Some years ago Main Street was declared dead, but those doomsayers need to visit New Jersey. From north to south, in all the 21 counties, Main Street is flourishing. I've visited Main Streets in 178 cities, in 14 countries, and counting. What I learned is that WE and Main Street are intertwined and interdependent. Our lives are linked in an infinite number of ways.
I am a social psychiatrist. This field of psychiatry is interested in the ways in which social life affects mental health. I am the Helen and Robert Fullilove Professor of Community Health at the University of Orange and a professor emeritus at The New School. My work focuses on cities. I have spent a lot of time traveling in France with Michel Cantal-Dupart, a famous urbanist. I have written several books, including Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It and Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America's Sorted-Out Cities. The third book in the urban restoration trilogy, Main Street, was published in October 2020. During the Covid pandemic, I became a devoted fan of K-drama and started a book, The Tao of K-drama.
Goal: Use what I learned about Main Street to face the problems of now
When I started this blog, my goal was to visit 100 Main Streets. I surpassed my original goal, visiting Main Streets in 178 cities in 14 countries. Based on what I'd learned, I published a book, "Main Street: How a City' Heart Connects Us All." Following the advice of environmental psychologist Hirofumi Minami, I carried out a "psychoanalysis of the city." The big take-home message: when we look at the Main Streets singly, we miss the point. We have to look at the "tangle" of Main Streets that make up a city or a region -- that's when it gets real. This insight has helped me think about the crises of now, like Covid and climate change, and find sources of wisdom, like K-drama.
Walker Evans, the great American photographer, was an avid collector of postcards, and his collection is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Of the 9,000 postcards in his collection, 700 are on display. As noted by Roberta Smith in the New York Times, "The show opens with a bank of postcards that offer plunging views down the middle of scores of American Main Streets, an almost scary tribute to the country’s can-do spirit, can-doing it again and again.” There are – David Chapin and I counted – 312 postcards of Main Street. This astounding display invited our study. David pointed out that most use one-point perspective that meets the horizon at one-fourth the way up the image. I noted the number of trolley tracks, and my reaction, like that of Smith, was a certain awe of the enthusiasm for urban development – and even inter-urban connection, David noted – among US citizens 100 years ago. It reminded me of the story of General Motors’ systematic attack on the trolleys which opened the way for the triumph of private cars. This kind of privatization of course continues apace, currently moving into private computers and personal phones. While Main Street represents a centripetal force pulling us together for social and economic exchange, our economy runs on incredible centrifugal forces. The result for our cities can be troublesome, as noted by Jane Jacobs: “Probably everyone is aware of certain dependencies by a city on its heart. When a city heart stagnates or disintegrates, a city as a social neighborhood of the whole begins to suffer. People who ought to get together, by means of central activities that are failing, fail to get together. Ideas and money that ought to meet, and do so often only by happenstance in a place of central vitality, fail to meet. The networks of city public life develop gaps they cannot afford. Without a strong and inclusive central heart, a city tends to become a collection of interests isolated from one another. It falters at producing something greater, socially, culturally and economically, than the sum of its separated parts.” (from The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p. 215)
