The Death and Life of Main Street

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF MAIN STREET: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community. By Miles Orvell. xiii and 286 pp.; ills., notes, index. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. 2012. $39-95 (cloth), ISBN 9780807835685. Miles Orvell has produced model of cross-disciplinary scholarship straddling two major interdisciplinary fields--American Studies and Urban Studies--while also mining literatures of other disciplines, including geography, sociology, history, planning, and literature. The book brings insights from all these different domains to bear on fascinating question: how has myth of Street influenced land-use planning in United States? In scholarly world that is increasingly subdivided into narrow specialties, OrvelPs book shows us how broadly synthetic mind can make cultural sense of large-scale trends across long historical arc. This treatment relies mainly on three key, overlapping terms: Main town, and Each term may be used to describe an idea or physical place, and most of book focuses on complicated and changing relationships between ideas and physical places. Orvell applies these terms to places of widely divergent sizes, across several centuries. Although his account goes all way back to Puritans, Orvell confirms durability of myth of Street by reminding readers that media commentators in our own time often contrast conditions prevailing on Street versus those on Wall Street, confident that their audience will understand meanings attached to these economic and social poles. Why has Street remained so powerful symbol in American psyche? Orvell suggests it is because Street is place where private enterprise is combined with public space. Street offers mythology that reconciles Americans' devotion to marketplace with their belief in community. Perhaps because of his grounding in American Studies, Orvell bolsters his case with examples from material culture to show how myth of Street is enshrined in American consciousness, for example, through elaborate model-railroad villages that re-create on tiny scale all elements of mythical American small towns. Or through life-size, living museums like Williamsburg, Virginia, and Greenfield Village, Michigan, which were produced by what Orvell calls acts of philanthropy powered by nostalgia (p. 35). Orvell includes photographs throughout chapters to illustrate his arguments, including many images taken by Depression-era photographers who worked for Farm Security Administration. And perhaps most convincing of all is his discussion of Disneyland, whose 1955 reconstruction of America's small town qualifies, in Orvell's words, as the apotheosis of Street (p. 37). Some of strongest parts of book are chapters 3 and 4, which offer author's commentary on literary works of 1920s and 1930s, illustrating an amazing shift in attitudes toward America's small towns. He devotes an entire chapter to Sinclair Lewis's classic novel Street, which Orvell sums up as a piercing satire that paints bleak and miserable picture of small-town life on prairie (p. 75). Yet in very next decade of 1930s, tide of opinion reversed among those who were shaping our culture. Photographers and writers began extolling virtues of small-town life, and Thornton Wilder produced Our Town, play that won Pulitzer Prize in 1938 for its sentimental portrayal of Grover's Corners. Orvell attributes this reversal of attitudes toward small towns to America's need for an anchor in chaos of Depression. Since that time, America's tastemakers have maintained an unshakeable faith in virtues of small town life, despite what Orvell identifies as harsher realities of many small towns. In particular, author devotes Chapter 5 to exclusionary tendencies that we sometimes observe in tightly bound communities

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