This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
Lance Mannion, in his lyrical way, reminds us that “Main Street,” a.k.a. Small Town America, came out of the railroad era, not the automobile era, and in doing so makes the case for pedestrian, walkable neighborhoods quite beautifully. The crux of his argument is probably familiar to anyone who reads Orphan Road, but Mannion’s post is far more charming to read than a policy paper:
The first suburbs sprang up at the end of the 19th Century and were built not off of highways but along rail lines. They were small towns that in growing grew into one another but did not lose their individual identities or economies and many of those not only still exist but still thrive as distinct towns with prospering main streets.
There’s a big difference between the sprawling subdivisions outside of Dallas and the tightly-packed tree-lined neighborhoods of the towns ringing Boston. Allen and Melrose are both technically suburbs, but the main street of one is a six-lane highway feeding into an endless series of parking lots and the main street of the other is Main Street where you can walk from Uncle Merlin’s embroidery shop to the bakery to the butcher’s to the bank to the back room of Benny’s bar—and I promise never to alliterate like that again—without getting out of earshot of your car alarm, not that it’s likely to go off, because who’s going to break into it with all those people walking around on their errands?
There are still Main Streets, and as it happens I live on one of them. Just around the corner from one anyway. Our town’s main street isn’t called Main Street but that’s what it is, with a couple of banks, the hardware store, a few restaurants, an ice cream parlor, an insurance agent’s, a barber shop, a dentist’s office, a florist, and a video store. The public library, the post office, the police station, the town hall, and the fire house are all there too.