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Main Street's where it's at
Wall Street is a far away, almost imaginary place for most people. Yes, it can spark a certain populist anger, but if you really want to get somebody going, bring up Main Street. I don't mean the symbolic one. I mean, their Main Street.
I've been perusing the content of a new documentary project called Mapping Main Street. I'm guessing the idea was sparked by the countless references to Wall Street vs Main Street in the past year. It turns out there are at least 10,466 Main Streets in America. From the website:
In May, the Mapping Main Street team packed into a 1996 Suburu station wagon and started a 12,000 mile journey across the country to visit Main Streets. In the process, we took photos, shot videos, and interviewed people.
On Main Street in a small town in West Virginia's Appalachian Mountains, we met a retired man who is fixing up a boarded-up house that was once a hotel for jazz musicians like Ella Fitzgerald and B.B. King during segregation. In New Hope, PA, we sat down for beers with a cop on Main Street who talked about strangest fetishes he had come across in his line of work.
We've talked with farm laborers and business owners, people out on their porches and people on park benches. We've even stood in empty fields...all on Main Streets across the country.
A couple of the team members are public radio producers (Kara Oehler and Ann Heppermann), so NPR is part of the collaboration too. The first story aired a week ago on Weekend Edition Saturday. The web headline reads: "In Chattanooga, Main St. Is A Prostitution Strip." The story begins this way:
On the surface, Main Street in Chattanooga, Tenn., looks nice. There's a newly developed arts district with galleries, upscale restaurants, a packed breakfast joint called the Bluegrass Grill, even houses that have been certified as environmentally friendly. But if you stray from these newly renovated blocks, there's a different side to Chattanooga's Main Street.
"In Chattanooga, we have this underbelly," Brother Ron Fender says. "You can walk down Main Street, and you don't know that just over there, there's prostitutes -- or just over there is a camp where people sleep in the woods at night."
The rest of the story gets personal with a former prostitute. What struck me was the comments section. For example:
"While I'm okay our community's "underbelly" was not "swept under the rug", I do wish with all the time spent "under the rug" the additional fibers with which our community is woven had not gone unnoticed."
"My family and I live in Ferger Place just off of Main Street. I said we LIVE there. There is a problem and I see it almost every day. I go to Nashville every Friday, leaving at 5 AM, to attend business school. The problem is especially noticable at that hour of the day. Thank you to the author for picking this scab. Perhaps the city will now be motivated to help those of us who feel it is a problem to solve it."
"We operate a boutique on Market Street, a block away from Main. We relocated here a year ago, in large part because of the revitalization that had been taking place. The community here is tight-knit and there is a genuine activism and concern in making this a neighborhood to be proud of. Many important facets were ignored in this story, and it seemed slanted to evoke a seething underbelly of masked degradation."
I find it fascinating that people who live blocks away from each other see things so differently. But the common thread is that they genuinely care about what's happening on their Main Street. I've seen this kind of reaction before, when I wrote about Flint, Michigan recently.
It's encouraging. I wish more of the discussion of our economic recovery could be about our Main Streets and less about Wall Street or K Street. Most Main Streets don't look the same at one end as they do at the other, and with certain obvious exceptions, that's a good thing. Many Main Streets aren't even the main street in town. It's just a street connected to another one, which is connected to another one, and so on.
This is an ongoing project, and you're invited to participate in Mapping Main Street. Read more about that here. The team has also commissioned some music specifically for the project. You can listen to it at the website. There are many different routes to explore, and it's a pleasure to see the many different Main Streets of America all in one place.
One of my favorites is just a stone's throw from where I was born -- the intersection of the Niagara River and Lake Ontario.
Main Street, Youngstown, New York, home to the Ontario House:
So pleased to see this post, and big kudos to Kara Oehler and Ann Hepperman for their brilliant work. Mapping Main Street is actually a project sponsored by AIR, the Association of Independents in Radio, Inc. with funding from CPB. Kara and Ann have assembled a terrific collaborative team -- one of eight producer-led teams on our roster right now -- who are working to blend the craft of traditional broadcast journalism/story-telling with digital platforms. You can read/watch/hear some of our other inventive projects who are working under the banner of MQ2 -- Makers Quest 2.0 -- at http://www.mq2.org
Sue Schardt, Executive Director
AIR
http://www.airmedia.org
++ AIR is everywhere ++
Great post, Scott. I think I can kind of understand why the comments from the communities might run negative.
I spent some time with Mapping Main Street earlier today. I'm a little concerned that this feels like a gimmick stretched out into a massive amount of material that has no underlying reason for being (or at least "being connected").
This may be a set of individually compelling profiles. But what are we left with here? "Lots of town have streets called Main Street, and they're all different and interesting."
OK...I think we all get why "Main Street" has become an easy turn-of-phrase for politicians and everyone else. What's the deeper thread?
And if I were someone in one of these communities, I think I'd be justified in asking, "Why did you do this arbitrary snap-shot of our town again? To what end?" The project doesn't give a clear answer to that. At the moment, it bothers me a bit that a project like this, with such a shallow premise, is such a draw for educational partners and foundations. I'm looking forward to seeing whether the segments to come can make a stronger case for the overall package.
Scott should remember that he is supposed to be reporting under the guise of business and finance. A single line summing up the results of his adventure would have been good enough. This is what most, if not all of us want to know. If Scott is going to continue giving us a lot of filler, than someone else should be reporting.
Here you go, Steve: I came across a new project called Mapping Main Street. The link: http://tinyurl.com/m3eyb8.
Scott, you just don't get it!
"One of my favorites is just a stone’s throw from where I was born — the intersection of the Niagara River and Lake Ontario."
Scott, we don't care! This and other things you wrote about have absolutely nothing to do with business and finance! Sorry.
One of the things I like about Marketplace's reporting is that they don't just stick to the dry, stoic numbers and jargon of business and finance. Marketplace includes the human factor as part of their economic reporting.
I believe Wall Street and the government have failed us because they only look at the numbers and not the people and human situations driving those numbers.
As a small business owner I sell door-to-door and meet face-to-face with other small business owners in my area. *Their* financial stories, the human factor, are more real and tangible than the numbers of business and finance.
I believe Scott and the rest of the Marketplace staff are providing us with a good service by presenting reports that include the human factor of the economy along with the numbers of business and finance.
Jon, if your response is an attempt to buck my previous statement about the manner of Scott's report, you've done a poor job of it.
I have been studying market timing for the past twenty-five years. All the pros will state that market timing is a poor strategy. Meanwhile, sooner or later, they will state that "timing is everything". This means that sooner or later, you have to select a time to sell or you have to select a time to buy.
The best strategy for market timing is not to attempt forecasting the future. The best strategy is to attempt to determine what Main Street or Wall Street presently feels about the market. I agree with you. As you said, this is not done completely with numbers and charts. The in-depth feelings of people must be known.
