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Main Street Niches In A Mass Sales World – Saving Main Street takes patience, but it’s worth it say Neal Peirce – Bill would help Wyoming communities revive downtowns
PLYMOUTH, N.H.– Steve Rand, owner-manager of the hardware store his grandfather founded in 1908, figured from the start that stopping the proposed Wal-Mart Superstore on the commercial highway outside Plymouth would be a losing battle.
Neal Peirce
http://www.postwritersgroup.com/archives/peir0105.htm
"Plymouth is at a crossroads of major roads," he said. "Wal-Mart looks at a map, decides it wants its store here, not some competitor’s. That’s how they dominate. We’re just one move on their huge chessboard. But stop them? They’re too large a Goliath for this David."
Only a regional impact economic study, Rand figured, could have tripped the Wal-Mart project. But New Hampshire, like most states, leaves every town to fend for itself. Even if Plymouth had turned Wal-Mart down, neighboring towns would likely have welcomed the store and its tax base.
So now Wal-Mart has arrived and Steve Rand is closing an outlying branch he’d had for nearly 33 years near the Wal-Mart site — one of the thousands of small-town retail outlets extinguished by the Goliath from Bentonville.
Still, walking around downtown Plymouth with Steve Rand — he won’t even bother with a coat on a winter day — you discover he has a survival strategy rolling.
His own downtown store, Rand explains, is solidly profitable. It sells specialized hardware and paint items acquired at attractive prices through a cooperative. It’s staffed by employees with extensive knowledge of customer needs. To meet the new competition, the store is now open seven days a week.
We pause at Plymouth’s handsome brick post office, facing directly onto the picturesque town common. It has a plaque commemorating its dedication in 1936, when James A. Farley was postmaster general. But in the mid-1990s, U.S. Postal Service bureaucrats decided they’d like to move operations out of town to a one-story, one-stop facility, convenient for trucks.
Rand and his friends hit the panic button, contacting everyone they knew in the political world, and got the decision reversed.
They did the same when a local selectman suggested moving Plymouth’s town offices to a single-story building with lots of parking, far from Main Street. Rand and allies argued hard to renovate the historic courthouse building, also facing the town common, for town offices. They prevailed. Instead of becoming a pile of bricks, the courthouse underwent a handsome redesign. We chat with one of the clerks; it’s clear she takes immense pride in working there.
Plymouth, it should be noted, isn’t just any old town — it is home to thriving Plymouth State University and its cultural arts center, where the New Hampshire Symphony plays and many theatrical performances are launched each year.
Still, a number of Main Street stores have struggled. Rand explains the history of each, how ugly post-World War II facades are being replaced and strategies developed to fill gaps. It’s no surprise to discover this is one of New Hampshire’s 19 officially designated Main Streets, with a full-time director and well-developed strategy. (Nationally there are about 1,600, reports the National Trust for Historic Preservation, founder of the program.)
Flower barrels on Main Street, a jazz series on the common, a Halloween festival, a welcome day for college students and their families, merchants’ forums, a downtown cleanup day — all are results of Plymouth’s Main Street program, now five years old.
I ask Rand who the principal supporters are and he replies, to my surprise, that they’re not predominantly merchants — retailers are often "the last to see the forest for the trees." Instead, Main Street’s most prominent rooters are regional institutions — the local hospital, the university, a private school. The hospital and university, for example, have recruiting issues: their prospects of attracting a physician or professor are enhanced, notes Rand, when "downtown is a community — not a black hole."
Put another way, Main Streets, like big city downtowns, are calling cards to the world, often important for a whole ring of communities. They’re the antithesis of the big box retail store — constructed one month, open the next, easily vacant a few seasons later as the market shifts.
Successful Main Street programs, Rand notes, take years to mature — four or five years to change attitudes and build initial confidence, five to 10 or more years for owners to start reinvesting seriously, 15 or 20 for the full recovery and new growth to take solid root.
Such patience sounds a world away from the globalized world of the big chains — Wal-Mart, for instance, with its expectation of opening hundreds of stores, hiring 160,000 more employees worldwide just this year.
And virtually no one foresees a time when Americans’ big-time retailing will focus again on Main Streets.
Yet as Plymouth shows, town history matters. And there can be a very real niche for community-based, smaller specialized stores, the places we know and are known when we go in. The rewards, for towns that care enough to nurture and patronize their own, can be immense.
Neal Peirce’s e-mail address is [email protected].
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Bill would help Wyoming communities revive downtowns
Associated Press
CHEYENNE – A bill that would create a program to help Wyoming communities revitalize their aging downtowns has been prepared for next month’s budget session.
House Bill 27 calls for reviving a Main Street program to give advice and technical support to communities interested in sprucing up commercial districts to boost economic development.
Wyoming had a successful Main Street program in the 1980s, but it was axed due to budget cuts, said Steve Achter, director of the Investment Ready Communities Division of the Wyoming Business Council.
"The program was very successful," he said. "You take a look at some of the communities around the state with vibrant downtowns, Evanston for instance. They’ve come a long way."
House Speaker Fred Parady, R-Rock Springs, is one of six lawmakers sponsoring the measure, which is also supported by the Business Council and Wyoming Association of Municipalities.
"If you think about the core of our towns – the chance to strengthen those downtown cores – it’s an ongoing need," Parady said. "This bill is an effort to move in that direction."
The measure asks for $273,500 from the state General Fund to create a Main Street Advisory Board, a seven-member panel appointed by the governor that would develop a plan to operate the program.
The Wyoming Business Council would run the program, if approved by the board, which would be developed as a three-year pilot venture.
The board and council would then select five communities to participate after holding public hearings. The communities must represent different geological locations and populations, and must have the potential for private-sector funding and commit to at least three years in the program.
Achter said requirements are based on the national Main Street program’s four building blocks – leadership, marketing, design and economic restructuring.
All improvements are paid for by the communities, which are shown various avenues for private and public funding, said George Parks, executive director of the Wyoming Association of Municipalities.
"The benefit of this bill is that it uses a little bit of state money to set up a state office to promote the program. … It’s very much a self-help program," he said.
Training and other technical assistance will also be provided under the bill to communities that aren’t in the program. Participating communities can choose to stay with the program after three years.
Achter said several communities, especially those damaged by fire in recent years like Moorcroft and Pine Bluffs, could immediately benefit. Several have already expressed interest, officials said.
"I think many communities are interested in their downtown cores and this just puts another tool in their tool box," Parady said.
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