Main Street

Main Street's Distinctive Characteristics

Although the origins of U.S. Main Streets lie in Europe, U.S. townscapes are distinctive for several reasons. After the United States broke away from its colonial rule and became an independent nation, mobility increased and trade flourished. This led to ambitious town development. Whereas communities on the eastern seaboard are quite European in layout and architecture, those that were built after about 1800 in the Midwest or West began to take on a decidedly “American” look. Their streets often intersected at right angles, and their architecture began to exhibit American characteristics such as the enthusiastic use of Greek Revival trim for both residences and commercial enterprises. It is here that the name Main Street took hold and its characteristic form took shape.

One ingredient was the use of a rectangular grid pattern that employed ruler-straight streets crossing at right angles. In designating a main thoroughfare for commerce, speculators encouraged development there. In about the mid-nineteenth century, buildings along Main Street became more heavily ornamented, and store-fronts began to incorporate larger expanses of glass. Both were a result of industrial and technological developments as well as changing aesthetic sentiments in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

In design, Main Street was influenced by both distant and local innovations. Although the most significant innovations in Main Street design occurred in urban areas and spread to towns on the frontier, local decisions also affected the design of Main Street. That tension between imported and local initiative was characteristic of U.S. towns, where local merchants consciously sought the more appealing, exotic architectural styles that conveyed some grandeur; therefore, versions of high-style architecture became common in even the smallest of Main Streets. While ideas of how a town should look typically diffuse from larger to smaller places, that is, from cities to towns, decisions on town [Page 890]development ultimately depend on local townsfolk accepting the architectural innovations. Victorian-era styling elements such as Italianate brackets and classical columns rendered in cast iron came to be associated with U.S. small towns after first being accepted in larger communities like New York and Philadelphia, which in turn followed the architectural fashions that originated in Europe (for instance, the Greek Revival style, with its imitation of Greek classical architecture). Through such borrowing, a series of architectural fads swept Main Street in the nineteenth century, including not only the Greek Revival but also the Italianate, Romanesque, and so on.

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