-
Foreword - Wayne Franklin
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
By Wayne Franklin Although the particular places we inhabit may seem resilient, unique, as far from each other in character as they are in space, we all recognize that the great majority of them repeat themes found all over the place. Like language, the human environment in fact is built from a few disarmingly simple elements. The variations on those elements produce difference without destroying intelligibility. Richard Francaviglia is an astute student of what is intelligible in our landscape precisely because he shows how it proceeds from common sources. In Main Street Revisited: Time, Space, and Image Building in Small-Town America, he undertakes to explain how one of the most patent of American places has evolved over time and across space while retaining much of its essential character. He describes many actual, concrete Main Streets in the process - especially those ofthe Victorian town and small city - but description is not what most engages his attention. Rather, he is intrigued by the forces that caused this dominant cultural form to emerge as the axis ofso many American settlements. At the crossroads of commerce and transportation, civic identity and spatial range, Main Street provided both a convenient entrepot and a material definition of citizenship for countless communities literally across the land. It was public space structured by common activity or need and giving to the people's experience a rich body oflimits and metaphors. Although it owed its origins to patterns imported from various points of departure in the Old World, it assumed in the course ofAmerican history a peculiar relation to the terms of our experience. Among all the public spaces where Americans have gathered - for good purpose or ill - few have become so evocative ofthe community itself as has Main Street. Ofcourse Main Street has undergone many crucial changes over time. The Federal-era rebuilding of the New England town that Joseph Wood has chronicled, for instance, created an illusion that the town centers of that region were survivals from the colonial age, whereas in many instances they were the fabrications ofa later era, funded by new wealth and serving to solidify a new perception of a somewhat illusory past. What we xii 1 Foreword now think of as Main Street itself was likewise the creature of the commercial culture of the nineteenth century. Although it has been loaded with all kinds of similarly antique meanings, the Main Street shopping district is structured around not only the imperatives of material systems (things such as proximity, concentration, the movement of goods across the counter and across town) but also, and one might say more importantly , the commercial assumptions of modern consumer culture. It is an apparatus of the modern cash/credit economy and presumes fairly high income levels, intensive levels of exchange, and a spatially focused population indoctrinated in the virtues of consumption. Once this larger structure of values was more or less in place, the particular variations of Main Street design as Francaviglia explores them served to direct, attract, and control the interest ofthe populace. And they served to amuse the populace as well. In the process, Main Street ceased to be simply a place rooted in the values and activities of the people and became an idea as well. Perhaps especially as Main Street began to yield to newer material realities - from catalog marketing as instituted by the Chicago mail order retailers to the growing dominance ofthe automobile as a form of transport and an adjunct of "shopping" - it was burdened with new meanings. To borrow the terms of Benedict Anderson, it became a kind of imagined community, or an image of imagined community , which itself could be marketed. This new sense of the meaning of Main Street emerged in the literature and films of the twentieth century. The key figure in its development was Walt Disney, less in his films than in his brilliant articulation of a reduced-scale archetype ofthe Main Street landscape at Disneyland. This symbolic landscape drew on Disney's own memories of small-town Missouri , but it was nourished as well, as Francaviglia shows, by the memories of those who worked with him on this massive "imagineering" project especially the architect Harper Goff, whose experience in Fort Collins, Colorado, contributed much to the look and layout of the resulting amusement landscape. Disney's genius lay in his ability to tap (and shape) the fantasies of his audiences; in developing the Main Street area of Disneyland, he likewise gave concrete expression to the longing...