Pittsburgh PA has a number of well preserved and facinating old buildings in its downtown area. Market Square, and the street which has Dollar Bank.
Pittsburgh PA has a number of well preserved and facinating old buildings in its downtown area. Market Square, and the street which has Dollar Bank.
Sandy...I would like to recommend the home of Antioch College... Yellow Springs, Ohio. The citizens are not overburdened with the need to have lawns immaculately manicured... that gives the side streets a wonderful "homey" feel. The liberal attitude of the citizens also makes them very receptive to artist's, so you won't have trouble getting permission to take pictures... And don't forget to stop at Young's Dairy for ice cream!!!
Another vote for Mt. Vernon, Ia. Beautiful. Having said that, I don't know if I could resist a place named "Chagrin Falls", unless it's What Cheer, Ia. .... jeff buckels (albuq)
And how could I forget?--Beatty, Nevada, "gateway to Death Valley." Every home seems to have a patch of land in front of it where a lawn might go, but conditions there just aren't amenable to lawns.
sandy - please take a look at my last book, "oregon main street" (by james norman, pub by OHS (oregon historical society) press, available at amazon.com, powells books, etc), which may give you some good ideas. i compiled a series of about 50 historic main street views from cities and towns across oregon, and went back to each location and reproduced each view as it appears today. the images were presented in the book as then and now pairs, and i had a team of four of my historian colleagues write descriptions of each pair of images describing the changes, both architectural and cultural, that had occurred over the past century, and a chapter on the development of cities in oregon. i wrote an introduction chapter that gave an overview of the rephotographic process. all the contemporary images were made with a 4x5 in black and white, with perspective control and vantage point matching the historic view as closely as possible. the project was immensely enjoyable, and the OHS museum in portland prepared a wonderful year-long exhibition of the materials that has now become one of their most rented-out traveling exhibitions around the state. also check out the dover book "main street usa in early photographs". there are several non-scholarly "then and now" books available for most of the larger cities in the US which can give you a good idea of what those city's main streets look like now. if what you want is towns which show little change from the past, look for places that have been bypassed by the interstate freeways, or even better, bypassed by the railroads when they were built in the 1800s - check out jacksonville in southern oregon in my book - the current views look almost identical to the historic views. good luck on your project.
My suggestion is Main St. in Northampton, MA. Great town to begin with, cool main street as well.
You'll probably never see Iowa mentioned 3 times in the same year here, let alone the same day........
David Plowden did a book a few years back, "A Sense of Place", in Iowa mainly in the farm country. He felt the river areas, Mississippi and Missouri, were a much different place than the heartland and being from there I fully agree. He had a good number of main street scenes in the book and they are an accurate look at the area then and now. Go to a map of Iowa, draw a circle 200 miles in diameter using the "hump" on the eastern edge as your center point (that's where I sit even now) and you will find hundreds of small towns in 4 states that are as varied as if they were in 4 countries. Let us know how you make out and drop a line if you get in the area!
Doesn't Disneyland at Anaheim have a Main Street? I think that would be a good shot to include. I'm wondering if you could get the photo before the park opens, or when it first opens. If you could get an elevated shot, perhaps all the people would add value to the photo.
Just for reference sake, Tracy Kidder wrote a book called Home Town a couple years ago which has a photo of the main drag in Northampton on the book jacket. Not the best photo, and it doesn't include a whole lot, but a photo nonetheless...
Hi Sandy, I saw this neat main street once, of course I can't remember the name of the town - right! But it is near the Mississippi River, and it is where U.S. Grant was keeping shop when the civil war began. I think it is Galena, Ill. There was a very interesting narrow main street of red brick shops as they must have been in the 1850s. Best, David
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