Here’s a picture of Arlington, SD from 1906. It looks pretty nice and non-trashy to me.
Great god, what a time sink - I got lost there for about 6 hours one Saturday afternoon!
I didn’t make myself clear. What I meant to emphasize was the sense of excitement that people must have felt when the entertainment arrived in an otherwise humdrum existence.
(Maybe seeing Dangerosa would help?)
Exactly. (Or The Music Man. Hence the strolling barbershop quartet. :D)
I’ve got a book called “Inside Disney” by the makers of the Unofficial Guide to Disney World. The writer, although a fan of Disney theme parks, brings up this very idea…that the Main Street of Walt’s childhood would have been nowhere near as clean as Main Street, USA.
But to that, I say…isn’t that kind of the point, that we want this recreation of the past to reflect the way we’d like it to be, even if it wasn’t completely the way it really was? It’s the same thing as, say, a Renaissance Faire…of course we want to visit Elizabethan England the way we’d like it to have been, not the very unhygienic way it was.
It’s also what I think of when commentators complain that certain movie depictions of past times look too “clean”–with the actors’ hair and clothes looking clean, and with all their teeth still in their mouths. Isn’t there only so far such period-appropriate realism can go before it becomes off-putting?
Or, as the author of the Inside Disney book put it,
“Maybe [Disney World] is only an imitation paradise, but if we don’t have models to go by, how will we remember–in this exhausting, selfish, violent, and often soul-crushing world–that there was ever a star to wish upon?”
Lots of horse poop.
The streetscape in the photo remains mostly intact, although the street is now a busy pedestrian mall.
Don’t forget the drugstore, where little Jimmy Tyrone stops in each day after school to buy his mom her fix. And the jolly fat cop, beating a prostitute for holding back some of her earnings. Who do we lynch tonight, an uppity negro, or one of those union radicals? I can’t decide until after I’ve been to the glory hole the slow kid runs down at the livery stable. That always clears my mind.
My gross thing would be the open air butcher shop-with pieces of beef hanging up-festooned by flies!:eek:
Hey, when you open a theme park with that theme, let us know!
Disney Main Street is supposed to be a Midwestern small town. They ran the prostitutes out of town in respectable Midwestern small towns in 1900 
Disney grew up in Marcelene, Missouri and that is the sort of small town being pulled from to create Main Street. (He really only lived there a few years, but they were formative for his childhood - and the fantasy that is Mainstreet is through those childhood memories. Respectable children would be shielded from the town drunk.
A big difference is the color - a Midwestern small town at the turn of the century wouldn’t have a coordinated color palate. That’s set design. The buildings wouldn’t have been built with a coordinated aesthetic. And yes, horses wouldn’t wear diapers and there wouldn’t be ten thousand people in shorts and t-shirts stopping to get their picture taken in front of a forced perspective fantasy castle codesigned by Mad King Ludwig.