I needed one machine screw. A specific one, quarter inch, to reattach a bracket under my dash that had been rattling for two states. It was 4:40 on a Thursday and I was standing outside a hardware store on a main street I had rolled into twenty minutes earlier, watching a man inside sweep an aisle while the sign in the window said the place closed at five.
He found the screw in a drawer of a wooden card-file cabinet, the kind with about ninety small drawers and handwritten labels, and charged me eleven cents. Then he asked what I was fixing, and then he asked where I was headed, and I got back to the car at 5:25 knowing more about that town than I had learned in most places where I stayed the night.
The businesses still open on a main street are a better read on a small town than its architecture, its population sign, or anything a chamber of commerce would want to hand me. Buildings are just the leftovers. Open doors are the current balance.
The hardware store is the load-bearing wall
If a town still has one, an actual one with bins of loose fasteners and a key machine and somebody who knows where things are, that town still functions as a town. People here fix things. They fix them today, not on Saturday after a forty-minute drive to a big box. Something is being maintained.
The hardware store also does a job nobody accounts for: it is where people ask each other questions. I have stood in one and listened to a woman describe a leak to two other customers and get three different opinions and one phone number of a guy who could look at it. That is infrastructure, and it does not show up in any census.
When the hardware store is gone and there is a farm supply or a lumber yard on the edge of town instead, the function moved but survived. When there is nothing at all, the town buys its screws somewhere else, which means it also has its conversations somewhere else.
Two bars and no coffee, or two coffees and no bar
This one is crude but it has never failed me by much.
Two bars and no coffee shop is a town that has not changed hands. The economy is whatever it was, the population is whoever it was, and the social life happens after work. These are the towns where a stranger at the counter is genuinely unusual, and where I have had both the best and the most uncomfortable conversations of my driving life.
Two coffee places and no bar means somebody moved here on purpose in the last ten years. Usually from a city, usually with a plan. This is not a bad thing and I am not sneering at it, I drink the coffee. But it means the main street I am looking at is partly aimed at people like me, and I should not confuse it for the town.
One of each is the healthiest thing I know how to find on a main street. It means two populations are cohabiting and neither one has won.
Nobody thinks about the insurance office
Walk a main street and you will notice the restaurant and the empty storefront and skip right over the insurance agency, the tax preparer, the title company, the small law office with two names on the glass. Those are the quiet vitals.
Those businesses exist because property changes hands here, and because people have enough assets to need them handled. A town with a title company is a town where somebody bought a house this year. A town with an agency that has been there long enough for the sign to be faded is a town where a family made a living on other families staying put.
When those go, they go silently. No article gets written about a closed insurance office. But when I see two blocks of retail vacancy and the tax preparer is still there with the lights on in April, I know somebody is still doing business in this county.
What an antique mall actually means
I used to treat antique malls as a good sign. Somebody is open, somebody restored the floor, there is foot traffic. Then I noticed how many of them there were, and where.
An antique mall is often what fills a building when nothing that serves the local population can afford the rent, or when there is not enough local population left to serve. The rent is low, the stock is consignment, the owner is retired and doing it partly to have somewhere to be. That is not a criticism of anyone involved. But a main street that is four antique malls and a used bookstore is not an economy, it is a slow, dignified estate sale that the town is conducting on itself.
The tell is what they sell. If it is furniture and tools and dishes from the surrounding county, the mall is a place where local households are being liquidated. If it is decorative goods brought in from elsewhere, the mall is aimed at drivers, and I am the customer, not the neighbor.
The pharmacy question
An independent pharmacy on a small main street is the single strongest thing I look for, and the rarest.
It means the town has enough people who need prescriptions filled locally and cannot or will not drive to the county seat for them. It usually means there is a clinic or at least a doctor who comes through. It means old people can stay here, which means families can stay here, which is most of what keeps a place from emptying out.
Twice I have found a pharmacy with a lunch counter still attached, both times by accident, both times the best hour of that particular day. Once the counter was three stools and a coffee pot and a woman who told me the store had been in her husband’s family since before the highway.
The street I got completely wrong
Last summer I came through a place where the main block was in rough shape. Three vacancies, peeling paint, one diner. I made my read, wrote it in my notebook as a town on the way out, and ate at the diner because it was that or nothing.
The diner had eleven people in it at 1:30 on a weekday. The waitress knew nine of them. Two guys at the counter were talking about a building on the next street over that a group of them had bought together and were converting. A woman came in to drop off a stack of flyers for something at the school.
That town was not dying. It was concentrated. Everything left had collapsed into one room, and the room was full, and from the sidewalk it looked like failure. I had graded the street when I should have opened the door. That is the mistake I make most, and knowing it has not stopped me from making it again.