What It Was Like When Main Street America Was Perfect... Until They Made This Happen

By the late 1950s, ten thousand American Main Streets looked roughly the same. A pharmacy, a hardware store, a diner, a tailor. The owners lived above the shops. The wages from the local mill landed on the same street within forty-eight hours of payday. The whole thing worked. Seventy years later, most of those Main Streets are gone. The buildings are still there. Sometimes the original names are still faintly painted on the brick. But the businesses inside have been replaced by Dollar Generals, vape shops, payday lenders, and a great many vacant windows. This is the story of how it happened. Not as a single collapse, but as a long sequence of choices — the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, the closure of the steel mills through the 1970s and 1980s, the arrival of Walmart on the edge of town, the consolidation of local banks into distant holding companies, and the slow departure of a generation of young, educated people who didn't come back. Each one of these had a logic at the time. Taken together, they hollowed out small-town America in ways we are still trying to understand. This video is a long, careful look at what happened, why it happened, and what a small number of towns have done to fight back.