What will the recession do to Main Street?

According to Judy Peet and Jeanette Rundquist, the 234 Main streets in New Jersey are struggling to stay afloat during the recession. With consumer buying power down, businesses are making tough adjustments to their hours and their offerings, hoping to find a formula to make ends meet. On some of the Main streets I visit the "For Rent" signs attest to businesses that have folded. Sales are everywhere. For some businesses, extending hours seems to be the way to meet the challenge. For others, it's cutting back. One shopkeeper in Boonton told the reporters, "We need to work together, but I don't see that happening." Yet cooperation is obviously a key idea. What Main streets have is a rich mix of activities and history. These can be put together in ways that energize the whole surrounding area, making it safer and more fun, at the same time maximizing the turnover of dollars in the local area. This takes imagination and a bit of thinking outside the box. A Main Street business might not think about the neighborhood two blocks over, but those neighbors are certainly thinking about Main Street. There is -- in that possible exchange -- the potential to find a solution that gets all of us through this tough recession.

Long Boulevards: Anderson Avenue

Today I drove the length of Anderson Avenue, which serves as a Main Street for Fairview and Cliffside Park. It is lined by small stores and services. You can find a post office, library, barbecue spot and halal meat market along this street. It obviously serves as a center for organization for those two towns. What is surprising in driving this boulevard is that as one crosses over into Fort Lee, Anderson Avenue becomes a residential street, anchored by Fairway Market at its southern end and Main Street at the northern end. This sudden change in building type requires some explanation -- why should Anderson Avenue be a commercial corridor in Cliffside Park and then not on the other side of the "Welcome to Fort Lee" sign? On an earlier exploration, friends and I had traced Fort Lee's Main Street on its east-west course from the Palisades to Hackensack. Fort Lee grew up along Main Street, which is where its commercial center is located. Its leafy residential sections are away from the hustle and bustle of its center. Anderson Avenue, which is perpendicular to Main Street, heads south, eventually arriving at the Hudson River at Weehawken. The same logic works for Cliffside Park and Fairview that works for Fort Lee -- commerce on the main street and leafy residential streets at the edges -- but the orientation is shifted by 90 degrees. I learned while spending the summer in Paris that pathways often have their logic routed in history. I lived in small apartment on Rue Saint Andre des Arts, a street that has been the site of heavy foot traffic for about 900 years. Originally people were walking from the center of the city to the duty free market outside the city walls. The lively commerce that was started then is still located in the same place and still draws great crowds. Thus history guides our footsteps, whether we're walking the streets of Paris or exploring the major city streets of our hometowns in New Jersey.

Beautiful + What?

I had the pleasure of visiting St. Louis November 14th.  I wanted to visit the site of the Mill Creek Valley Urban Renewal Project, as well as the site of the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project.  I was staying at the Hilton at the Ballpark -- a delightful hotel -- and these sites were close by.  I also got to see the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, which includes the Gateway Arch.  All of these places turn out to flank a downtown mall, which starts at the Old Courthouse, and ends by Union Station.  What splendor!  The arch is a stunning site and the museum well worth a visit.  The Old Courthouse, where the Dred Scott trial took place, is one of the most important places in American history.  Union Station, designed by Theodore C. Link, is a magnificent building, and a major project in adaptive reuse.  And the mall is also an attraction.  Yet, sadly, the magnificence is not well-used.  You would think that such a charming spot would be full of people but everywhere I went, the streets were empty.  There were a scattering of tourists in the park, but that was it.  Jane Jacobs, the great urbanist, made the observation that parks need people.  In general, she was quite skeptical about open space, seeing it as a potential rupture in the tight coherence of occupation that makes a city hum.  She was decidedly opposed to the orthodox view, as propounded by the great park designer, Frederick Law Olmsted, that city people are longing for great open spaces.   Evidence on the Jacobs' side: the most active place I was visited with the tiny stretch of historic waterfront, which is full of restaurants, shops and people strolling about.  St. Louis has much of beauty but to make the city vibrant again, its leaders might rethink all that open space that replaced what once was its energetic urban core.  

The Popular Vote

A huge "VOTE" sign strung across Palisades Avenue, in Englewood, NJ, made me think, "What are the indications of the election on Main Street?" For a couple of days I've walked up down photographing what I saw. There was one sign telling the Obama canvassers that the location of their meet-up had been moved. One sign supporting Obama -- not surprising that this was to be found on the street's black barbership. One sign at Ben and Jerry's offering free ice cream to voters -- I was happy to return on Tuesday with my granddaughter, who helped me vote, and therefore had earned my free scoop. I saw one woman, dressed in a McCain/Palin shirt, who was dancing and holding up her McCain sign for passing voters. There was a sign that voting would be help at City Hall. On the whole, Main Street was a little thin of voting action. Granddaughter A'Lelia and I stopped at CVS to pick up some election party supplies and she pointed to the magazine rack. "How many pictures of John McCain do you see?" I looked more closely and realized what she was pointing out. We took this picture. I've heard of people voting with their feet, but this was voting with their magazines, a truly popular vote.

Loving Your Lot in Life

I had the delightful experience of visiting Macedonia AME Church in Flushing, NY, on October 30th. This historic black church was established in 1811 and served the black community that grew up in the area. Robert Moses, the great remaker of New York City, bulldozed the area around the Church to create a parking lot, literally he "bulldozed paradise and put up a parking lot," as it says in the song. This accounts for the odd appearance of the Church, with its main door facing one of the parking lot entrances. Mrs. Beverly Riley, who had read my book, Root Shock, and who was struck by its relevance for her church, related what it's like to surrounded by a parking lot. "We had to push back church services, " she said, "because the parking lot used by people for overnight parking on Saturdays and then our congregation couldn't find parking. People would drive around for half an hour and then go home." She also pointed out that the parking lot itself was set to be transformed, this time into apartments. Oddly, as much as an ugly parking lot is something that annoys people, I know that once it is gone, it will be missed. We seem to grow used to what is, warts and all. As a social psychiatrist, I am always thinking about ways in which people could use what is around them as part of their healing. For some reason, "Garden in Transit," the project that applied flowers to NYC taxicabs came to mind. In that 4-month public art project, children and adults painted flowers on removable plastic that was placed on the hoods of taxicabs to make a movable garden in New York City. The image that came to mind was of the parking lot transformed into a flower garden by having a day of public art and painting flowers over the asphalt. It would help people understand their love/hate relationship with the parking lot, just in time to say goodbye. We don't always have that opportunity. I hated the World Trade Center, but later I regretted that I had never forgiven the Twin Towers for their boring modernism.

El Puente's New Bridge

I often go to visit Main Streets outside of New Jersey. On Monday, October 20th, I had a wonderful excursion to the "City of Brooklyn," as Borough President Marty Markowitz called it. I went to see the ribbon-cutting for a new school building developed by El Puente, a community human rights organization serving Northern Brooklyn and beyond. El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice has taken over Transfiguration Grammar School, a Catholic school that had educated generations of people from the Williamsburg neighborhood. Luis Garden Acosta, who founded El Puente in 1982, welcomed a long list of people who had helped in the struggle for the new home for the school. Among them was Congresswoman Nydia Velasquez who shared that she was heading back to Washington to work on the economy. "The country is depressed and you know why. This is a dose of optimism when I really needed it." Political and community leaders rejoiced in that Transfiguration School had been given new life. NYC Councilwoman Diana Reyna, who grew up in the neighborhood, told the youth in the audience, "You are surrounded on all sides by people who want to protect and nourish you. And that is what this icon of a building is: a place to nurture children. If these walls could talk, what stories they would tell of our community." The shining faces of the Academy's students were enough to light up anybody's day. Leaving the event, I reflected back on a speech I heard Acosta give at Body and Soul, the 2008 International Urban Parks Conference in Pittsburgh. At the end of his remarks, he asked the audience to rise and join him in chanting, "The people united will never be defeated!" That ribbon-cutting was certainly a case in point.

Wall Street, Main Street, Happy 5769!

The juxtaposition of "Wall Street" and "Main Street" occurs in many articles about the deep financial crisis in the US. While Wall Street has obvious connotations, I'm not sure what they mean when they say "Main Street."

What I've learned in New Jersey is that Main Street is a huge mixed bag. Take, for example, Cedar Lane in Teaneck, NJ, where I had lunch yesterday. Cedar Lane was empty, deserted. It looked like Christmas Day, it was so empty. And it sense it was: yesterday was Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar. Many of the stores on Cedar Lane are operated by Jews and serve the large, and actively religious, Jewish community that lives in the area. I had lunch with a friend at an Indian restaurant, one of a number of ethnic restaurants that was welcoming diners. Main Street is like that: it takes on the character of the people who live nearby. At the same time, Main Street has services that reach a much larger group. I love to visit Teaneck's farmers' market which is held in one of the Cedar Lane parking lots and attracts a diverse crowd, including people who travel to distance to get great fresh vegetables, bread and other treats.

Main Street is a street. People walk up and down, they accomplish tasks, they greet neighbors, they look at the urban streetscape, they dream about possibilities. Each of these functions will be affected in different ways by the collapse of Wall Street. Main Street, at its best, is not simply the local mirror of Wall Street, but rather it's antidote. My lunch on Cedar Lane buoyed my spirits. I enjoyed the time spent with my friend. I was heartened to think it is 5769 in the Jewish calendar: people have been counting for a long time, and they've made it through worse than this.

"Happy New Year!" from Main Street.