Main Street Revisited: Time, Space, and Image Building in Small-Town America (American Land & Life) - Hardcover

Francaviglia, Richard V.

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9780877455424: Main Street Revisited: Time, Space, and Image Building in Small-Town America (American Land & Life)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0877455422 ISBN 13: 9780877455424

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 1996

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Main Street has come to symbolize a place of honest aspirations and few pretenses, a place where economics, community pride, and entertainment generate an intuitive appreciation of the small town as a vital part of the American experience. 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 from 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.
As a historical geographer with a long-standing interest in American popular culture, Francaviglia looks sympathetically but realistically at the ways in which Main Street's image developed and persists. He reaffirms that life can imitate art, that the cherished icons surrounding Main Street have become the substance of popular culture. Ultimately, his book is about the material culture that architects, town developers, and image makers have left us as their legacy. Seen through the lives of the visionaries who created them in their search for the perfect community, Main Streets above all symbolize both individual and collective human energy and dreams.

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About the Author:

Richard Francaviglia is Professor of history and director of the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies and the History of Cartography at the University of Texas at Arlington.

From Publishers Weekly:

Whether in Sinclair Lewis novels, Jimmy Stewart films or Norman Rockwell paintings, no American image is as uniformly depicted as that of Main Street, with its Fourth of July parades, five-and-dime stores and barber poles. This book, part of Iowa's American Land and Life series, asks how and why the recognizably generic streetscape took shape. Francaviglia, an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington, documents the physical changes in downtown America over the years and offers 16 axioms that define the design and development of the small-town commercial center. Photographs taken from Maine to California reveal Main Street's material culture: building styles and materials, street plans, road surfaces and lighting. An interesting paradox emerges: that Main Street is both mundane and utopian, mundane in its aspirations to uniformity but utopian in that it embodies an ideal of life in America. Francaviglia's otherwise bland study culminates in a somewhat belabored defense of the influence of Disneyland's Main Street, U.S.A. on the very form and existence of America's downtown shopping districts since the 1950s. For historians of architecture and town planning, this book will offer a useful review of Main Street's development. But readers interested in why Main Street came to represent American ideals may be disappointed. Photos and illustrations.

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