Main Streets. (Council Grove, Kansas)

Small town Main Streets everywhere in the US and Canada are just dead, and have been for at least a generation. My experience of Kansas small towns is: emptiness. Big sky. emptiness. All the real commercial life of towns happens out on the highway strips on the fringes. This kills the towns as towns--as communities. I see the  horror happening bit by bit in my hometown of Blue Hill, Maine. In that case, the pattern is another American standard: a "quaint" old town center is abandoned to seasonal, tourist-oriented businesses, which come and go every year, but the places that actually connect the community-- pharmacy, grocery store, etc.--sprout up on the highway where they are joined by the inevitable chains--Subway, Dunkin Donuts, etc., the last nail in the coffin being a Family Dollar store, full of cheap Chinese crap.  Up until the mid=seventies a lot towns and small cities, for example Burlington, Vermont--had  downtowns which were active commercial, social, interactive spaces, with lots going on. There are reasons democracy grew up in towns and not in the fundamentalist back roads. Towns are where  people quickly figure out that it's plainly to everyone's advantage to rub shoulders and, somehow, get along. In the new America there's so much loneliness manufactured by market capitalism. We've left it to the real estate industry to decide upon and shape the physical pattern of how we live our lives, to determine the geography of daily life. Political and religious fundamentalism sprouts up in towns that have ceased being communities, or never were. The sprawls where people do their shopping in big chain stores fronted by enormous parking lots are the perfect medium for Know-Nothingisms like the Tea Party; in that landscape the only crowd to rub shoulders with is at the mega church where everyone looks, thinks and speaks the same. 

      And we have these beautiful town centers as shells, dried-up husks,  all over the country. Tarting them up as tourist centers is putting lipstick on a pig. In most areas it's too late, but laws, bylaws, and zoning to protect main streets and downtowns are the only way to preserve towns and cities as communities, as hotspots of democracy. In Western Europe, town centers are still alive, for everyone, mostly because the political will was there to protect them.