Did we cancel Christmas?

As I have been walking up and down Main Streets, I realized that I wasn't seeing the lights and decorations that I expected.  I was missing the joyful shoppers, hurrying with their arms full of packages and contented smiles on their faces.  I was even missing the incessant Christmas carols oozing out of every possible auditory device.  I walk past stores with their windows plastered with "Huge Sale" signs, but hardly an elf or reindeer in sight.  All of this raises the critical question, "How did the Grinch get us?"  I have been thinking that it's time to shake ourselves out of these doldrums.  It's time to find that special, indefinable something that is the essence of Christmas, the thing deeper than cash and presents, the thing that in the face of everything will help us affirm that we will confront these times in solidarity and joy.  

Whose street?

"Main Street," according to Wikipedia, is a figure of speech indicating the retail and social center of neighborhood, village or city.  In the American collective imagination, Main Street belongs to the city and its people.  In older times, it's where the teens met at the malt shop and the farmers talked about corn prices.  More recently, it's where Starbucks is or isn't, depending on your town's social status.  What's important is its openness as the market center of a larger unit. In that vein,  Salt Lake City has an interesting counter story.  Several years ago, the city sold a block of Main Street to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a church which is very powerful in the city and in the state of Utah.  The block has become a private park, governed by the Church.  Suddenly the collective thoroughfare is interrupted, and new way of organizing behavior inserted.  This manifestation of the beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ is uplifting to members but an imposition to non-members who often feel oppressed by the Church's political power.  When are we entitled to access to that which flows?  To take another example, in a recent decision, the Montana Supreme Court ruled that wealthy landowners could not bar their fellows from the trout-rich stream that ran through their lands.  One of the landowners, Kenneth F. Siebel, was very upset.  He was quoted in the NY Times as saying, "I've put time and energy and love into the property and it's all gone and it's a shame."  Obviously the property was still there, and still in the improved condition to which he had brought it.  What made it seem "all gone" if strangers could visit?  And what about flow in cities -- should we protect the flow of Main Street the way we protect trout streams?

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.