The Main Street Program model was created nationally about 1980 ................................. The first three towns were so successful, the idea was implemented in thirty-six towns the following year, and by 2000, there were over 2,000 towns across America operating some variation on a Main Street Program. In about 42 states, the state selects and designates towns that meet certain criteria,
and then the state program provides some kind of technical assistance to help them.
-- The state programs also facilitate an exchange of ideas between various programs, through periodic networking meetings so, so they can learn from one another’s activities. -- In Pennsylvania, the state program is called the Pennsylvania Downtown Center, or PDC (see: http://www.padowntown.org/ ). The PDC has some great stuff posted online, and their executive director was here to help us, leading a town meeting at Monongahela Fire Hall, just as our program was getting started with a new board of directors. More than 50 people were in attendance, in October 2015. ...................................................................
When It Looked Like We Were Fighting the Malls .................................
In the years just before 1980, most downtown business districts in America felt threatened by new mall developments. Some decided that they had to try to make downtown look like a mall to compete. Some felt they needed more parking or some chain stores or fast food restaurants. Federal money was available at the time to remove blighted buildings, and a lot of towns just started tearing down a lot of their core buildings. The Main Street Program concept appeared as an alternative to this. ..................................................................
The Big Redevelopment Project ................................. Some of us in Monongahela were concerned in 1980 that our city and county had gone a bit too far in demolishing buildings at the center of town. In fact, about 40 buildings were torn down with federal funds in a very short period of time. To the credit of those who made the 1978-1980 Monongahela Redevelopment Project happen, it did “right-size” our town in a way, at least based on the assumptions of that time (today, we could use some of those missing buildings, as our downtown business community is clearly growing again). That is, it made some of the real estate more valuable, by the standards of that time, by reducing the number of possible commercial locations and by eliminating many vacancies. It also made it possible to bring in McDonald’s, a self-serve liquor store, a donut shop (now gone), and a senior housing highrise. But we lost almost half of our downtown in the process. --While it may have had a real estate benefit, the Big Redevelopment Project was the opposite of what most architects might have advised. This is because Monongahela, like many communities, had layers of well-designed, interwoven buildings from generations of development, and these buildings, though sometimes a bit jumbled, or sometimes a bit tattered, gave the community as a whole a remarkable sense of visual coherence. These buildings were at a scale that worked for a community of this size. They also provided architects and other designers something interesting to work with. A window display designer could have built wonderful displays here. An imaginative painter could have accentuated layers of wood trim around the upper story windows. Our downtown had pressed metal lions’ heads mounted to the wall over the signs to Isaly’s and the Sun-Wall paint store. It had a sign for a fall-out shelter. It had the names of important former merchants, like “Landefeld” and “Markell” and “Odelli” worked into the parapets and cornices at the top of certain buildings. It had ghost signs for the Daily Republican and “Myers and Myers” and Vittorio Abatti’s Steamship Ticket agency and a sign for spark plugs as you came down Fourth Street (used to make me wonder what a “spark plug” was). It had a movie house, and a beloved peanut roaster, and its own handmade style of star ornaments for Christmas, made by Mr. Malena whose blacksmith shop was right down the street. ..................................
The mass demolition took most of those things away. It stripped away a system of layered design that would have given people clues about where to go next. Buildings that helped us navigate, both literally from day to day and in a broader sense, navigating to move the town forward. Buildings that shaped a gigantic space we all could share. My grandfather had worked on many of those buildings. My family was in the car in the middle of that space, at the intersection of Fourth and West Main Street, one day in 1963 when someone ran up to the car to say that the president had died. There were many people on the streets in those days. We all worked together in some way or other, and we all knew each other.Half of the buildings are still there, but it can be a challenge now to decide what to do next. ................................. Demolition by itself does not work as a way to solve downtown problems. The 1980 demolition project led to many others after it, like a ripple effect. Some of the first buildings to come down had been at the core of our city. Unfortunately, they were among the most architecturally interesting. But that one large project was followed by many others: demolition of buildings at First Street to build the senior citizen’s activity center, then the buildings next to the old bridge where NAPA is now (this was justified by a need to build a pharmacy, but that business is already now long gone), then others on Second Street (the old Hickory Grill/Vinnie’s/Paymaster restaurant building, part of which was once a 5-story hotel), then the Keeney Garage Building at the First Street and West Main corner of what is now the current Sheetz Lot, and then the other buildings where Sheetz is now. Instead of cleaning up the edges of our downtown, these projects took away some of the best buildings first. Because they started at the center of town, there was often not a good solution for stabilizing the newly exposed walls of the next building over, and pretty soon it came down too. Buildings kept disappearing in something like a domino effect. ..................................................................
The Main Street Program First Discussed Here When the Idea Was Brand-New ................................. Those of us who expressed concern at that time were told about a new program that was being tried in a few places, the “Main Street Program.” This was in 1982, when there were only about 40 Main Street towns in the entire United States (now there are over 2,000). We held a meeting, but only a few people came. At the time, Main Street designation came with state funding, and while this sounds helpful, it was the reason why a full-fledged Main Street Program did not happen here at that time. Our municipal government, at the time, was not interested in the idea, so that was the end of the story. ..................................................................
The Monongahela Area Historical Society in the 1980s ................................. The idea was being tossed around at meetings of the Board of Directors of the Monongahela Area Historical Society and within the society’s Historic Preservation Committee. Some of the officers involved included Roy Sarver, Linda Dudzik, Charles Talbert, and Ida Mae Seal. The Preservation Committee included Ed Sichi and Kathleen Petrosky. While we did not start an official Main Street Program in 1982, we did start a museum, in a house we rented from Anne Whitlatch and her daughters. Kathy Petrosky made drawings of the gazebo and four historic houses that were made into notecards as a fundraiser. Iva Eckbreth helped with an exhibit of antique postcards that we put on display in Pittsburgh. A birdseye view drawing of Monongahela from the 1880s was the basis for a placemat the Society issued for use in restaurants. It was printed by Chuck Provan at Zimmer Printing, our second oldest downtown business, as were several other publications like it, all designed to draw attention to our downtown. The Society also had its name on a history column in the local newspaper. After opening the museum, a group was assembled to start a Christmas festival. Called Christmas-in-the-Park, it restarted a very old tradition of the whole community singing Christmas carols together. This brought more individuals to the table, like George Lyons and Florence Yohe. Dick McVicker got involved at one point because his father had led the singing decades earlier. Over 800 people came to Christmas-in-the-Park the first year. ..................................................................
Back to the Present ................................. Main Street Programs are not always tied to local government, but they were in Pennsylvania at the time (in Pennsylvania, in the early 1980s, state-level Main Street designation was only possible if your municipal government, i.e., in our case, City Council, applied for and received a grant to hire a Main Street Manager). More recently, our city government has shown a lively interest in this idea, now that it is primarily a grass roots movement rather than a politically reliant city-initiated single-grant project, and they have lent their support. As a result, our new group applied for a grant in 2016 and got a $65,000 for the city to offer to building owners who were willing to do historically appropriate projects. The window of opportunity for that particular grant expired recently, although some of the individual projects it leveraged are still being finished. In 2022, we have received additional funds to offer small facade grants and development grants to building owners from the DCED's Keystone Communities Program and the Washington County LSA Program. .................................
A Main Street Program has an organizational structure that works on four kinds of things simultaneously. It also has a staff consisting of at least one person called a Main Street Manager, and sometimes some helpers. It is like adding a second layer to Chamber of Commerce activities, but focused on a specific historic core area, or target area. Years ago, people thought the issue was all about one topic, maybe that the buildings needed to look different, or that there needed to be more activities, or that recruiting a big store would help. Many towns had leaders who thought that progress could only be made with one big splash, through a “big fix” project. But the lesson of the Main Street concept is that small town revitalization takes a balance of the four work areas to make a difference. .................................
The four work areas are: (Often structured as a Main Street Program's main committees - 4 Work areas of the “4-Point Approach”)
* Organization (this would include forming committees, such as an Executive Committee, By-Laws Committee, and any Fundraising ad-hoc committees; this work area also involves trying to get all the organizations that are sponsoring things downtown to work together in a spirit of cooperation.)
* Promotion (in our case, likely a liaison with Chamber and many other organizations on events, plus “marketing” and promotions/marketing activities, ads, etc., focused on our historic downtown image)
* Design (e.g., to prepare for and review the proposed facade projects and sub-grants, with the city, for the grant we wrote for them, and any future grant funding, plus providing architectural information I'm general and encouraging good downtown lighting, good sidewalks, planters and plantings, better window displays, etc.)
* Economic Vitality (this area includes rethinking the economy, including business planning and business retention; in our case, also, bridging to the Chamber's efforts and the work of related organizations such as the Small Business Administration, the Small Business Development Centers, as well as the Mon Valley Alliance, and other agencies like them that help people plan and improve businesses.) ................................. In some ways, these things are actually all one thing - a good business plan includes promotions, well organized connections to the community, and a good building image. A good facade project should be well organized, well promoted, and economically meaningful. A good organization will be well organized, well promoted itself, and will address appearances and the economy. --Together, all of this is called the “Four Point Approach.”
