Main Street USA has an impossible task: this land has to instantaneously transport you into another world, leaving normal life behind. So how does this busy little street pull off such a feat? The little details. Every square inch of Main Street USA carefully works together to create an illusion. Visitors to the street immediately feel nostalgia…for a place that never existed. The sights, smells, sounds, and feeling of Main Street USA make us immediately believe in what we see. It becomes real. Without so many little details, this instant transportation into the past would be impossible.
Here are just a few of my favorite details that make Main Street USA a living, breathing time machine.
You say “Visitors to the street immediately feel nostalgia…for a place that never existed”. But that’s not true. Part of Disneyland’s Main Street could be found in smaller towns all across America in the 1890s-1910s era. That’s what made it so nostalgic for older folks when it opened in 1955. There were still many, many people who had grown up in “Small Town America” back in the first few decades of Disneyland. My grandparents all visited at one time or another, and for them it WAS a “nostalgia trip”. Here, in 2018, you’re not likely to find anyone around who was around then, let alone remembers it. So for us perhaps, it’s a place that “never existed” — except in old photos, early film clips and newsreels, and what vestiges remained in America’s small towns. I grew up in the 1960s in an L.A. suburb, but I could still appreciate the “old-tyme” feeling of Main Street and an earlier, simplier time.
Hi Michael! I completely agree about the nostalgia about small town America. What I mean is that this Main Street is not modeled after any one street – it combines elements of Marceline, small towns in Colorado, and southern cities. It’s a romantic and exaggerated version of Americana, but not a street anyone truly experienced. Of course, the nostalgia generated was certainly authentic, and the street undoubtedly reminded people of real experiences. That’s the beauty of Disneyland! 🙂