I always liked the idyllic picture of Main Street in Disneyworld. The beautifully painted Victorian homes, spotless streets, and elegantly dressed people. Of course, the is Walt Disney’s filtered memories of his home town in 1910. What would the real Main Street have looked like? Would there be garbage and horse crap everywhere, with flies, and buildings with peeling paint? Are the Disney reenactments of the past in any way accurate?
There are plenty of actual Victorian homes left on Main Streets throughout America and they look a lot like the ones in Main Street USA. I don’t know if they all looked like that, but they might have, since those who could afford to live near the business district may have been able to afford homes with nice trim.
Of course it could be confirmation bias since the crappy old homes may have been destroyed, but the actual architecture of Main Street USA doesn’t seem that far off from reality.
The Main Street of a small town would have been well kept up – it would have been a fairly prosperous neighborhood. Appearance would be generally like that in Disneyland.
Of course, it would not be as clean. The streets would more likely be dirt. Horses would have left their calling cards. Some of it was cleaned up, but the horseshit would either dry up and blow everywhere (if it was dry), or mix in the mud (if rainy). Flies would be a problem in the summer (no screens).
Garbage would not be a problem. Nearly all of it was compostable, and every house had a garbage pit in the back yard. Scraps (that the dogs didn’t eat) were thrown in the pit (along with ash from the fire); once it was filled a new one would be dug.
By 1910, there were cars available, but they were not common; a small town might only have one or two of them.
Flies, lots of them, due o aforementioned horse manure.
Lack of modern paints would have resulted in more peeling.
The lawns might have looked a bit shaggier.
More smoke, from home chimneys .
Well, aside from the bricks in real life being fill scale, and the stores being relatively small ones that don’t extend through several shop frnts
1.) There certainly would be more horse poop. A well-maintained downtown would sweep it up, of course, but there’d be remnants. That omnipresent mud in period films, and which Sherlock Holmes was always analyzing would probably have an organic component in it best not thought about too much.
2.) A lot of main streets were either packed dirt or cobblestoned. Our modern asphalt/tarmacadam wasn’t common then.
3.) Depending on where you were, there might be a lot of advertisements, often peeling and overlaying each other pasted o the walls, at least on side walls.
4.) In a lot of well-to-do places there were trolley tracks running through streets.
Thomasville NC Downtown Looking East and West on Main St. and Salem St. around 1900
ETA:Vancouver Canada, 1907
(I personally recommend turning the sound off for this one)One place to look is at Shorpy.
The people and their clothing wouldn’t be as clean. Not everyone had running water in the house and baths were saved for Saturday night. The women wore their hair swept up on the head and didn’t wash it daily.
Clothing made of wool was reused many times before cleaning.
Would there be a roaming barbershop quartet?
Since this is a WASP UpperClass neighborhood, & many barbers of the era were immigrants, commonly Italians…No.
They would be escorted away by the police.
Was that Disneyland’s barbershop quartet, or the underground utopia’s from A Boy and his Dog? I know one doesn’t have the creatively used milking machine (at least that we know of).
Did Harlan Ellison create that similarly while seething for revenge?
And, people didn’t have a lot of clothes. Even a respectable upper middle class couple would keep the entire seasons wardrobe in one closest or more likely a armoire/wood wardrobe. A man would have two maybe three suits, worn every day (if he had three, one would be extra nice, saved for special occasions), something for doing dirty work, and a lounging outfit.
Mind you, wool clothes were “aired out” often, dirt brushed off, etc. But to us, they’d smell of smoke, etc.
Though many of them did their best to fake American accents.
Take a look at the day the circus came to town from this site:
http://www.casde.unl.edu/history/counties/richardson/fallscity/
[quote=“engineer_comp_geek, post:6, topic:672985”]
Thomasville NC Downtown Looking East and West on Main St. and Salem St. around 1900
[/QUOTE]Thanks for posting this. I just love watching these old films (and seeing some of the first color photographs). The more common photographs from these eras are often overly staged and dull. It is fun to see kids of the age acting like kids, and adults laughing and joking around. It is easy to forget that people of the past were pretty similar to people of the present, and this is a nice connection back in time.
Some of those kids had their knickbockers rebuckled below the knees. :eek:
Fascinating. I wish I know Vancouver well enough to get a sense of where the streetcar was going.
Incidentally, notice that they are driving on the left! I had read that the formerly-British parts of Canada* drove on the left until the 1920s, but this is the first actual clear evidence that I’ve seen of it.
*BC and the Maritime Provinces. Ontario was originally part of Quebec, to oversimplify somewhat, and always drove on the right.
Seeing Dangerosa’s post about the circus coming to town reminded me that it’s possible that there might have been. But they may not have been local. Up until about the mid-sixties there were traveling groups of entertainers who performed outdoors.
It didn’t necessarily need to be Chatauqua and they probably wouldn’t have sung for free unless they were local.
They would have set up a tent in the town square and most folks, hungry for some live entertainment besides the banker’s wife singing solos at church on Sunday morning, would have gladly paid the ten cents admission to see something different.
I can just imagine the excitement of a child (and probably the adults) when the circus came to town. No $35.00 tickets and $8.00 popcorn, no PETA protestors, no auditorium with its plastic and concrete.
Instead, wooden bleachers in a musty smelling tent with a real zippy circus band. And there you sat, up close, taking in all the sights, sounds and smells of a real live circus. They came veritably to entertain you!
I’m trying to convince myself that there’s a touch of that on Main Street Disney. But, I can’t say it works for me. Maybe when the parade goes by?
Of course not. The circus you’ve described above–the actual circus of that era–is the antithesis of what Disney strives for, namely, a sanitized, de-naturalized reflection of our would-be selves.
Or our past and our fantasies as set design.
The Polynesian resort isn’t a real world example of Tahiti or Hawaii, its what you would fantasize it was like if you had read a few books and created a set. Likewise, Main Street isn’t support to be a historical portrayal, its Main Street from Meet Me In St. Louis.