Why no St. Louis "Main Streets"?

Chicago has two. New Orleans has four. Detroit has eight. But St. Louis has none.

What is a "Main Street" and why do I have it entrapped by quotation marks? The Main Street Program is...well, let's let the Trust explain:

In the 1970s, the National Trust developed its pioneering Main Street approach to commercial district revitalization, an innovative methodology that combines historic preservation with economic development to restore prosperity and vitality to downtowns and neighborhood business districts. Today, the message has spread, as the Center advocates a comprehensive approach that rural and urban communities alike can use to revitalize their traditional commercial areas through historic preservation and grassroots-based economic development. It has created a network of more than 40 statewide, citywide, and countywide Main Street programs with more than 1,200 active Main Street programs nationally.

The Main Street "Four Point Approach" is a strategy to redevelop ailing "main streets", both urban and rural, or bolster those that already have significant assets. The four points are Design, Organization, Promotion, and Economic Restructuring--affectionately abbreviated D.O.P.E. by those witty enough to notice. A "Main Street" gets a manager (much like a mall) to whom all emerging concerns filter, while an organized collection of business owners work together to make the Main Street attractive, lively, and, most important, financially viable. It has been called the Trust's greatest program and studies have shown for every one Main Street dollar invested, 38 return.

The project started off as a pilot project in the Midwest and only applied to cities with fewer than 100,000 people, as rural decline at the time was perhaps at an even greater crisis than its better publicized urban counterpart. Urban Main Streets are now fairly common, with Boston having led the way with its remarkable pouring of support into the program.

In future updates, I will argue my choices for the St. Louis Main Street Program. This program boasts of several features that make it a clear choice for St. Louis: it is in effect a "subsidy" for local businesses (rather than the TIFs and other incentives handed out to large developers who bring national chains to the table and nothing else); it encourages rehabilitations of long suffering commercial corridors that are seen as outmoded today; and it has worked in so many places. In short, it quietly kills that destructive adage that historic preservation and economic development are diametric opposites.

Stay posted.