Saturday Night in Steubenville, 1950s
Downtown Steubenville, Ohio, not unlike the fictitious town in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), possessed all the admired attributes of American life in the first half of the twentieth century – public spirit, locally-owned shops, full employment, a rising middle-class, thriving local cultural scene and so on. Somewhere along the line, however, the American dream turned into a nightmare. Fourth Street precinct, the main thoroughfare in Old Steubenville, became a run-down, burnt-out parody of its previous self – the place you went to buy drugs or sex or get yourself killed when you were tired of life. There is, nevertheless, a revival going on in Fourth Street, a renewal that tells us a lot about a different kind of conservatism.
