Main Street Revisited
Main street holds a special place in the heart of most Americans. While many of us chose to live in big cities, we harbor a small desire to move to a small town with a quaint little main street. A safe hamlet where everybody knows everybody. Movies and shows have been recreating this image for years. Examples exist in movies like It's a Wonderful Life a television shows like Gillmore Girls. Every time I visit a new small town I come home and tell my husband we need to move to that particular town because its walkable, has adorable shops, and the people there are friendly. But we have yet to do so and continue to live in larger cities where we know maybe three or four people on our block.
I have only been working with small towns for a few years now, but Richard Francaviglia, author of Main Street Revisited, has spent his entire career analyzing main streets and developed an interesting list of 16 axioms of main street. The book was an good read with some obvious points and others that made me look at small towns in a new way. For example, the observation that the front façade is the most important elevation and was architecturally treated as such is obvious because it greeted customers. The back and sides of the buildings are rarely seen by anyone except the building owners and delivery people which is why two kinds of brick were used to construct main street buildings. The primary brick used on the front was a higher quality and finish, while the sides and rear of the building were a common brick, less expensive than the brick used on the front.
One concept discussed in the book is that most of our downtown’s are very uniform in their construction. This resulted from various periods of prosperity leading to building booms that reflected the style of that period. I think of towns like Spencer, Iowa with a large collection of Art Deco buildings or Geneva, Nebraska with a high number of Victorian buildings. Styles moved from larger cities to smaller towns, with modifications along the way. This is why it is difficult to pinpoint any one style in many buildings because in a small town the architecture is often a modification of the true style developed in the large city made to fit main street. These styles and the shape main street took are reflective of the ideas conceived by designers of that era that were then shared through images.
The most interesting observation from this book is how we place main street on an idealistic pedestal. We recreate main street to be what we think it should look like, not an objective view of how it actually looked. One example provided in the book is the gazebo in the central square. Victorian towns of the late 18th and early 19th century did not usually have a decorative gazebo in the town square. It actually began as a grassy space for livestock to graze. But our interpretation of the past in a romanticized manner has led to modern additions that further the image we want main street to convey. It is this romanticizing of the past that equates to protection in Francaviglia's thirteenth axiom.
The final observation made in this book that was the most striking was the influence that Walt Disney had on modern main street revitalization efforts. Numerous writings point to Disney copying main street for both Disney World and Disneyland, creating an imitated and fake version of the real thing, but Francaviglia goes one step further to suggest that our main street revitalization programs are actually influence by Disney's concepts used to create his main streets. It is actually a strong argument when dissected. The Main Street Program supports standards for a uniform appearance in downtown similar to how Disney marketed his main street. Disney is the one who coined the term Main Street USA, used in many main street business names. We have even begun to expect real world main streets to reflect Disney's main street designs, to be as polished and welcoming and filled with charm.
Despite our romanticizing of main street many are slowly dying. I spent last fall driving around small towns in four rural counties in western Nebraska and found a few thriving and well-preserved main streets, but a number in various states of decline. One town's row of beautiful cast iron storefront buildings were slowly caving in on themselves, waiting for the town to raise enough money to tear them down. Another had already lost their main street. The two block stretch of commercial buildings was just grass, no record beyond an old photograph of their existence. It is heartbreaking to think of all the hard work, perseverance, and commitment that went into creating these communities, all to be lost 100 years later. The pioneer spirit has faded away, along with the main streets it helped to build.
