Main Street Revisited: Time, Space, and Image Building in Small-Town America

Section 3. Image Building and Main Street: The Shaping of a Popular American Icon

3 : IMJ\GI: lilJlI.I)ING J\NI) MJ\IN STI~I:I:T The Shaping ofa Popular American Icon THE SMALL TOWN IMAGE CONSISTS OF SOUNDS, SMELLS, CONVERSATIONS, PATTERNS, VISTAS, AND EMOTIONS. IT IS A PARADOXICAL TRUTH THAT WE SLOWLY CREATE OUR SMALL TOWNS IN OUR IMAGE, AND THEN THEY SLOWLY REBUILD US IN THEIRS. IMAGE IS SUBTLE, YET IN DETERMINING WHAT WE VALUE ABOUT SMALL TOWNS, IT POSSESSES GREAT POWER. - JAMES BARKER, "THE SMALL TOWN: ORDER AND IMAGE" s it evolved in time and space, Main Street became the commercial and social heart of the American small town; as it developed in our collective thought, Main Street became an integral part of American culture. Because many people left small towns in the early to mid-twentieth century, these places became repositories of memories. Main Street was always associated with place; now it also became an intrinsic part of our view of history. It may surprise some to learn that, in the early part of the twentieth century, the small town as exemplified by Main Street was not held in especially high regard. Architect-educator James Barker noted that "a number of us possess a subtle schizophrenia concerning the small town image. We love it for its picturesque qualities and its sense of community, but we hate it for its narrowness of thought and its slowness to respond to change." 1 We have always been, and perhaps ought to be, ambivalent about small towns, for they provide security at a price: conformity. Despite our ambivalence toward them, small towns offer a seeming virtue in their constancy. In the popular mind, small towns seem to Image Building and Main Street [ 131 change less than their surroundings, and this helps explain why they seem to be havens from change. Despite America's involvement in two major wars, and its experiencing rapid technological and social change in the twentieth century, the nation's small towns seemed to change less than the world around them. In the small town, it seemed, the pace of life was slower, offering the type of security and nostalgic longing portrayed in episodes ofthe Twilight Zone, whose creator, Rod Serling, grew up experiencing the small towns of western New York before he attended Antioch College in the idyllic small town of Yellow Springs, Ohio. Like many shapers of popular culture, Serling helped to create a mind-set about the small town and its Main Street. In describing a harried executive's return to a small town where all cares could be forgotten, Serling penned the following unforgettable prose image: Beyond the station was a small village square with a bandstand. A bed of flowers went halfway around the square and added reds and whites and blues to the deep green ofthe town. A summer afternoon and a small town with a village square and a bandstand and people in old fashioned dress. In his whole life ... he had never felt such a stirring deep inside, such a hunger to see a place again....2 The image is all the more poignant when we realize that the man only found this idyllic community after calling out its name (Willoughby) and stepping off a moving train to his death; thus, the small town becomes heaven to those stuck in the modern hell ofthe present. In their Cold War-era films and television shows, science-fiction writers creatively used the small-town square to contrasnhe predictability and reassurance of small-town life with the terrors of the unknown. One particularly chilling scene in the original 1956 Invasion ofthe Body Snatchers depicts the residents ofthe fictional small California town of Santa Mira, California, grouping in the public square as they methodically load alien pods onto trucks. The townsfolk are viewed from the second-story window of a commercial building by stars Kevin McCarthy and Dana Winters, and the audience shares the witnesses' horror, for the heart of a onceidyllic small town has now become the marshalling point of nightmarish activity destined to dehumanize every town in America. The elevated perspective of this scene is significant, for it normally conveys a sense of serenity and control in small towns (as was noted earlier in the popular 132 1 Image Building and Main Street bird's-eye views of the nineteenth century) but now only serves to compound the sense of terror. It is significant that the heart of the small town...