MAIN STREET

Main Street is a place that exists in the physical and theoretical world.

“Why do Main Streets Matter? We all know where our Main Streets are, but do we know what they are and why they matter? Whether they are named First Avenue or Water Street or Martin Luther King Boulevard, what they represent is universal. Main Street is the economic engine, the big stage, and the core of the community. Our Main Streets tell us who we are and who we were, and how the past has shaped us. We do not go to bland suburbs or enclosed shopping malls to learn about our past, explore our culture, or discover our identity.”1

Our Main Streets are the places of shared memory where people still come together to live, work, and play. In Sinclair Lewis’ novel “Main Street” it is traditional American morals and values in the midst of a changing and somewhat frightening modern world.  It is a place of challenge and conflict, the individual vs. the community, change of society through thought, spoken word and action.

What is Main Street?  “The phrase has been used to describe everything from our nostalgic past to our current economic woes, but when we talk about Main Street, we are thinking of real places doing real work to revitalize economies and preserve the character of the city and town.” 2

Main St, Flushing, Queens ©Art Print Images

Main Street, Auburn  1909  

©pauldorpat.com,

Main Streets tell us who we are and who we were, and how the past has shaped us. We do not go to bland suburbs or enclosed shopping malls to learn about our past, explore our culture, or discover our identity. Our Main Streets are the places of shared memory where people still come together to live, work, and play.

 Main Street, Red Lodge, Montana ©Wikipedia

Main Street, USA in Disneyland is a sanitized composite of a typical American town during the turn of the century. Fashioned loosely after Walt Disney's hometown of Marceline, Missouri, Main Street USA features themed dining, entertainment and shopping experiences. Traveling up Main Street USA, you arrive at the Hub, or Central Plaza of Disneyland, which leads to the other various lands of Disneyland.

Main Street Town Sq. Disneyland

old postcard

At the center of town is a public square. Typically this “node” is a swollen activity center.   Be it the core, the public room, the central activity node which in some way links the town, it is the heart of the town/city. As history tells us, many times a church, body of government is nearby and with it, this functional node is an area that can accommodate crowds, festivities, carnivals, dancing, speeches, shouting and mourning – “the life of a town”.3

It could be argued that in fact Main Street is really a mosaic of a diverse country and varied points of view.

Mapping Main Street is a collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the United States through stories, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets. The goal is to document all of the more than 10,000 streets named Main Street in the United States.

HEDGES

The word "hedge" appears to stem from the Old English word "HEGG" which is believed to be derived from the Anglo-Saxon words ;

HAEG - hurdle 

HECG - territorial boundary dead or planted

HEGA - living border boundary 1

Hedges are a bordering and design tool. They enclose and subdivide fields, orchards, yards, parks and gardens. They form vegetative edges, topographic spaces, garden rooms, gateways, screens, enclosures, foci and forms within the landscape.

The term Hedgerow used to refer to 2 hedges running side by side separated by a track or pathway. These hedgerows served 2 traditional purposes , that of being a barrier to livestock and as a means of marking out territory or property boundaries. The term however tends to be used these days to describe a hedge of shrubs and occasional trees that create a border between fields and gardens or to create a privacy wall for a homeowner.

An extreme privacy hedge

www.dicts.info/img/ud/hedge.jpg

It is believed that the Romans may have first planted hedges in Britain but most of the few ancient hedges date from Saxon times, making some of them 1000 years old. The Saxons organized ‘strip farming’ in which each community of people would have a field which was divided into strips separated by grass verges. Each strip was one furrow long (one furlong or 201 metres). People were given a number of strips to farm by the lord of the manor. This system changed in the late Middle Ages when landlords wanted to put boundaries around their property, so they enclosed their land with walls or hedges. Enclosure Acts in the 18th and 19th centuries allowed farmers to put more hedges round their fields and most of Britain’s 300, 000 miles or so of hedges date from this time.

“During the 16^th and 17^th centuries, dense hedgerow patterns provided shelter for persecuted Protestants in France and Holland to organize their clandestine religious meetings. During the WW II the dense bocage in Normandy caused the invading Allied forces much trouble in advancing to conquer the Nazi regime.”2

In the past hawthorne (Crataegus monogyna) was the most popular choice for hedgerows in the ancient woodland for marking territory or as barriers to contain livestock. Nowadays hedges are commonly constructed of various plant and non-plant material for more ornamental purposes yet still as a privacy tool.  Boxwood, Privet, Beech, Cherry Laurel, Hedge Maple, Hornbeam, Holly and Yew are but a few of the more desirous plants used currently for hedges.

 Designer Luciano Giubbilei's masterful use of hedges at a Chelsea Flower Show garden in 2009

1. Hedgerows, Hedges and Verges of Britain and Ireland

2. Natural History Museum of Britain. www.nhm.ac.uk/index.html


*all photos copyright Todd Haiman unless otherwise noted