The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community. Miles Orvell. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. xiii and 286 pp., maps, photos, diagrams, illus., notes, bibliog., index. $39.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8078-3568-5).

The AAG book review policy encourages “lively scholarly writing” and even “a bit of flair,” so what you are about to read will be written in that spirit. Because all book reviews are ultimately autobiographical, I begin by noting that I was intrigued by this book's title when the AAG Review of Books editor first contacted me. Getting online, I checked out the publisher's promotional literature to see if I wanted to accept the assignment. The publisher's claim that this book explores how popular images of Main Street translate “into real spaces … in recent decades, especially in the new urbanist planned communities” was quite intriguing. Forty plus years ago I had written—and almost published—a book that attempted to do much the same thing. Far from qualifying me to write this review, however, that initially made me reluctant to accept the invitation. After all, one of the most damning things a reviewer can do is to review a book with the book he or she—rather than the author—intended to write. But curiosity got the better of me and I agreed to review it.

Before I tell you about this book, however, permit me to briefly describe my stillborn book project, which took root when I was in graduate school at the University of Oregon (1967–1970). At that time, fellow student Larry Ford and I discussed many subjects and shared many insights. Larry knew about my passion for America's small towns and recommended that I someday study Medina in his home state of Ohio. After being hired by the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) in 1970, I began the ambitious book project that investigated small towns coast to coast. My goal was to determine why the small town was so endearing and persistent despite the growth of cities and suburbs. Could we learn anything from that persistence? In seeking answers, I spent the summer of 1971 asking townsfolk nationwide a set of questions about community size and design and the quality of life. I deliberately selected towns that were within commuting distance of cities, yet noted that all had maintained their own identities. Naturally, Medina (near Cleveland) was one of the towns in my study. While meeting with business leaders there, I discovered something career changing: Disneyland's Main Street USA had served as inspiration for Medina's storybook-looking downtown revitalization. Medina was Mecca for anyone seriously interested in studying American communities, for it proved that “real” Main Streets owed a debt to popular culture. In the other towns I studied, a similar theme emerged: This was a case of life imitating art and it became a centerpiece of my book manuscript titled “Small Town America in the Urban Age.” The manuscript took shape quickly, and I submitted it to the University of Minnesota Press for consideration later that year. About the same time, I presented my findings to colleagues and students in our Geography Department colloquium. Although the students were enthusiastic, only one of my faculty colleagues—Yi Fu Tuan—seemed to appreciate it. In retrospect, I was a postmodern phenomenologist swimming against a current of modernist logical positivism. In 1972, with my book manuscript still under consideration but a vote of no confidence from my department, I accepted a wonderful position at Antioch College. To make things complete, as I was preparing to leave for Ohio, I received a letter from the Press rejecting my manuscript, although it had received the three positive reviews required! The letter, which I still have, cited the economic downturn, but my students suspected something more nefarious. On the brighter side, Antioch College made good on its promise of academic freedom and interdisciplinary collegiality.

Fast forward more than twenty years to the early 1990s, by which time I had become a card-carrying historian at the University of Texas at Arlington following varied interdisciplinary stints outside of academe in environmental and community development planning, historic preservation, and museum administration. By the mid-1990s, my original book manuscript, files, and correspondence were still in a box, which, despite occasional encouragement from Larry Ford over the years, remained sealed. In the meantime, I had written a different—albeit less ambitious—book manuscript titled Main Street Revisited: Time Space and Image-Building in Small Town America (Francaviglia 1996). At about that time, as fate would have it, I was asked to participate in a museum exhibit project on Disney's impact on architecture and design. The fact that Yi Fu Tuan would be one of my fellow consultants, and that our meeting at Disneyland would also include discussions with some of Disney's original “imagineers,” made the assignment as close to heaven, or utopia, as one could get.

Fast-forward another couple of decades to 2013, when this attractively designed book by Miles Orvell arrived for my review. As I began to read it, I realized that it was indeed based on premises similar to those in my stillborn book. Building on a theme I also discussed in Main Street Revisited, Orvell deftly demonstrates how Disney and a host of other shapers of popular culture (including Antioch College alum Rod Serling) iconized the small town. Orvell's incorporation of popular film into the mix, and his observations about the depiction of small towns in film, are especially cogent. Orvell also pursues my earlier manuscript's premise that the mythologized small town served as the inspiration for successful model residential communities over much of the twentieth century. He does a wonderful job with that, too, clearly showing how the small town insinuates itself into the public consciousness about the design of all communities, not just small towns. Reading Orvell's book, it was easy to see how it clearly benefited from the passage of time, which provided many more examples of the close connection between the scale of urban development and its ultimate success. Orvell offers a better bottle of wine than the one I could have served four decades ago.

This is rich reading, and Orvell makes many astute observations, among them these: The paradox that the small town professes to be inclusive but has long been a place of exclusion—either outright racial segregation or erasure of differences; the paradox that the American town has been a place in which one not only interacted closely with others but could also disappear (i.e., hide out), sometimes in plain view; the dilemma that each town is unique yet ultimately stands in for all such communities; the conundrum that as soon as we think we understand the small town it has actually morphed into something else. Another paradox is built into the title of Orvell's book itself, for as he astutely puts it, “the small town has been dying for almost as long as it has been in existence” (47). The main factor here is the town's vulnerability to the gravitational pull of cities. In eight well-researched and engaging chapters, Orvell brings the American small town full circle—from its original creation in wood, stone, and brick to its mythologizing in literature, film, and television; to the subtle incorporation of these imagined townscapes into planned residential communities; and even in modern city design, for example, North Philadelphia. As Orvell concludes, “Even as the real small town continues to struggle for its material survival in the twenty-first century, Main Street has become one of the leading paradigms for the construction and reconstruction of public space, including, remarkably, urban space” (235). As noted in my earlier stillborn manuscript, the key would be the intimate scale and mixture of land use, particularly residential, civic, and commercial, offered by the idealized small-town model. With that seemingly enigmatic “death and life” metaphor in mind, I can gladly bury my original forty-plus-year-old manuscript.

The Death and Life of Main Street leaves no doubt that the New Urbanism owes a debt to small-town America, and masterfully uses a wealth of other primary sources to make its point. Whereas much of the literature focuses on Main Street's connections to commercial development, including suburban malls, Orvell's book takes it another step into the residential heart of suburbia. His discussions of communities such as Levittown[s] (all three of the communities founded by William Levitt) are especially insightful. In a particularly wry and astute section, Orvell notes that these, too, were places of exclusion: Anti-Semitic clauses kept Jews out of Levittown, which means that Levitt himself could not have lived in the place he built! The only observation that Orvell missed here was one I noted in 1971; mustachioed Walt Disney himself would have been denied work in Disneyland, where no facial hair was permitted. Orvell nevertheless beautifully nails the 1950s as a time of conformity in which Main Street represented an ideal, pure place, free of difference. Today, as he notes, they are becoming the most ethnically diverse parts of America.

My only criticism of this book is that it could have made more use of firsthand interviews (residents, business owners, etc.) as did my original; that criticism, however, pales in the light of all that this book achieves. To his credit, in recognizing that the image of small-town America is constantly changing—and in fact becoming more inclusive—Orvell avoids the temptation that some scholars have found irresistible, namely a demonization that portrays the image of the American small-town Main Street as a tool of a fascist nation that is shipping its imperial fascism worldwide (see Poll2012). That type of criticism might be politically attractive, but nonetheless essentializes the subject, simplifying and solidifying public attitudes when in fact they are complex and fluid. My conclusion is this: The Death and Life of Main Street is carefully researched, insightful, and well written, just the kind of book that I can see the late Larry Ford savoring. That, in retrospect, is the highest praise I can give any book about American communities.