Main Street

“ After four years the crudity of it all astonished her––the stark vulgarity of Main Street in the sunshine, every mean, flimsy architectural detail revealed––the dingy trolley poles, the telegraph poles loaded with unlovely wires and battered little electric light fixtures––the uncompromising, unrelieved ugliness of street and people, of shop and vehicle, of treeless sidewalks, brick pavement, car rails, hydrants, and rusty gasoline pumps. ”

“ The truck and the motor and trolley car and the elevated train They make the weary city street reverberate with pain: But there is yet an echo left deep down within my heart Of the music the Main Street cobblestones made beneath a butcher's cart. God be thanked for the Milky Way that runs across the sky, That's the path that my feet would tread whenever I have to die. Some folks call it a Silver Sword, and some a Pearly Crown, But the only thing I think it is, is Main Street, Heaventown. ”

“ Their fathers and grandsires tell them how, within a few years past, the forest stood here, with but a lonely track beneath its tangled shade. Vain legend! They cannot make it true and real to their conceptions. With them, moreover, the Main Street is a street indeed, worthy to hold its way with the thronged and stately avenues of cities beyond the sea. ”

“ To the patriarchs of the settlement, no doubt, the Main Street is still but an affair of yesterday, hardly more antique, even if destined to be more permanent, than a path shovelled through the snow. But to the middle-aged and elderly men who came hither in childhood or early youth, it presents the aspect of a long and well-established work, on which they have expended the strength and ardor of their life. ”

“ What really matters as to Main Street is [25] that it shall be happy. We can’t, merely by taking thought, lift its people to higher levels of aspiration. Main Street is neither blind nor deaf; it knows well enough what is going on in the world; it is not to be jostled or pushed by condescending outsiders eager to bestow sweetness and light upon it. ”

“ In such towns, it is quite possible, if you are an amiable being, to know well-nigh every one. The main thoroughfare is a place of fascinations, the stage for a continuing drama. Carrier delivery destroys the old joy of meeting all the folks at the post-office, but most of the citizens, male and female, find some excuse for a daily visit to Main Street. They are bound together by dear and close ties. You’ve got to know your neighbors whether you want to or not, and it’s well for the health of your soul to know them and be of use to them when you can. ”

“ And Main Street laughs till it aches, giggles till the spirit doubts his own self and tries to give up the use of wings for the correct uses of a 'gents' furnishings store.' Gopher Prairie with its celebrated eleven miles of cement walk. ”

“ She saw Main Street in the dusty prairie sunset, a line of frontier shanties with solemn lonely people waiting for her, solemn and lonely as an old man who has outlived his friends. She remembered that Kennicott and Sam Clark had listened to her songs, and she wanted to run to them and sing. ”

“ There are “Main Street” towns in every country in Europe, and life is dull in them though adorned by fights and drinks and “hussies”—but where will you find such an unexhausted élan and zest for the unornamented reality that America [9] affords? Where else moreover will you find the working-men to-day working in silk shirts? Life in Main Street seems worth while, at least to those who live there.
It’s a by-line from Flora to Springfield, and you plough iron slowly through Illinois corn. ”

“ And I saw the powdery swirl of stars, where it swept across the sky,
The wide way of the white stars, where it ran up and down,
And my heart was sad for the man who said It was Main Street, Heaventown.
He chose to walk in the Main Street, in the wide ways of men ”

“ You would never know Main Street, with its paving and its fancy concrete street lights, and its glittering exclusive shops ready equally to awe you or flatter you as long as they get to your pocketbook. Motors flash by on their way to country places that would have been prohibitively remote in the old days. ”

“ He can render a reason for all the bends and deviations of the thoroughfare, which, in its flexible and plastic infancy, was made to swerve aside from a straight line, in order to visit every settler’s door. The Main Street is still youthful; the coeval man is in his latest age. ”

“ Their bidding is the result of crowding, and the crowding in turn is due to the concentration of population in the area of these sites. Thus comes Main Street, with its general store, its hotel, its theater, and its library.
Main Street is not merely a thoroughfare. Here one can enjoy the pleasures of social life, here one can produce things of value, here one can put one's savings to productive use. ”

“ Ting-a-ting-ting! goes the bell; the curtain rises; and we behold—not, indeed, the Main Street—but the track of leaf-strewn forest-land over which its dusty pavement is hereafter to extend.
You perceive, at a glance, that this is the ancient and primitive wood,—the ever-youthful and venerably old,—verdant with new twigs, yet hoary, as it were, with the snowfall of innumerable years, that have accumulated upon its intermingled branches. The white man’s axe has never smitten a single tree ”

“ Everything seems to be piled into the street; old houses made over, and new ones going up everywhere. You know the kind of street Main Street always used to be in our section—half plank-road and turnpike, and the rest mud-hole, and a lot of stores and doggeries strung along with false fronts a story higher than the back, and here and there a decent building with the gable end to the public ”

“ I've never excused my failures by sneering at my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them. I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith.”
“Sure. You bet you have,” said Kennicott. ”

“ Years have rolled over our scene, and converted the forest-track into a dusty thoroughfare, which, being intersected with lanes and cross-paths, may fairly be designated as the Main Street. On the ground-sites of many of the log-built sheds, into which the first settlers crept for shelter, houses of quaint architecture have now risen. ”

“ She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street. ”

“ Main Street is not only a bad name for a thoroughfare; the quality which it implies is unfortunate. And that quality may be seen in Main Street, Buffalo. On an exaggerated scale that street is like the Main Street of a little town, for the business district, the retail shopping district, all the city's activities string along on
We made believe we wanted to go out and smoke. And as we left our seats she made believe she didn't know that we were going
[ 23]
either side. It is bad for a city to grow in that elongated way just as it is bad for a human being. ”

“ Its dreary monotony shall not test your fortitude like one of our actual New England winters, which leaves so large a blank—so melancholy a death-spot—in lives so brief that they ought to be all summer-time. Here, at least, I may claim to be ruler of the seasons. One turn of the crank shall melt away the snow from the Main Street, and show the trees in their full foliage, the rose-bushes in bloom, and a border of green grass along the sidewalk. ”

“ They drove home under the sunset. Mounds of straw, and wheat-stacks like bee-hives, stood out in startling rose and gold, and the green-tufted stubble glistened. As the vast girdle of crimson darkened, the fulfilled land became autumnal in deep reds and browns. The black road before the buggy turned to a faint lavender, then was blotted to uncertain grayness. Cattle came in a long line up to the barred gates of the farmyards, and over the resting land was a dark glow.
Carol had found the dignity and greatness which had failed her in Main Street. ”

“ Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters. What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea; whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider.
Our railway station is the final aspiration of architecture. Sam Clark's annual hardware turnover is the envy of the four counties which constitute God's Country. ”

“ We'll go back to Main Street or Prairie Boulevard or whatever they call that causeway down there and drop it along the pavement. Then we'll wait until it gets nice and soft and make a lot of money prying folks loose. ”

“ We had gone hardly a block before we realized that our earlier impressions of the place had been ill-founded. We had arrived in the least agreeable portion of the city, and had not, hitherto, seen any of the built-up, well-paved streets. "Petticoat Lane"—the fashionable shopping district on Eleventh Street between Main Street and Grand Avenue—has a metropolitan appearance, and the wider avenues, with their well-built skyscrapers, tell a story of substantiality and progress. ”

“ She escaped from Main Street, fled home.
She wouldn't have cared, she insisted, if the people had been comely. She had noted a young man loafing before a shop, one unwashed hand holding the cord of an awning; a middle-aged man who had a way of staring at women as though he had been married too long and too prosaically; an old farmer, solid, wholesome, but not clean—his face like a potato fresh from the earth. ”

“ So it chanced that Carol Kennicott and Bea Sorenson were viewing Main Street at the same time.
Bea had never before been in a town larger than Scandia Crossing, which has sixty-seven inhabitants.
As she marched up the street she was meditating that it didn't hardly seem like it was possible there could be so many folks all in one place at the same time. My! It would take years to get acquainted with them all. And swell people, too! A fine big gentleman in a new pink shirt with a diamond, and not no washed-out blue denim working-shirt. ”

“ On the lower corner stands another dwelling,—destined, at some period of its existence, to be the abode of an unsuccessful alchemist,—which shall likewise survive to our own generation, and perhaps long outlive it. Thus, through the medium of these patriarchal edifices, we have now established a sort of kindred and hereditary acquaintance with the Main Street.
Great as is the transformation produced by a short term of years, each single day creeps through the Puritan settlement sluggishly enough. ”

“ Market and Main are business streets—at least they are so where they cross—and, like the other streets, are wide. They are lined with brick buildings few if any of them more than three stories in height, and it was in one of these buildings, on Main Street, that we found the Bell Café—advertised as "the most exclusive café in the State." ”

“ Impalpable black dust far-borne from Dakota covered the inner sills of the closed windows.
The July heat was ever more stifling. They crawled along Main Street by day; they found it hard to sleep at night. They brought mattresses down to the living-room, and thrashed and turned by the open window. Ten times a night they talked of going out to soak themselves with the hose and wade through the dew, but they were too listless to take the trouble. On cool evenings, when they tried to go walking, the gnats appeared in swarms which peppered their faces and caught in their throats. ”

“ Can it be that the thronged street of a city will ever pass into this twilight solitude,—over those soft heaps of the decaying tree-trunks, and through the swampy places, green with water-moss, and penetrate that hopeless entanglement of great trees, which have been uprooted and tossed together by a whirlwind? ”

“ A respectable-looking individual makes his bow and addresses the public. In my daily walks along the principal street of my native town, it has often occurred to me, that, if its growth from infancy upward, and the vicissitude of characteristic scenes that have passed along this thoroughfare during the more than two centuries of its existence, could be presented to the eye in a shifting panorama, it would bean exceedingly effective method of illustrating the march of time. ”

“ The halls that were loud with the merry tread of young and careless feet Are still with a stillness that is too drear to seem like holiday, And never a gust of laughter breaks the calm of the dreaming street Or rises to shake the ivied walls and frighten the doves away. ”

“ What I am crying out about is the stupid naming of such streets as carry names. Why do we have so many Main Streets? Do you think we lack imagination? Then look at the names of Western towns and Kansas girls and Pullman cars! ”

“ Queen Street is the main thoroughfare of the town,—a broad avenue extending from the wharves to the suburbs, lined with a rather motley collection of buildings, some of which, however, are large and have fair architectural pretensions. There are upon this street a dozen or more fine stone buildings occupied by banks, insurance offices, warehouses, and some very handsome stores. ”