The Death And Life Of Main Street

For more than a century, the term "Main Street" has conjured up nostalgic images of American small-town life. Representations exist all around us, from fiction and film to the architecture of shopping malls and Disneyland. All the while, the nation has become increasingly diverse, exposing tensions within this ideal. In The Death and Life of Main Street, Miles Orvell wrestles with the mythic allure of the small town in all its forms, illustrating how Americans continue to reinscribe these images on real places in order to forge consensus about inclusion and civic identity, especially in times of crisis. Orvell underscores the fact that Main Street was never what it seemed; it has always been much more complex than it appears, as he shows in his discussions of figures like Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Frank Capra, Thornton Wilder, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans. He argues that translating the overly tidy cultural metaphor into real spaces--as has been done in recent decades, especially in the new urbanist planned communities of Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany--actually diminishes the communitarian ideals at the center of this nostalgic construct. Orvell investigates the way these tensions play out in a variety of cultural realms and explores the rise of literary and artistic traditions that deliberately challenge the tropes and assumptions of small-town ideology and life.

Carol Milford grows up in a mid-sized town in Minnesota before moving to Chicago for college. After her education, during which she’s exposed to big-city life and culture, she moves to Minneapolis to work as a librarian. She soon meets Will Kennicott, a small-town doctor, and the two get married and move to Gopher Prairie, Kennicott’s home town. Carol, inspired by big-city ideas, soon begins chafing at the seeming quaintness and even backwardness of the townsfolk, and their conservative, self-satisfied way of life. She struggles to try to reform the town in her image, while finding meaning in the seeming cultural desert she’s found herself in and in her increasingly cold marriage. Gopher Prairie is a detailed, satirical take on small-town American life, modeled after Sauk Centre, the town in which Lewis himself grew up. The town is fully realized, with generations of inhabitants interacting in a complex web of village society. Its bitingly satirical portrayal made Main Street highly acclaimed by its contemporaries, though many thought the satirical take was perhaps a bit too dark and hopeless. The book’s celebration and condemnation of small town life make it a candidate for the title of the Great American Novel. Main Street was awarded the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, but the decision was overturned by the prize’s Board of Trustees and awarded instead to Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence. When Lewis went on to win the 1926 Pulitzer for Arrowsmith, he declined it—with the New York Times reporting that he did so because he was still angry at the Pulitzers for being denied the prize for Main Street. Despite the book’s snub at the Pulitzers, Lewis went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, with Main Street being cited as one of the reasons for his win.

As an archetype for an entire class of places, Main Street has become one of America's most popular and idealized images. In Main Street Revisited, the first book to place the design of small downtowns in spatial and chronological context, Richard Francaviglia finds the sources of romanticized images of this archetype, including Walt Disney's Main Street USA, in towns as diverse as Marceline, Missouri, and Fort Collins, Colorado. Francaviglia interprets Main Street both as a real place and as an expression of collective assumptions, designs, and myths; his Main Streets are treasure troves of historic patterns. Using many historical and contemporary photographs and maps for his extensive fieldwork and research, he reveals a rich regional pattern of small-town development that serves as the basis for American community design. He underscores the significance of time in the development of Main Street's distinctive personality, focuses on the importance of space in the creation of place, and concentrates on popular images that have enshrined Main Street in the collective American consciousness.

In this classic study of the relationship between technology and culture, Miles Orvell demonstrates that the roots of contemporary popular culture reach back to the Victorian era, when mechanical replications of familiar objects reigned supreme and realism dominated artistic representation. Reacting against this genteel culture of imitation, a number of artists and intellectuals at the turn of the century were inspired by the machine to create more authentic works of art that were themselves "real things." The resulting tension between a culture of imitation and a culture of authenticity, argues Orvell, has become a defining category in our culture. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author, looking back on the late twentieth century and assessing tensions between imitation and authenticity in the context of our digital age. Considering material culture, photography, and literature, the book touches on influential figures such as writers Walt Whitman, Henry James, John Dos Passos, and James Agee; photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White; and architect-designers Gustav Stickley and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Suburban space has traditionally been understood as a formless remnant of physical city expansion, without a dynamic or logic of its own. Suburban Urbanities challenges this view by defining the suburb as a temporally evolving feature of urban growth.Anchored in the architectural research discipline of space syntax, this book offers a comprehensive understanding of urban change, touching on the history of the suburb as well as its current development challenges, with a particular focus on suburban centres. Studies of the high street as a centre for social, economic and cultural exchange provide evidence for its critical role in sustaining local centres over time. Contributors from the architecture, urban design, geography, history and anthropology disciplines examine cases spanning Europe and around the Mediterranean.By linking large-scale city mapping, urban design scale expositions of high street activity and local-scale ethnographies, the book underscores the need to consider suburban space on its own terms as a specific and complex field of social practice

“Harvard Square isn’t what it used to be.” Spend any time there, and you’re bound to hear that lament. Yet people have been saying the very same thing for well over a century. So what does it really mean that Harvard Square—or any other beloved Main Street or downtown—“isn’t what it used to be”? Catherine J. Turco, an economic sociologist and longtime denizen of Harvard Square, set out to answer this question after she started to wonder about her own complicated feelings concerning the changing Square. Diving into Harvard Square’s past and present, Turco explores why we love our local marketplaces and why we so often struggle with changes in them. Along the way, she introduces readers to a compelling set of characters, including the early twentieth-century businessmen who bonded over scotch and cigars to found the Harvard Square Business Association; a feisty, frugal landlady who became one of the Square’s most powerful property owners in the mid-1900s; a neighborhood group calling itself the Harvard Square Defense Fund that fought real estate developers throughout the 1980s and ’90s; and a local businesswoman who, in recent years, strove to keep her shop afloat amid personal tragedy, the rise of Amazon, and a globalizing property market that sent her rent soaring. Harvard Square tells the crazy, complicated love story of one quirky little marketplace and in the process, reveals the hidden love story Americans everywhere have long had with their own Main Streets and downtowns. Offering a new and powerful lens that exposes the stability and instability, the security and insecurity, markets provide, Turco transforms how we think about our cherished local marketplaces and markets in general. We come to see that our relationship with the markets in our lives is, and has always been, about our relationship with ourselves and one another, how we come together and how we come apart.

The Buildings of Main Street is the primary resource for interpreting commercial architectural style. Richard Longstreth, a renowned and respected author in the field of historic preservation, presents a useful survey of commercial architecture in urban America. He has developed a typology of architectural classification for commercial application in American towns across the United States. Likely to be enjoyed by both students and members of the general public seeking an introduction to commercial architecture, The Buildings of Main Streetmakes a significant and lasting contribution to American architectural history.