Not exactly what I was expecting. I always think of Main Streets as the town centers, business districts, social gathering places, of towns. Some towns have a couple, three main drags, depending on how they are designed. Cities with main streets, center of urban areas, in many rust belt cities have been gutted. Sad. Suburbs and malls destroyed them. I've been watching "urban renewal" in my city for nigh on 50 years. It hasn't helped. A second wave is now occurring with gentrification. Time will tell. Main Street was an interesting look at a variety of issues in a variety of places. I guess it could be a start for someone unfamiliar with the issues. But the book wasn't for me.

I really wanted to like this, but I don't think it achieved what it ostensibly intended. Fullilove studied over one hundred Main Streets, and did seem to garner a lot of information from those travels, but the way it was synthesized here was hit or miss. The framework she set up seemed like it was going somewhere, but then when it came time to examine specifics and discuss, it fizzled into a mixture of anecdotes and tangents.

In this book Mindy Thompson Fullilove, a well-established author on the subject of urbanism, attempts to examine the concept of “Main Street”: its components, its significance, the diversity in which such streets come.
She starts off strong, introducing the reader to the variety of functions and spaces a Main Street can embody and leading them through her framework for examining main streets (box-circle-line tangle). It is a convincing framework, though the rest of the book has not persuaded me of its necessity. Perhaps, it’s because once introduced, the framework is not applied further on. Fullilove moves on to discussing communities aspiring to support and protect their Main streets (including her own), quirks of some that she encountered on the road have etc. I would love to have seen a rigorous systematic examination of a variety of Main Streets through the lens established. Alas, not in this book.
She does describe and use other techniques though, for example, that of the Japanese-inspired “scroll”, describing places she visits in a series of sequential atmospheric photographs. They are fascinating and are, perhaps, my favorite part of the book.

Fullilove injects anecdotes and asides thought her writing, talking about her education with the French urbanist Cantal, her son, the New School curriculum and even the 2016 presidential election and its fallout. There is nothing wrong with such interjections, indeed, they serve to make the writing more intimate and personal, however, the further into the book - the more tenuous their relationship to the central subject matter. Certainly, there is an important place for discussing inequality, racism, gentrification, spatial segregation and even personal history when it comes to Main Streets, but Fullilove passionately engages the former ideas without sufficiently addressing the latter, diluting the book and neglecting its stated purpose.

She dedicates a lot of page space to descriptions of places she visits and her work with colleagues and students. These seems like valuable and important events to incorporate into the discussion, but without the discussion itself being firmly established they serve to make the book read as more disjointed and disorganized.

In the end, this reads as part a travelogues, part - notes on a fascinating concept and reflections on a rich career and part - a further elaboration on “Root Shock”. “Root Shock” is Fullilove most known book and it is referenced so generously throughout this one, it makes one wonder: should I be reading it instead? Is there anything added here?
Main streets are certainly a subject worth examining and one that could really shine in the hands of unique professionals such as Mindy Thompson Fullilove. Alas, this book does not do either of them justice.