquitous coffee-house chain taste like clay pigeons, and where a juiced-up group of local retailers and other...
...kind of place where, when I left to go check out Burlington, Wolf and Saunders, 50 and 59, dropped some scones into a care package for my trip. Burlington has tougher challenges than Fort Madison. The much bigger, grittier downtown was built for the industrial railroad hub that Burlington once was, and big, boxy buildings sit vacant now. But just as in Fort Madison, there is something worth saving here, where neighborhoods sweep up gracefully from the banks of the Mississippi to form an amphitheater with terrific views of downtown and the bridge that spokes majestically across the river...
...unabashedly partial to a town where gin and tonics are available on the street, and even more partial when I'm invited to the party. I can't say what downtown Fort Madison or Burlington will look like in 10 years, or in 25, but I drank to their future, and to the future of every community that stands up to the steamroller. There is some evidence that as the work force becomes more flexible, more of the people who can work from home are choosing downtowns. Ground-floor and second-floor occupancy rates were up in Main Street towns...