That classic American small town with a Main Street, big Town Hall, one or two movie theatres, diners, bar, mom and pop stores, etc.
Where everything is within walking distance and everyone knows each other? I find that so cute as a British person – I love that side of Americana.
Did you grow up in one?
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Rich villages located outside of wealthy suburbs in the Midwest. I did not grow up in one but was in one the other day!
There are hundreds of such towns scattered across the country, but they are disappearing.
Outside of everything being within walking distance, those sorts of towns are all over America. I’d say generally the closer the town is to an urban area the more lively and well kept it will be these days. Many of those places have fallen on hard times as people have moved to the larger cities
Rural area of fly over states mostly. It’s usually just a mainstreet or block near a larger intra/interstate road (or just outside a metropolitan area) surrounded by rural area and are usually smaller and more “run down” then what is portrayed in the movies. You can also see similar in coastal communities as well.
Many county seats in Indiana are like this with a courthouse square or courthouse rotary/roundabout. You’ll have local shops, businesses catering to the government workers, lawyers, police, etc… during business hours, a locals only bar, and whatnot.
[Noblesville’s courthouse square often gets closed to traffic during the summer for events.](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.0461191,-86.0135444,3a,75y,2.86h,90t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sVD4xq9-ct03LdPLrIX5Jkg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)
That said only the inner Noblesville neighborhoods are really walking distance to the square. Noblesville nowadays is a suburb of Indianapolis and there’s lots of development outside of Noblesville’s core.
[Salem, IN also has a pretty good courthouse circle](https://www.google.com/maps/@38.6061459,-86.1005476,3a,75y,244.18h,86.94t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sP0E3tQd7wzmFLVo1ZB8oiw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DP0E3tQd7wzmFLVo1ZB8oiw%26cb_client%3Dsearch.revgeo_and_fetch.gps%26w%3D96%26h%3D64%26yaw%3D103.20871%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656), complete with a [24 hour bakery](https://goo.gl/maps/y2Epv8iFPuf9AKxA7).
>Where everything is within walking distance and everyone knows each other?
99% of small towns are like this. I don’t understand the whole “America isn’t walkable” mantra that gets thrown around. All of small town America is walkable.
I grew up in a little town like that in Idaho, nowhere near any cities or interstates. The town has grown a lot since I was a child and now has more businesses spread out further from the central Main Street core area, but it does still have most of the same charm.
Never did know EVERYONE…it wasn’t quite that small. But I’d usually run into at least one person I knew everywhere in town.
Old railroad towns are like this. They’re dotted across the United States. Sadly, a lot of them are quietly dying, but some are trying to reinvent themselves as getaway destinations.
I live in a small coastal city that’s fairly similar. I’ve also visited several smaller coastal cities in other states that have the same vibe. It’s actually funny my mother in law was just saying how she shops at another grocery store that’s a little farther away from her simply because she can get in and out without running into anyone that knows her. Small town problems!
There are hundreds, if not thousands of such towns all over the US.
Everything within walking distance is not realistic, but no movie is going to show everybody jumping in the car for 10 minutes between everywhere.
> Did you grow up in one?
Yep, they’re nice, but not quite like the movies.
There are still a few out there, but they take a bit of work to find. For example I’ve got a few favorites in West Virginia and Georgia.
I grew up in one like that myself, though my hometown kind of exploded with new development, and it’s borderline a major city now. I think what killed the “small town” vibe was when they decided to build a shopping mall. That worked out economically for a while, and turned my little podunk nowhereville into a thriving economy. It was a little bit incredible to see happen in person. The mall is a depressing wasteland now, but I won’t deny that the mall put my little town on the map.
But before the mall was built? Yeah, you’d have to get on your bike if you wanted to visit your friends. If you were in a social mood you could walk to your friend’s house, and wave “hi” at all the neighbors. Maybe even stop in for a chat. The local grandma would always have something awesome “coincidentally” just coming out of the oven. Good times.
A lot of rural county seats are like this.
My parents just moved to a very small town in Georgia. You can walk pretty much everywhere from their house except to the grocery store. It’s definitely a dying town, a lot of the businesses have been closed for years and quite a few houses are abandoned/destroyed. Some of their neighbors are a little pushy about them joining their church. I personally wouldn’t want to live there but they seem to like it.
I didn’t grow up in one, but the towns near mine are like that. Grand ledge, Eaton rapids, Dewitt michigan. It’s a decent place to live because you’re only 15 minutes from Lansing (my city) where there’s like malls and more theaters and bigger stores and stuff like that.
I live in a town like that. Except we don’t have a movie theater. No it isn’t Tampa, but the outer edges of the Tampa Suburbs.
We have a town square area normally hundreds of kids are there Friday and Saturday nights hanging out lots of families too. You see kids outside playing every day. Even the alley I live off of has kids playing in it almost every day.
Couple chain restaurants and a couple local. Had 2 bars but down to 1 at the moment.
Walking distance is questionable but trails and bike paths connect everything. I use a onewheel to go anywhere I need locally even small grocery stops.
The commute sucks but honestly when I’m home I never have to leave.
There’s a super cute downtown in Apex, NC
I didn’t grow up in one but I went to school in two smaller and walkable towns. They were obviously both university centered so slightly different but yeah, at one point I could walk from my house across town and just be waving hi and saying hello to someone just about every 20 feet lol.
You’ll find them a lot in the midwest.
Pretty much any small town or suburban area that was built up to some extent prior to WWII will have a central somewhat walkable downtown area similar to Hill Valley in BTTF.
Those towns dont have everything within walking distance at all.
In fact, you could say bikes are so popular amongst american youths in old movies for precisely that reason
Lawrence, Kansas for me was kind of like this especially downtown. It is a college town, so if you don’t count the students and just go with townies, it has a small town feel. Growing up there I knew pretty much everyone in my age group even though a 2nd high school had just been built. Being involved with community organizations and events helps with this. Church youth groups, boy scouts, youth league sports, band in the park, and having a walkable downtown with non-boarded up businesses.
They’re everywhere scattered around the country.
A lot of what you’re seeing in movies is considered the “oldtown” or “core” of American towns. Most sections like that were pretty extinct by the 1990s, but intentional revitalization in the past 20 years has brought them back. They’re often surrounded by homogenous suburban sprawl, with typical strip malls and big box stores. These oldtown/core sections often have high end boutiques and little restaurants and cafés.
I mean they’re all over America, but the South and Midwest have a bunch of them. Small towns that fell out of favor in the past 20-30-40 years.
If you want a cute 1950s vibe, Celebration FL was designed specifically to house the workers of the Disney company for Disney World, and it has that aesthetic.
They’re all over the place. Many of the cities and towns that are now suburbs of bigger metro areas used to be smaller towns like that. Some of them have done a good job of maintaining or revitalizing their old downtowns, but many haven’t. Even here in Southern California (which people don’t really associate with small towns), there are quite a few suburbs that have little downtowns, but sprawl has smooshed these towns together in ways that obscure their old cores.
The movie actually does a good job of showing the typical evolution of small- to mid-sized towns between the 1950s and 1980s. Marty is pretty amazed at how nice and welcoming Hill Valley’s downtown is when he arrives in 1955 because in 1985 it’s pretty dumpy. It’s dumpy because suburbia hollowed out the town’s old core. And not coincidentally, the suburbs are where Marty’s parents (like many other people) could afford to buy a house in the 1960s and 1970s. Many, many Americans live in places where that happened. The McFly’s suburb doesn’t exist yet in 1955, but we see Marty hide the DeLorean behind the billboard advertising the housing tract that will soon be built.
The cute downtown is actually the Courthouse Square area of the Universal Studios backlot in Los Angeles and has been used for many other movies and TV shows. The last time I did the studio tour, the courthouse was still there, although it doesn’t have a clock on it anymore. More info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courthouse_Square
Places like that that I have been:
Dallas and Monmouth in Oregon.
Prescott, Arizona (until 3 years ago, growth has been exponential).
Bloomfield, Indiana.
Leavenworth, Kansas
Durango and Telluride, Colorado
Santa Fe, New Mexico
San Luis Obispo and Paso Robles, California
America is full of those places. literally most of the country is taken up by places like that. Leave any large metro area and you will find them.
For the most part anyway. Mom and pop stores aren’t very common either until you get into places that have very small populations. For the most part they have all been run out of business by chains.
Walk-ability varies but lots of small towns have a little downtown area around the courthouse that is walk able.
The downtown part of the small town I grew up in was like that. . .30+ years ago in the 1980’s.
The city hall/courthouse, the old movie theater, mom & pop stores, the local newspaper, the diner, a couple of Churches, the old-style pharmacy (even had an old-style soda fountain), the local bank etc.
If you’d been there a few decades before THAT they even still had a railroad station, but they removed the tracks in the mid 1980’s and the station itself was removed in the 1960’s as passenger rail service in the US collapsed due to the rise of interstate highways.
We still lived miles out of town and had to drive into town, but the Main Street area of town definitely was a lot like that.
. . .and it was a town of about 2,000 people at the time, small enough that people generally knew each other, or if they didn’t know you they probably knew someone in your family. We knew the family that ran the local supermarket, and ran one of the convenience stores, and ran the gas station at the end of Main Street.
It’s an ideal, to be sure, but I’m not sure how many towns are still like that.
The places like that are an idealized small town/suburban existence. I don’t know if there are any towns truly like that anymore, but a lot of people grew up in towns that sort of resembled that or were close enough they could relate to it.
Yes, I love them too. MainStreet.org is trying to preserve them.
The up-side is that we generally get fewer Karens. I was working at McDonald’s one day and we has some chick (Maybe 30-something) come in throwing an absolute unholy fit. She was angry when she arrived and just kept escalating no matter what the managers said. For maybe five minutes she kept getting louder and angrier, kicking the floor and wailing like a toddler. It stopped when an older woman in a church-dress swept in and stormed up to her like a roll of thunder.
The woman reached up and grabbed the Karen by the ear and started ranting in a furious but hushed voice along the lines of, “Well I *never!* Sally Jane you know better than to behave like this. *What* will they think at church!? How *dare* you *embarrass* your family this way. You just *wait* until your father hears…” and promptly dragged Karen out of the store still ranting at her.
Karen was thirty-something years old and another *customer* called her *mother* who actually came down and dragged her off.
The down-side is that *someone will call your mother*. Someone once called my mother to tell her they saw me *drinking at a bar with a man*. I was twenty-eight and with my husband. And while the place we were at served alcohol, it was also a restaurant and we were in the dining room, not even at the bar. Mom thought it was hilarious.
I’m divorced now, but my husband’s cousin had an Uncle-step-father. Uncle saw his brother abusing his wife so he shot and killed his brother. When he got out of jail ten years later he married his now widowed sister-in-law and helped raise his now thirteen year old nephew as his own son.
I have an entire Facebook account solely for keeping in contact with people that I strongly dislike but have to be polite to. See, the girl who tortured me in school? Her dad owns the local bank. So I can’t tell her to “fuck off” the way I’d like because that would make me a town pariah. Her aunt is the high school librarian and was my favorite teacher ever.
There’s a church less than a mile from my house (and I’m eight miles from the nearest place to buy *anything)* but my neighbor drives fifteen miles to a different church not because it’s the wrong denomination, but because the lady who does the books for the local church once offended my neighbor in the supermarket and my neighbor now won’t speak to her.
My newspaper comes weekly and has an entire page devoted to “local happenings.” As in, “Johnny came home from the army to visit his family three months ago and now Sally Jane is looking a little pudgy around the middle. Do I hear wedding bells?”
A few years back I hit a buzzard driving home and shattered my windshield. I was chatting with my mechanic about it and the guy working in the next bay went, “Wait, was this out by the old general store, across from the church? That was *you* that hit that buzzard?” Turns out his brother had picked it up and took photos because it was the biggest one he’d ever seen.
That’s what it’s like growing up in or around a small town in America. Everyone knows everyone’s business and feels it’s their duty to get into it and pass it around.
There are benefits and drawbacks, but it’s nowhere near as idyllic as the movies make it out to be. It’s much more like that Criminal Minds episode.
Well if you ever want to visit one, you can’t do better than Woodstock, Indiana. The movie “Groundhog Day” may be set in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania but it was filmed almost entirely in the town of Woodstock, about 61 miles northwest of Chicago. Woodstock meets all of your criteria and is a charming place, and the locals try really hard to maintain the look and feel of the town.
New England towns probably come the closest to the imaginary ideal of a relatively compact area that is incorporated as a town with definite boundaries, has an even more compact town center within the larger town, has school district boundaries coterminous with the town (or with an alliance of two or more smaller towns) rather than being drawn completely differently, and has a general sense of town-ness. (And has real town meetings that, although generally poorly attended, actually cast binding votes on the town budget and such. A frequent TV plot device that seldom exists in reality in other parts of the country.)
But definitely there are deviations from the fictional picture. Most people drive to the grocery store even if theoretically they could not. The church in the town center is probably a Congregational/UCC church that very few people attend. (First they were outnumbered by the Catholic immigrants, and then all churches went into a decline as New England became the most secular region.) Even when I was a boy, largely before multiplexes and definitely long before streaming, the days were long over in which every town had its own movie theater.