 Good morning and welcome to Moments with Melinda. I'm Melinda Moulton your host and my guest today is Mary Means. Mary, thank you for joining me. I know and it's such a delight because everything that's going on right now has pertained so much to your life's work. So let me share with my viewers a little bit about who you are. Mary Means is the retired owner of Mary Means and Associates, a small but mighty community planning firm that earned a strong reputation for building bridges between plans and people. Mary conceived the Main Street Project, which had the bold mission of demonstrating economic development within the context of historic preservation. This pilot project evolved into Main Street America. In 2021, Mary wrote Main Streets come back and how it can come back again. And the National Trust for Historic Preservation gave Mary the 2020 Louise DuPont Crown and Shield Award. And Mary is presently working on her memoir. Is that about right? That sounds quite good. So I also want to talk to you today about your life and working to help save downtowns. But I want my viewers to know that you and I met when we were serving on the Orton Family Foundation together. And we also just had a little bit of time together down in Washington, DC. And so, Mary, let's start with talking about you as an award-winning community planner. Let me turn this off. As an award-winning community planner and innovator. Oh, there we are. Okay. Are we back now? Good. Okay. So I want to talk to you about you are an award-winning community planner and innovator. And you sparked and inspired this movement in Main Street revitalization for nearly four decades. Can you share with my viewers a little bit about your childhood growing up and who inspired you to pursue this work? Wow, that's interesting. We're going to go way back a long way. Almost in the 19th century. That's why I grew up in Atlanta when my father was a classical architect, meaning that he might as well have been born in the 18th century. He had a very innate sense of classical proportion. We thought that the last decent design he's done about 1852 is a pretty rigid opinion. My mom was a nurse. I grew up with good childhood in Georgia. I can remember when he asked me things that might have influenced my path. First of all, I could my father do. But I can distinctly remember about age 11 or so. Going to Mr. Fisk's Toy Store. This place on Peachtree Street at 10th Street in Atlanta. And mom would kind of park us there while she went shopping for groceries next door. And Mr. Fisk treated me and my brother and sister. They were all little, like the customers that we were. And he really respected our opinions. He would let us informally have lay a way so we couldn't afford the 75 cent toy that we needed that week. So when I come back a week or two later and get it. And I think it was embedded in me is this is my image of small businesses and how distinctly different they are from the businesses that are networked or operating as part of remote ownership. So that was part of what got me into this. And when I was hired by the National Trust and start preservation in 1973, to go out and open the first, the second of the National Trust regional offices. This one was free in Chicago to cover the Midwest, loving the Western States. And I said, what am I supposed to do? That's my job. And they essentially said, we're gonna make historic preservation happen in the Midwest. Great. So I did it out to do this. I'd not go to college in the Midwest, but that's about all I knew about. And then when a matter of a year or so of driving around the Midwest and not speaking, meeting with a very, very clutching preservation, was able to move into these small organizations that were found at the last night to save at Orthouse or something. Thank you. But one of the things I noticed is he based on what is one was there wasn't anything historic in the Midwest. That's what an investor would start. When I would try to talk to them about the beautiful start building in their town, most people would say, there's nothing historic here. It's just old. Historic is Boston and Charleston. But it's not here. And yet, we're coming up with a bicentenary. So I knew that we were not going to be able to sell preservation as the architecturally defined quality that the National Trust and other preservation folks in the 1970s and really, because it just wasn't going to fly in the practical midwives. You can't tell me that's historic. It's just an old building that's falling down. We need to focus. That was one string. I was having a hard time convincing people that it was anything historic. And the second negotiation I made was in addition to really manual buildings like Orthouse and City Halls and things like that, there was also this undisputed or noticed ensemble of buildings, they were kind of ordinary buildings, but together they were something special. And that was the downtown, the main streets of nearly all of these smaller communities. They were being severely impacted by highway construction, there were bypasses around them or shopping centers that were coming in nearby, and then the businesses were trying best to keep it correct. But it was a real struggle and the towns were in danger of kind of losing their form. And it didn't look like anybody was doing anything to reverse this or slow it down. So that's what first got me interested in, not just preservation, but in doing something that you weren't doing yet, because whatever we were doing wasn't working right now. Fascinating. So would you say that that was the time that you realized that you wanted to be a planner and make this your career? No, I think I realized that when you get a subconscious, my dad, when we were in vacations, kids, we tried to go to someplace that had a historic character. I would call it you know, Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, Annapolis. My mom would make sure that it's kid things to be there too. We certainly found Bourbon Street be fascinating to kids in the way that I think my mother appreciated. But I think subconsciously I learned that there were places that were not like suburban Atlanta and small and places that had a tight sense of proportion and reclusive places to be. And I did not know what Bourbon design and landscape architecture was at the time. I just realized it was attractive to places like that. When I got out of grad school, I was very fortunate in being hired by the National Registry of Historic Places, which is only about three years old at the time. And it was very little on it. But that people were beginning to nominate on historic sites and places all over the country. If something became listed on the National Registry, it was protected a great deal from the Federal Civil wiser. Anything that's going to use federal money to alter democracy has to go through a special review process. And that definitely through a monkey wrench and the threads of the bulldozer, but really everything on a large scale at that time had federal funds involved in it. So I realized that these buildings would fall right in line. And these places of character that I love were in danger. I wasn't ready to be an academic historian or to sit at a desk and make decisions about historic buildings. I really had a more activist sense of agency. And I realized that my interest in heritage places and architecture and my interest in doing something about it and making the difference combined and where in this sort of preservation, you know, there was at that time. And that's what led me to it. I later realized that a lot of what I have learned in helping communities find their common interest in a mainstream and doing something about it would be applied to larger grouping groups over similar kinds of things like a plan for a town or a plan for a downtown. So when I left the preservation field and the clinic was open, that's what I worked in was community planning, not just for main streets, sometimes it was for a university that was trying to expand its campus and running into problems with the neighbors. And sometimes it was from whole regions that were drawn from the competitive. But what the thing, for all of it together, was they needed to be able to come from the ground, grab the common sense of direction, and then be able to work together to implement it. And I was pretty good at that. So that's why we did things small but mighty. Let's let's talk for a second, Mary, about the impact of COVID on downtowns and how so many downtowns are still suffering from that input put and that impact of that pandemic, because so many people ended up purchasing stuff online. So we got used to doing that. And do we really need to drive into downtown to go shopping. And also a lot of people began working from home and doing what you and I are doing right now zoom. So the office spaces were empty. And now a lot of businesses are allowing people to work remotely. So talk to me about the effect of COVID on the strength and endurance of our downtowns. Well, the immediate effect of it, I was just in the final stages of writing my book, Main Streets from Death. When the pandemic closed everything in the world, certainly everything in the United States, every business closed down, we all went indoors. We had no idea how long it was going to last or what it was. And my part just turned over. It's like, I've run a small business. I know about cash flow. They're not going to survive this. What has been happening? But within a few weeks, places, particularly the places that had mainstream organizations, and have been working on keeping their downtowns lively for years, were able to help their merchants get online, or to find ways of dealing with those to advocate on their behalf with the Crown government's got allowing alcohol to be sold and delivered at home and things like that for restaurants. So the immediate thing was surprised that we survived even the first few weeks of the pandemic. And delighted to see how well adapting the Main Street communities were in terms of the need to help their local businesses. Let's fast forward as we all became much more that at what we're doing now, while having meaning for conversations and making decisions and things like that, remotely, from overnight, we were sort of advanced 10 years, probably technologically, and grandparents who'd never known how to find anything, all of a sudden, we're living on Zoom or on Microsoft Teams. And that just changed everything. It allowed people to work at home. Where there was broadband internet access, I have to say, because there were lots of votes, you can say, let me continue this way. No, the whole country doesn't have broadband. It might soon, there's been a significant investment in it recently, I can also spawn bother by the pandemic. But once we've learned that we could work from home, a couple of things happen, I don't speak alone, it's positive. But yes, you're right. A lot of central business districts, particularly in larger cities have been hollowed out, because so many of the office buildings, now a bar fewer workers, and they're on irregular schedules. And they have been the traffic that supported businesses and people in restaurants and coffee shops and things. So there's been a real domino effect of its impact on on downtown San Juan City. But I think the other part of that is what we were seeing within 2020 and 2021, was people in larger cities saying, really, I can work remotely, I can work remotely from a small town in Iowa, that has really good schools, a decent cultural life. And it's the and the housing is, you know, 30% of what we're paying here in Chicago or someplace else. So we saw a number of remote workers who could relocate their families to some of the smaller communities. And that really ultimately helped these small communities return to health. Now, in the larger cities, we almost developed the downtown that will respond. We didn't realize I think at the time, we put all the chicks in one spot, we put all of the major office buildings and things in larger cities in the central business district. And there wasn't the kind of diverse uses and diverse times a day, if we might be able to pass it down. So all of a sudden, that's just me. It's coming back. I live in the Washington, DC area. And it's getting better. But one of the reasons it's getting better, is the federal government is working with the District of Columbia government about what they're going to do with getting workers back or bringing up some of the space to be leased out to others and other uses when they work. Not everyone, by the way, not everyone is shopping online. I have to confess, I shop online here. But I also, and many people do this, I really want to feel the fabric, see the cell phone, whatever. So we go into, we tend to also go in and there are a number of places, even Amazon has been open brick and mortar stores around the country. And you're seeing the shift in how retailing is done, that's the ability to move to market. But isn't all necessarily heading to remote shopping completely? No, that's very true. Well, since our audience is Vermont centric, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what you see as the answer to the amount of homelessness and drug use plaguing our downtowns. Just last week, seven days, did a story highlighting the blighted sites in the city, where graffiti is rampant and the effects of social systems breaking down, where drug use and homelessness has taken over really many of our downtowns. But in Burlington, we are really struggling with this. As we speak right now, and there are people, when you talk about going downtown who say, no, I don't want to go back to Burlington because I don't feel it's safe. Now, I'm not saying that that's the case for me. And I'm actually going to be working on a commentary, which is why I'm so excited to be talking to you, Mary. But these small downtowns are feeling the effects of the social fabric in our country that's really being torn apart. Well, it's really true that it would seem when you go into many older cities, that this is the case, that there's far more visible homelessness for un-challenged people. Many of them have pretty obvious mental issues that are not being treated. And they look dangerous, they can look dangerous. Sometimes the blood problem that is real in there, sometimes it's a perception problem. But the perception, as Adonis pointed out, perception often is more important than the truth or it may not be. But I want to get back to the main street movement and talk a bit with this. But it can't solve the issue of we have not been building housing that has been able to be supported by people who are making a very high income in many, many years. And this is not just in New York City, it's a problem across the country. And the second part of that is, of course, is it's only recently that mental health was even considered a health issue that's made eligible in some insurance programs. So we've neglected areas of housing and areas of health, mental health. For such a long time, there's a lot of catchment to do. And I just pleased to see the current administration making bold investments across the board in some of these issues, including investing in broadband, which is going to open up great human potential, and investment in mental health care, and in housing, particularly investment in housing, create housing that isn't just a single family model, it's market grade. And oftentimes, a lot of our historic buildings are turned are torn down for housing, but we'll get into that in a minute. You yesterday, I went to the National Trust for Historic Preservation National Conference at the awards presentation. And I was stunned to see the number of awards that are being given and recognized for converting an old wheel building into housing or converting, is that the other end of housing? How many of them are being done as a combination, mixed income or low income housing? You look at the end of the historic buildings, they've always been, but they're housing dozens and dozens and hundreds of families. That's outstanding. I know they did that in my hometown of Allentown, which is the whole Bethlehem Steel complex, been turned into housing and mixed use. And there's still so much more of that facility, miles of that facility that are being worked on. So now let's talk a little bit about your incredible book, which, Mary, congratulations on your book. Its main streets come back and how it can come back again. And I encourage my Vermont viewers, especially community leaders and people involved in some of these organizations that can help our beautiful Queen City to get a copy. And I'm assuming it's available in local bookstores, I'm sure, and you can probably get it online, but always check with your local bookstore and order it there first. So As I said in the book, of course, you can order it from the obvious sources, but one of them is your local independent bookseller who can get it easily for you. That's right. So I'm going to give a big push for Phoenix Books. I'll bet they get this book for you folks. So you do mention Vermont a few times in your book. And you talk about the demolition of the downtown in Winnowsky, which every time I drive into that city, you know, you can't help but wonder, you know, what happened to that city. And I really agree with you. But I want you to talk about the resilience of downtowns to rebound. And I don't believe many in this country feel that this is going to happen. I think there's a lot of a Malay and a Paul around this. And there is a feeling of desperation as we are seeing more and more businesses move from downtowns out to the suburbs. Can you talk to us a little bit about that, Mary? Well, many things are different in Vermont. I haven't really noticed a lot of things moving out suburbs, but as strong as it was in the 70s and 80s. But when we go back to we're talking about Vermont and smaller communities there. And one of the things that came out of not much that was greatly positive came out of the pandemic. But one thing that did was we had an amazing test inadvertently of the ability of communities to recover from the disaster. They were able the communities that had very active mainstream organizations or downtown and corporate districts and staff and boards and volunteers were able to pivot a lot more quickly and help their people adapt and recover and help the community begin to actively support the businesses and the residents of all downtowns. So the fact is that the pandemic kind of identified for us this invaluable use of these organizations in downtowns as what the urbanist group's past calls regenerators, a regenerate somebody's going to have to rebuild after whatever disaster strikes and it's been established a level across a level of experience or working with each other in some of these organizations that can be tapped for wider use when inevitable crises will arise having to be climate or another pandemic or whatever. And Vermont is a wonderful and lawful profession. It's a wonderful woman named Mindy Fulilov who is a social psychiatrist. I've been called a civic shrink but Mindy Fulilov is actually a civic shrink. She has studied the way communities and sort of the organizing of community and people are able to work together and not work together all over the place and she does a wonderful contrast between Vermont's quicker coverage from flooding a number of years back and the struggle posed standard hurricane Sandy in New Jersey in New York in the absence of the kind of community cohesion that Vermonters seem to have. We're not waiting for the rescue three. We figured a way to hack our way across that flooded screen and get to the other side. That didn't happen in other parts of the country. Yeah Vermont does have these incredible organizations and community spirit and soul. But we are struggling and certainly Montpelier was devastated by the most recent flood and they're going to have to figure out how to rebuild. But businesses have moved out of Burlington and they're moving into Essex Junction. They're moving out to Williston and so but I want to let you know that I and a whole bunch of other people work very hard to save our memorial auditorium which is the gateway to Burlington and it was being considered for demolition by the existing administration. Now there's a housing project that's being proposed in that area and with that building and I and I very much believe they will protect that building. Our mall was shut down and the big pit it was literally shut down and there was a big hole the buildings were all taken down the big hole that covered you know two and a half blocks sat vacant unbuilt for seven years. Macy's Macy's which we fought the Burlington Business Association when I was chair we had a great great board and we fought to get a downtown department store and we got Macy's. Well Macy's left downtown when the mall was shut down and that building was vacant until the high school moved in because of toxins at the high school which the high school needed to be torn down so now the high school moved into Macy's but we lost our major department store. So millions were also invested in the renovation of City Hall Park but folks are avoiding the park because of what's going on in the park with a lot of drug use and things like that. So they're and the whole thing about to defund the police which I'm which I know a lot of people are you know on both sides of that that discussion but there's been a lot you know sort of an uptick in crime. So there's a lot of social issues that are pushing this forward but Mary do you believe that we can protect and save our downtowns if we do not first deal with mental illness drug addiction poverty and homelessness? Well I think we have to do all of it at once. A little bit of motion on all of it you can't ignore it because you mentioned these are huge factors and they're huge factors in people's trust that downtowns are safe places to be. These are all places to be. I'm wondering with things like your park when people are saying it's not safe to go there. To me parks and big public open spaces need constant programming organized activities and things stuff that draws people to them and by the presence of a number of people make it safer by the being more more it's only neglected places where bad things happen for the most part because there aren't enough eyes on the street that James Jacobs would say. So I think there's going to there's a whole lot of communities to do more to make there a reason a new reason to be downtown to be together. I want to return to the Macy's point of mind. There's been a really a great deal of restructuring in the entire way we buy things and department stores used to be the anchors for traditional downtowns. There are no more department stores were all expensive purposes these days. Who would ever thought that Main Street would survive when shopping centers are being closed? My favorite is one in Shreveport, Louisiana that's been turned into a mega church. The entire selling church I know with no parking problem. They've got the whole thing as their parking lot. But I digress. So it isn't a matter of just lamenting that Macy's closed. Macy's is closed just about everywhere. And the next question is what kind of active uses can be brought in that can work off of each other and be there? And downtown housing is very definitely one of those. There are a number of department stores that have been converted into housing. I saw an example of it given an award by the National Trust yesterday. It actually was reused as the offices of a regional health organization that brought 700 jobs right into the downtown all working locally. So here's the customers there for all the businesses. I can't give you a four point solution for dealing with the issues that the towns and cities are working with right now. Let me say the first thing that needs to happen is we've got to stop avoiding dealing with issues of housing and issues of mental health and start treating those. I think it's unfortunate the term we fund the police. But I very much believe in the idea of investing investing in the prevention of a lot of this by getting into root issues of mental health. And investing in smart justice. I mean the project is really smart justice. Now do we reallocate our funding to support mental health in our policing? And I honor our police and our justice folks. All in all, I mean Burlington is still winning all these awards. The best place to raise a kid, the best place to go to school. I mean it's still getting all these awards and a lot of this is perception. But perception can really kill a downtown. So that's what a bunch of us are working on. I just want to let you know that myself and a couple of historians are working on a Burlington history and cultural center. And so much of your work is about people learning and understanding culture. So I wanted to let you know that that's happening and I know that my team would love to talk to you. And then I wanted to ask you, Mary, as we're kind of coming to the end of our interview, do you believe that schools are doing enough to educate our young about the importance of place, our humanities, community, and human experience during a time when hate groups are rising and the rule of law in our own democracy is being challenged? Talk to us about your vision of the future of this country, Mary, and how you see us moving through these deeply difficult and challenging times for the last few running out of time. That's a pretty big one. It is a big one but do you feel like there should be more education of our youth about the importance of culture in our communities? It's really enlightening going to the National Cross Conference yesterday. As one of the winners of the award is the school in New Orleans, November 1960, the first desegregation. There were three very brave first graders who endured a gauntlet of angry, vicious white feet as they daily went to school where everyone else was boycotting in school. These three little girls were there. For those three little girls are grown women now, that school building had been boarded up for a long time and was facing demolition. They organized and it brought it back as a history and cultural center and they were there yesterday to receive the award for doing this and one of them said our people everyone needs to know the story of America and America isn't all the polyam Fourth of July stuff. It's got a very troubled history but until we acknowledge that our history it's going to be pretty hard to include it through you. And as a person who's trained in history and I've been a educational historian I guess all my life I couldn't agree more. It's there's such a need for knowing knowing who we are all of us and knowing the good and the bad of all of us and coming out of it so that we can work together. So I'm I'm part of the optimistic and I think one has to be the possible is the last thing that should leave you because if you don't have hope you might as well just not exist. So I'm hopeful that we're going to see some progress and I've certainly seen a lot of it in the years since the pandemic last past year. And I have great I have great hope in our youth too and so I just want to let you know that we did get Amtrak to Burlington so now we have to do that. Right. Certainly Biden's infrastructure bill is bringing a lot of money into the state as you drive down the roads are closed and getting fabulous and again I am so excited about your book Mary and to my viewers it's main streets come back and how it can come back again by Mary means I suggest you get it and read it it's easy to read with great photographs and if you're curious about how we can help our downtowns in Vermont Mary's got a lot of great ideas and thoughts and I'm going to definitely be bringing this to my board for our Burlington history and cultural museum. You're a great publicist for me and I appreciate that. I love Mary I've loved your work since I first met you back at the Yorton Family Foundation and and the main street award the main street project was your vision you were the one who who really spearheaded going into these these towns and helping them to understand that that that they were great and we needed to protect them and you were a leader in that and well I will have to say well I didn't know what I put time and I think how I understood how crazy it was to say this little historic preservation organization can tackle the revitalization of the town's centers if I don't know how hard that was I probably wouldn't have started it but there's nothing like when I even did it you to say let's try something and we'll see if it works and if it doesn't work they've been telling us it wouldn't all along so no fault no loss but it didn't work and I had no idea that it would survive and thrive the way it has so it was 45 years and you and you have helped transform our country in such a such an incredible way Mary and you've and you've been recognized for that I I always believe in the power of naivete I say if you don't know it then you will create it and so sometimes the less you know the better things turn out so Mary I want you to come back to Vermont and to meet my group Elise and Gail who are working on our history and culture museum and I want to thank you for all that you have done for our country to help bring back our small downtowns and the work that you're going to continue to do probably through the rest of your life to ensure that that your work continues I want to thank you for that and thank you for being my friend well it's a joy to be your friend and I I love Vermont and I would love to come and see what you're doing do anything I can to help it help against it thank you so much for today thank you my dear and we will be in touch soon have a good day to my viewers and I will see you shortly bye bye