For their Zócalo Sketchbook, Pérez Espinosa has rendered images of California flora and fauna on top of local store receipts. The vibrant colors and undulating lines of the art joyfully overwhelms the substrate of humdrum commercialism.

Of their work, Pérez Espinosa says, “I’m delving deeper into understanding systems of care and Indigenous knowledge in regard to nature, and how essential they are to healing ourselves. I drew different sprouts representing my feelings on tending, renewal, learning, interconnectedness, and coastal life.”

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It is the self-consciousness of the idea of Main Street—from its origins in a Nathaniel Hawthorne sketch of New England, to Walt Disney’s construction of a Main Street USA, to the establishment of ersatz Main Streets in today’s urban malls—that makes it so essentially American. Main Street has been used in myriad ways to describe very many different things—from the crushing power of convention to the thrill of new entertainment, from the small town to new big city neighborhoods.

Main Street’s meaning could change quickly. In the 1920s, to invoke Main Street was to call up an image of the dullness of provincial life. By the 1930s, Main Street represented the bedrock of America’s embattled democracy. For decades, Main Street stood for the local; today it’s an importable model of planning and development that can be set up almost anywhere.

Main Street bears double political meanings that in turn raise complicated questions about whether the United States lives up to its ideals.

As public space, the American Main Street has always represented an ideal of community, where persons from different surrounding neighborhoods and social classes come together as rough equals. But Main Street also has a history of discriminatory practice going back more than a hundred years. Northern “sundown towns” in the late 19th century and first half of the 20th century policed their Main Streets by warning and expelling anyone who didn’t “belong” after the sun went down. And historically Main Street usually has been defined by the ruling class of the area, with outsiders—by class, ethnicity, religion, color—not particularly welcome.

So even as we celebrate the ideal of Main Street as a space of democratic equality, we should remember—and rue—the reality.

Part of the reality is this: America’s small towns and their Main Streets have died a thousand deaths, but Main Streets also live on and multiply now as never before, as we recreate them in wealthy suburbs and big cities. Over the past 20 years, America has seen the growth of ersatz Main Streets, facsimiles of the real thing, in private shopping places everywhere.

The Main Street of Springfield, Mass. in 1905. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

As the malls of America have become deserted, those shopping centers still clinging to life have strived to emulate the amenities of what they had rendered obsolete: Main Street. They have installed benches, street lamps, grassy areas, and even band stands, providing the feel of public space in the open air, the feel of a community. These facsimiles of Main Street, creations of commercial landscape architects, can be more successful than actual Main Streets, since the national retail brands in ersatz Main Street attract shoppers in the massive numbers needed to make a public space seem genuinely “public.”

If we prefer the authentic to the ersatz, then this new Main Street poses a challenge to the original article. What’s the best response to such a challenge? To do what the ersatz Main Street can’t: provide the individualized shops and restaurants that you won’t find in the ersatz space. The real Main Street also must work harder to draw in people from outside the community, with street fairs and festivals, art galleries, craft shops, and other one-of-a-kind attractions.

Meanwhile, the ersatz Main Street carries its own double meaning: It represents a corporate usurpation of the idea of Main Street—and also an expansion of the idea. Indeed, since the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, Main Street has taken on a broader meaning and wider constituency than it ever before possessed. It is not just small businesses that Main Street represents. The phrase has become a substitute for what we all share, the American commons. We are either Main Street or its opposite, Wall Street. In this polarized time, we belong to one pole or the other.

One paradox is that the public space of Main Street, regulated spaces that must be open to all, may be harder to police than the ersatz Main Streets, which are private spaces where certain standards of decorum can be swiftly enforced. We don’t usually notice the limitations on our behavior in private spaces, but they exist, often in a sign posted as you enter the space.

Is it possible that the private space of the ersatz Main Street, which welcomes shoppers of all religions and colors, is a more hospitable space than the public space of Main Street? Is the private Main Street more tolerant of difference (as long as you keep your shirt on and wear shoes) than the public space of warring statues and demonstrators armed with torches or guns, where intimidation can be masked as self-defense? If this is the case, it argues for the democracy of the marketplace, which embraces anyone, regardless of creed or color, who has the money to make a purchase.

Today, Main Street faces what some see as an existential threat: e-commerce, which has made any physical shopping space increasingly a luxury. The real Main Street has a future in this digitally dominated marketplace—it is not competing with e-commerce—but the ersatz Main Streets of malls may have more to worry about. Will they evolve as hybrid showrooms where consumers can touch the merchandise before buying it cheaper online? Or as places to pick up merchandise ordered in advance and delivered locally? Or will e-commerce fall victim to its own success and be defeated by Main Street—the infinity of choices and merchandise reviews consuming so much of the shopper’s time that it’s simpler to just go shopping in a store with limited, pre-selected, merchandise?

If Main Street means anything today, it signifies an idealized space where American society can practice its highest values, which include civility, tolerance, and yes, commerce. And Main Street’s endurance, as an idea, demonstrates the authority of myth to nurture a sense of community, even in a society as fragmented as ours.

The post A Short History of the Idea of ‘Main Street’ in America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Cynics may dismiss these memories as mere reflections of cold retail strategies. But for Chicagoans, the emotional connections are real, as they are for shoppers across the country who cherished the family-owned department stores that anchored their downtowns. Bostonians had Filene’s. Atlantans had Rich’s. Detroiters had Hudson’s. Clevelanders had Halle’s. Philadelphians had Wanamaker’s. Though conceived primarily as commercial centers, they evolved into larger institutions of American life—places where families of various castes and classes were welcome to take in the spectacle of services and goods, no admission fee required.

No time was this truer than the holiday season. And before the age of online shopping and franchise-heavy megamalls sent them to their demise (Marshall Field’s, for one, was converted into a Macy’s), these stores held a significant place in our collective Christmas memories.

But how did these houses of retail come to inspire such fond feelings?

Marshall Field’s in 1949.

That’s the question that I, as a historian, became fascinated by growing up in Chicago, where Marshall Field’s was as much a part of the soul of the city as our Lakefront or our Cubs. As a child, I would meet my grandmother under the famous clock at State Street and Washington Boulevard, and head up to the Walnut Room for lunch with my grandfather, who worked at Field’s as the buyer for the linen department for 25 years. When the change to Macy’s was announced, protestors gathered under the clock with signs reading “Field’s is Chicago—Boycott Macy’s.” They have been picketing there every fall since 2005. This year’s signs read, “If the Cubs can win the World Series, Marshall Field’s can come back to Chicago.”

Christmas wasn’t much of a holiday anywhere in America when Potter Palmer arrived in Chicago in 1852 and opened a dry goods store. By the turn of the century his successors, Marshall Field and Levi Leiter (and later just the now-eponymous Field) had built it into the premiere department store in the Midwest, known for impeccable customer care, generous return policies, quality merchandise, and a vast array of services (from tea rooms to relaxation rooms, shoe repair to hotel bookings—all of which kept shoppers in the building and reaching for their wallets).

Christmas, however, had received only modest attention. The store eventually began advertising Christmas cards and gift merchandise, and in 1885, they opened a seasonal toy department (which later became year-round). The first mention of holiday decorations at Marshall Field and Company came in 1907. The store had just opened in a monumental new building featuring the Walnut Room, and restaurant employees reportedly put up a small Christmas tree.

Marshall Field’s at Christmas in 2005, the last year before it was rebranded as a Macy’s.

By 1934, the tree stood 25 feet high. By mid-century, Field’s laid claim to the world’s largest indoor Christmas conifer: a 45-foot evergreen hoisted atop the Walnut Room’s drained fountain. It took 18 decorators and three-story-high scaffolding to trim the live evergreen. To kids, it looked like it stretched all the way up to the sky.

Through the decades, department stores like Marshall Field’s employed ever more elaborate strategies to lure shoppers. As the smell of Mrs. Herring’s Chicken Pot Pie wafted from the Walnut Room, massive “ice” reindeer soared over displays, oversized candy canes and evergreen garlands wound down the aisles, and giant stars and mega snowflakes floated in the skylight. In dizzying displays of holiday spirit, Field’s insides conveyed top-to-bottom Yuletide joy.

And then there were the Marshall Field’s gift boxes. Each one bore the elegant calligraphy of the company name, signaling that the gift inside was worth savoring. It was not unheard of for gift-givers to repurpose the notoriously sturdy containers, packing them with “imposter” goods from other stores, both out of frugality and in an effort to impart that ineffable Field’s glow.

Crowds in front of Marshall Field’s in 2005.

Field’s had good reason to continue these traditions. But their real power came from transcending their original commercial purpose. For many Chicagoans, Marshall Field’s at Christmas was transformed from a wonderfully stocked department store into a near-sacred family ritual.

None of these rituals was more legend than the holiday windows.

In 1910, thanks to improved glass manufacturing that could create massive transparent panels, stores across the U.S. began mounting elaborate window displays, and efforts quickly escalated as they became a powerful lure for shoppers.

Marshall Field’s inventive window designer, Arthur Fraser, used the big corner window at Washington Boulevard to showcase holiday gift merchandise. His first panel featured animated carousels and gift-ready toy trains. But in 1944 the store’s new stylist, John Moss, ditched the hard sell in favor of narrative windows—recreating Clement Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas. The story panels were such a hit they were repeated the next year.

Soon a new holiday window trend took hold: store-specific mascots. Montgomery Ward’s claimed Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Wieboldt’s concocted the Cinnamon Bear. Not to be outdone, one of Moss’s co-designers, Joanna Osborn, conjured Uncle Mistletoe, a plump, Dickens-like figure decked out in a red great-coat and black top hat. With white wings, he flew around the world, teaching children the importance of kindness at Christmas.

The first window displays of Uncle Mistletoe went up in 1946 in a series titled A Christmas Dream, which featured the generous old man bringing a young boy and girl to the North Pole to visit Santa. In 1948, Uncle Mistletoe got some company in the form of Aunt Holly, and the pair became a merchandizing bonanza. Over the years, shoppers could buy dolls, books, ornaments, coloring sets, molded candles, cocktail napkins, hot pads, puppets, glassware, and even used window props.

Protestors in front of the recently rebranded Macy’s on Chicago’s State Street, formerly Marshall Field’s, in 2006.

As time went on, Field’s window decorators mastered the art of fake snow (a combination of kosher salt and ground-up glass) and detailed animatronic antics. I remember when the windows had a Nutcracker theme. Below the big scenes depicting the main store were tiny windows where tiny mice figurines were enacting their own delightful version of the story.

At their peak, planning and designing the annual displays began more than a year in advance, with an eager public waiting every November for the reveal of each new theme. Tens of thousands of fans made pilgrimages from Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota to crowd around the earnest State Street displays in childlike awe.

There was a marketing aspect to the windows, of course. Delighted viewers, suffused with the seasonal spirit, would hopefully pop inside to shop. But there was no commerce in the displays themselves. Like many of the holiday creations inside, people became attached to the spirit, not the sales. The store’s brand became more than just the goods it sold, which ebbed and flowed over the years. For generations of Chicago families, Marshall Field’s simply inspired Christmas cheer.

The post For Generations of Chicagoans, Marshall Field’s Meant Business—and Christmas appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The yarn paintings comprising “The Spun Universe” exhibit, now on view at UCLA’s Fowler Museum, were primarily collected in the 1960s by Peter T. Furst, a UCLA-trained anthropologist who studied the Wixárika (commonly known as Huichol). According to Fowler curator Patrick A. Polk, Furst had been drawn to the Wixárika by his journalistic reporting and later academic interest regarding the uses of psychedelic drugs. As in many indigenous cultures in the Americas, Wixárika shamans ingested peyote, which they call hikuri, during religious ceremonies.

Untitled, Ramón Medina Silva, mid-1960s. Yarn, beeswax, composition board. Purchase courtesy of the Ford Foundation, X67.63; Fowler Museum at UCLA.

Norwegian ethnographer Carl Lumholtz first documented this in the 1890s, after staying among the Wixárika for about 10 months. “The plant, when taken, exhilarates the human system … it also produces colour visions,” wrote Lumholtz in his 1902 publication Unknown Mexico.

“Peyote is a fundamental element of the Wixárika belief system,” said Polk. “It’s a source of revelation, of spiritual connection, of healing … and has inherent sacredness beyond psychotropic properties.”

In 1965, Ramón Medina Silva, a Wixárika living in Guadalajara who claimed to be a shaman apprentice, became a primary guide to Furst and his colleague Barbara Meyerhoff. In describing his holistic belief system to the anthropologists—which included hallucinogenic visions based on deities such as Our Elder Brother Deer, Our Mother Blue Corn, and Our Grandfather Fire—Silva relied upon nierakate, drawings made with brightly colored yarn affixed to boards with beeswax.

Untitled, Ramón Medina Silva, mid-1960s. Yarn, beeswax, composition board. Purchase courtesy of the Ford Foundation, X67.51; Fowler Museum at UCLA.

The Wixárika, whose culture retained many pre-Columbian aspects due to their remote location in the Sierra Madre Occidental, were known for their artistic offerings and adornment of votive objects for religious ceremonies. Lumholtz described and illustrated many examples of small tablets and gourds decorated with spiritual motifs in Unknown Mexico. In the 1950s, they began to make simple, decorative versions of nierakate, an idea Furst traced back to Alfonso Soto Soria, a collector of Mexican folk art and museum director. According to Furst’s book Visions of a Huichol Shaman, Soria thought these “yarn paintings” would be intriguing for an exhibition he was putting on and as another type of folk art Wixárika artisans could produce for sale.

Mexican folk art was then becoming a hot commodity, championed by the Mexican government in its simultaneous midcentury pushes to improve living standards in remote indigenous communities and popularize and protect their artistic traditions. But as a medium to express his culture’s beliefs to outsiders like Furst, Silva’s artworks, and that of his wife Guadalupe de la Cruz Rios, were more intricate and narrative, distinctly apart from both the small, traditional religious offerings and the larger, more decorative nierakate pioneered in the ’50s with Soria’s encouragement.

Untitled, Ramón Medina Silva, mid-1960s. Yarn, beeswax, composition board. Purchase courtesy of the Ford Foundation, X67.72; Fowler Museum at UCLA.

While Silva’s status as a shaman has been questioned, Polk described him as a “culture broker,” using his own undeniable artistic talent to preserve the beliefs of his people and create a demand for the artwork he helped pioneer. Silva understood that he was “at the right place at the right time,” as Polk said, in terms of the heightened interest in both folk art and psychedelic art. With the encouragement of Furst, who bought many yarn paintings on behalf of UCLA and other institutions, Silva became world-renowned. In 1968, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History staged a one-man exhibition of his work.

Silva’s style, sometimes down to the exact design, was quickly taken up by other Wixárika artisans and further popularized in the Mexican urban centers inhabited by Wixárika emigrants. “In the 1960s there was a confluence of research, popular interest, tourism, and traditional arts” around shamanic traditions, said Polk. Visitors to Guadalajara or Puerto Vallarta can still easily find psychedelic nierakate to take home as souvenirs, though they may not realize their purchase reflects more an indigenous people’s canny navigation of the art market than an ancient artistic practice.

Though some aspects of Silva’s, Furst’s, and Meyerhoff’s accounts of Wixárika culture were later disputed (all three are now deceased), the yarn paintings they brought to the wider world continued to be created by Wixárika artists like José Benitez Sánchez. “It lets [the Wixárika] give others their Technicolor visions of the universe,” said Polk.

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