The Second Acts

The American downtown that survived the twentieth century by being abandoned is, by now, a familiar story, though the familiarity has not made the fact of the places themselves any less worth visiting. What happened was simple enough: the highway moved, or the mill closed, or the department store left for the ring road, and the blocks that had held a city's daily life stood empty for long enough that the rent became honest again, the buildings stopped being pulled down, and the people who rebuild things noticed. The result, in town after town across the country, is a main street doing its best work in a generation, and the travelers who have been paying attention know it.

What the successful ones got right is worth saying plainly, since not every downtown that tried has managed it, and the ones in these pages did. They kept the buildings, which is the first condition. They put the people who actually live there back at the center of the thing, which is the second. And they built around some true local fact, a waterfall, a river trail, a food culture that had been there all along, rather than importing a version of somewhere else, which is the third and the one most often skipped. The regulars in these places will tell you they always believed it would come back, and they are not wrong, though believing it through forty years of empty storefronts is a different proposition from believing it now, with the sidewalk tables full on a Wednesday evening in October.

Everything in this issue is a place worth the drive. Come in the shoulder weeks if you can, since spring and fall are when these towns show themselves most clearly, with the festivals and the football Saturdays quieted and the people who have been returning for years back at their usual tables. Book earlier than feels reasonable for the weekends. The second act, it turns out, draws a crowd.