Reviving Main Street

Pleasance Crawford is a Canadian landscape and garden-history researcher
and writer and the co-author of Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian
Garden Writing.

These ten articles, with accompanying foreword, preface, epilogue, and numerous photographs, explain and document the pilot phase of the Heritage Canada Foundation’s Main Street program. In the early 1980s, this program explored and demonstrated techniques for revitalizing the historic downtowns of seven communities in six provinces.

Further, the book under review provides an introduction to the second stage of the Main Street program, which extends to far more communities. Finally, it offers new insights for anyone interested in streetscape preservation and downtown revitalization.

The Main Street program, adapted in part from the United States National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Main Street project, combines building restoration and low-key streetscape improvement with attention to the social and economic dynamics of communities. It employs a coordinator who for three years lives and works in a community, and who facilitates the merging of preservation concerns with sound business practices. Thus, the Main Street program goes beyond attempts to pretty up downtowns without helping them to compete with shopping malls.

Seven of this collection’s authors were coordinators in the pilot phase of the Main Street program: Gordon Fulton, Hans Honegger, Peter Hyndman, Don Macintosh, Jim Mountain, Chris Pelham, and John Stewart. The other authors are also prominent workers in the fields of preservation, conservation, and restoration: Pierre Berton, Jacques Dalibard, John Edwards, Deryck Holdsworth, Robert Inwood, and Harold Kalman. The collection, although somewhat repetitive and uneven, is an important contribution to the literature of Canadian heritage preservation.