ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT Everybody’s Hometown Visions linking Main Streets, past and future
T
he proverbial main street is an icon of Americana, especially for small and medium sized cities. In nearly every town, you can find a street on which there exists a grocer, a pharmacy, maybe a hardware store, banks, and bakers. It is a street where you see people you grew up with, you run into the parents of your child’s friends, the place where all your business is done, and this being Connecticut, probably a Green. It is the stuff of many American dreams. Unfortunately, that vision in many ways has faded or does not live up to the idyllic memory provided by reminiscence. Businesses began to close and people started to leave after the economic downturn of the early naughts. This was exacerbated by the internet boom where in increasing numbers people don’t have to leave their homes to catch up with friends or go window shopping. This change has left many Main Streets blighted and deserted. Though the sights of empty streets and stores might be disconcerting, there are those that are working on rejuvenating Main Streets across the state of Connecticut. They are doing this against great odds — with a federal government that has cut large amounts of funding and a state budget crisis that threaten the grand lists of communities large and small. They are caught in between a rock and a hard place when creating a vision of their town’s future. But with the right plans, towns across the state are finding ways to make their Main Streets attractive to prospective businesses and residents. The concept of a “Main Street” is nearly as old as our country. In a series called “What It Means To Be American,” produced by the Smithsonian and Arizona State University, Miles Orvell traces the concept all the way back to Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the New England-set short story called “Main Street,” Hawthorne describes the birth of the town center through a mechanical “shifting panorama,” literally tracing the birth of a Main Street from a barely trodden path through the development of a full blooded town center. So central to American life was Main Street that Hawthorne suggests that towns sprung up around them rather than the other way around. This effect can be seen in many of Connecticut’s larger cities. The Main Streets of Middletown and Norwich have roots in the 17th century and continue to be utilized today. New Haven is famous across the world for being one of the first towns with a modern grid system. Founded nearly 400 years ago, at its center was the Green, a gathering place for merchants and worshipers. And what was true for these larger towns, became true for the cities and towns that settled later.
28 | CONNECTICUT TOWN & CITY | JUNE 2018
Coventry’s downtown was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991, and they won a Municipal Excellence Award for their village in 2016
Eric Trott, the Director of Planning and Development for the town of Coventry has a robust definition of what a downtown means to one Connecticut town: “A healthy downtown serves as a centerpiece for the community – a shining example of what often times is the best of what’s in a town or city. In Coventry, it is very significant since we are predominantly rural-residential and our Coventry Village serves many important roles in our community – a place of commerce, recreation, learning, art, entrepreneurship, gathering, dining, and living. The Village has a very strong connection with its rich industrial history, where many remnants still remain intact today – renovated and adaptively used mill buildings, stone structures – walls – stone lined waterways, architecturally significant residences and commercial buildings, the honoring and highlighting of the watercourse that once powered the mills (Mill Brook) and its source, Coventry Lake.” In Hawthorne’s recollection, as the town’s needs changed, so did the street. There are natural ebbs and flows; a dirt path gave way to a dirt road, to pavers, and finally, in a turn that Hawthorne himself might not have imagined, to car-worthy streets. Nationally, by the end of the 20th century, Main Streets began to lose their Mom & Pop Stores, only to be replaced by larger chain stores. Gone was the local credit union and the town pharmacist; many simply couldn’t compete, others were swallowed up in a seemingly endless period of mergers and acquisitions. With the boom of online shopping, gone too were the local goods stores. It was the Great Recession that dealt the other blow: people began leaving small towns, something Con-
