Main Street Versus Mall Street

With the Dow Jones diving 700 points a day and Swiss banks joining the bailout party, America's next top cliche is the question, "How will what's happening on Wall Street affect Main Street?," meaning how will this crisis trickle down to the average guy.

But, as a recent adventure with my mother proves, the comparison between streets is not quite accurate.

Last week, we went on a mini road trip in search of a quaint downtown area within a 30-minute drive of East Brunswick, NJ, and where we had not been before.

The obvious choices would have been New Brunswick, home of Rutgers University, or its neighbor Highland Park. But these were out because we had been there many times. So we began to look on the map. Did Sayreville have a downtown? No. Milltown? One Main Street, mostly inhabited by Dunkin' Donuts and taxidermists. North Brunswick? No. Spotswood? Main Street populated by nail salons, Rite Aid and Dunkin' Donuts (again).

Eventually we gave up and settled on Highland Park, pop. 14,000. The downtown consists of one solitary Main Street running between blocks and blocks of single-family detached homes with lawns. To HP's credit, the leafy downtown area is attractive, with a pretty school building, a pleasantly small library, houses with generous wrap-around porches, and no taxidermists. On the other hand, Main Street is an extension of a busy road in the adjacent town and sitting outside means a constant drone of passing cars and trucks.

The street itself was disappointingly was full of banks, closed restaurants and a chain coffee house selling hotdogs encased in bagels. After walking up and down for an hour and pondering the fate of the recently vanished used book shop, we cut our losses and left.

As I looked out the window on the ride home, I realized that my mom and I had searched for the wrong thing in New Jersey. Rather than hunt for Main Streets, we should have been on the lookout for enclosed shopping malls and strip malls crowding highway frontage. This would have been much easier to find. East Brunswick alone has one sprawling enclosed shopping center, as well as strip malls along every major road - Summerhill Road, Race Track Road, Arthur Street, Rues Lane, Ryder's Lane, Route 18, Cranbury Road. Basically any paved surface gives birth to a strip mall on either side surrounded by oceans of parking spaces.

Here's Mega Movies at the East Brunswick mall, courtesy of a local realtor's Web site.

From the trip, I gather that the only people who really care about most Main Streets in America are apparently Dunkin' Donuts and taxidermists. Therefore, I would like to suggest a change in the national cliche: "We need to think about how what happens on Wall Street affects the mall street."