Every election season, we hear a lot about “Main Street,” a reference intended to evoke a sense of universal American-ness. But, as I leaned from Mapping Main Street, there are actually more than 10, 466 streets named Main in the United States. And Mapping Main Street is trying to document all of them! Not only that, they’re depending on collaborators across the country to help. Here is a description of the project, in their own words:
Mapping Main Street is a collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the country through stories, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets. The goal is to document all of the more than 10,000 streets named Main in the United States. We invite you to capture the stories and images of the country today. Go out, look around, talk to people, and contribute to this re-mapping of the United States.
We’ve already got a head start. In May, the Mapping Main Street team packed into a 1996 Suburu station wagon and started a 12,000 mile journey across the country to visit Main Streets. In the process, we took photos, shot videos, and interviewed people. On Main Street in a small town in West Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains, we met a retired man who is fixing up a boarded-up house that was once a hotel for jazz musicians like Ella Fitzgerald and B.B. King during segregation. In New Hope, PA, we sat down for beers with a cop on Main Street who talked about strangest fetishes he had come across in his line of work. We’ve talked with farm laborers and business owners, people out on their porches and people on park benches. We’ve even stood in empty fields…all on Main Streets across the country.
We commissioned bands to write songs for the project. High Places, the Hive Dwellers, Jason Cady and Ian Svenonius collected field recordings on Main Streets and wrote a songs inspired by those recordings. We’ve also started fabricating a Mapping Main Street scuplture that will serve as a mobile art installation and recording unit, enabling people to share stories via cell phones.
They’re always looking for people to contribute to the project, so if you’re interested in them, they’re interested in you!
Moving beyond the borders of the country, check out this quirky little video that demonstrates how people in different parts of the world count cash differently. A cultural nuance that has never crossed my mind!
Photo credit: fdfr66.com
Finally, there’s Atlas Obscura, which bills itself as “a compendium of this age’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica.” Here’s how they describe themselves:
The Atlas Obscura is a collaborative project with the goal of cataloging all of the singular, eccentric, bizarre, fantastical, and strange out-of-the-way places that get left out of traditional travel guidebooks and are ignored by the average tourist. If you’re looking for miniature cities, glass flowers, books bound in human skin, gigantic flaming holes in the ground, phallological museums, bone churches, balancing pagodas, or homes built entirely out of paper, the Atlas Obscura is where you’ll find them.
Recently added attractions include Indonesian jungle tours that center around the world’s largest flower, which smells like rotting flesh; a festival in France in which villagers paint themselves black and white and drunkenly recreate a local, pre-Christian folk tale; and a zoo in New Jersey, the occupants of which are rescued exotic and farm animals. Off the beaten path, indeed!
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