FINDING MAIN STREET

[HostDave]

What is a place without a sense of history? For those of us at the American Queen Steamboat Company, the answer is “not much.” Don’t get us wrong, we love shiny and new. A brand new shopping center or an impressive ballpark or trendy restaurant has a certain electric excitement about it. It’s fun to visit for the first time. But as you walk around, you’re very aware that every slab of concrete was poured just a few weeks ago and each steel beam was forged just months before. Someday, many years from now, such a place will have a sense of history. But for now it is not only sparkling and new, but also bland and generic.

One of the biggest trends in recent years has been the construction of outdoor malls. If you recall, indoor covered malls came into vogue beginning in the 1950s, exploded in the 1960s and dotted the landscape in the 1970s. Plenty more went up in the 1980s but by the 1990s the fashion was to take an historic building and convert it into a shopping center. It might be an old mill, old warehouse or old textile factory and it would soon be gutted, leaving the exterior shell as the only reminder of a piece of a city’s history. Inside, escalators, gleaming light fixtures, marble floors and carefully manicured plants and trees made it almost indistinguishable from the hundreds of new indoor malls across the country.

But as the new millennium dawned, America seemed to realize that something had been lost in the rush to gentrify our downtowns. The concept of an indoor mall was to provide all the shops that one might find on a traditional main street in any smaller community in the Heartland but transport it out to the suburbs in air-conditioned and heated comfort so one could stroll the “streets” year-round. As an idea, it was a good one as far as generating shopping revenue went, but it was also missing something as well. No matter how well-designed, an indoor mall does not have the feel of a classic main street in a small town. It’s all flash and no historical substance.

So, the next evolutionary step was to build main streets from scratch, mostly in the suburbs but entirely roofless with street parking and buildings that are designed to look “different” than one another but still blend together. Sprigs of new trees, contained within wrought iron grates, tentatively spring up from sidewalks and behind it all are larger parking structures to accommodate the rush of people visiting big box stores, clothing outlets and booksellers. Compared to massive indoor malls, their blank concrete walls facing acres of parking lots, these outdoor streetscape versions were a vast improvement. They invited people in rather than acting as citadels of commerce daring shoppers to cross the asphalt moats that surround them.

But try as the developers might, once again something vital was missing. These were sanitized versions of main streets but not actually main streets. They were a destination that people drove to, parked their cars, walked around, and then went home. They were not the hub of commercial activity. The buildings were stylish, often with an architectural nod to the past, but the expense of building true replicas of the classic buildings of yesteryear was cost-prohibitive. Above all, these outdoor “main streets” lacked something that can only be duplicated with the passage of time: history.

While the American Queen visits several big cities on her itineraries, she spends most of her time in the small towns and communities along the banks of the Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. Next year, our new addition, the American Empress, will do the same in the Pacific Northwest. What we find both fascinating and heart-warming is how our guests respond to the real main streets of America they find along the way. Our guests come from all over the world, though most hail from North America and most of them live in, or on the outskirts of, larger cities. For most people, manufactured outdoor mall streetscapes are the closest they’ve been to a real main street in a very long time.

The first reaction we see is disbelief. The main streets of Hannibal, Brandenburg, Alton, Henderson, Natchez, Vicksburg and Wheeling seem a bit too perfect to believe that somehow they haven’t been heavily manipulated to appear to be authentic. Of course, the very thing that gives them their charm is the fact that they are, indeed, 100% genuine. The flower pots on the street corners are placed there because shop owners take pride in their businesses. Each pot might be a bit different; each array of flowers a different color. There is no commercial management company dictating the size, shape and colors of the pots or their contents. Signs advertising cafes and boutiques are as unique as each establishment; there is no central authority dictating the shapes, the wording or the fonts used.

The bricks on the streets or comprising the buildings often have dates engraved in them. For the most part, the years immortalized in stone are from the 1800s and early 1900s. Yes, the buildings really were built that long ago. The concrete is not fresh and the architecture is adorned with all the details one would expect to find from the period, not half-hearted recreations tied into a central heating and cooling system. In the side of one building, you might find a cannonball embedded as a reminder of a particularly fierce Civil War battle from 150 years ago. Or the chips in the brick wall outside what is now a restaurant might be a living reminder of the bullets that ricocheted off what was once a bank during a famed heist from the 1930s.

Yes, the one thing that can never be duplicated is a sense of history. In America’s smaller communities, along well-kept and adorably preserved main streets, history still lives. Perhaps the most enjoyable part of discovering history in each of our destinations is learning the stories from the locals. History comes from more than old buildings; it comes from the pride of the people who live there and are as eager to tell you of the steamboats that gathered at the landing in the 1880s as they are to point out the new bistro in a former hardware store where their great grandfathers once bought tools and farm equipment. Ask the proprietor of a shop in one of the new suburban outdoor “main streets” about its history and, after a blank but polite stare, you’re likely to learn the store, just like the entire complex, is only two or three years old and that the store is really part of a national chain. In fact, they might not even own the store at all but just be employees of a large corporation headquartered several states away.

If there is one thing, above all else, that our guests love about the destinations that they visit when traveling with the American Queen Steamboat Company, it’s the history and authentic nature of the river towns. With our hop-on, hop-off shore excursions included in every port of call, it’s easy to explore fully. This is where life is real in every way; where history is found on every doorstep, and the people are beautifully and fully connected to the fabric of their community. This is more than authentic America; this is the way life should always be.