Town centers in the United States over the past fifty (50) years have been under attack by a series of events and concepts that have affected the economic lifeblood of the town center -- its retail, restaurant, service and entertainment businesses. Federal and State governments, driven by the desire to improve the productivity of interstate and intrastate commerce focused on highway throughput, and as a result highways bypassed many town centers in order to improve the speed of transport vehicles through the area. In all cases of a bypass regardless of the size of the city, the downtown was affected negatively. Since most small town centers (less than 10,000 population) are vitally dependent on traffic generated business, they were negatively affected the most. In the cases of larger towns and cities there was usually enough economic movement to the area of the bypass to eventually recover some of the economic impact. However, the down towns of these towns and cities were never the same.