Looking through the Lauderdale Library archives one lonely night, wandering from room to room in the Mansion, I came across a box of old postcards, and pulled this one out, showing Main Street, looking south from the intersection of Madison.
Now, when I say "colorful" I have to be careful, because any colors you see here are probably from the postcard artist's imagination. In these days — I'm talking around 1900 or so — postcard manufacturers used black-and-white photographs (well, for that matter, so did everybody else) and then teams of artists hand-colored portions of the cards. But not by actually visiting the places and seeing the colors for themselves.
This made them more attractive, but the colors can't be considered reliable or authentic. I don't know, for certain, if our trolley cars back then were painted a lovely shade of green. But I'm pretty sure that all the people on the street here weren't dressed in black or grey clothing, except for maybe a half dozen brave souls who wandered outside wearing bright green, yellow, or bright orange dresses.
The signs show the former locations of the Pantaze Drugstore on the east side of the street, and the Golden Eagle Clothing Store on the west side of Main. I really can't make out the names of other businesses very clearly, but what does stand out is how many signs you can see here.
When Main Street was converted into Mid-America Mall in the 1980s, one of the "rules" was that all outside signage that protruded from buildings along the street had to be taken down (oh, don't even get me started on that), so workers used torches and hacksaws to remove some really impressive and incredible signs. What a shame.
The other thing dramatically different about this view is the trees — or lack of them. Main Street was obviously a busy thoroughfare back then, so with all that traffic — just look at all the trolleys lined up! — and all the people crowding the sidewalks, there was no room for trees. When the street was converted into a mall, at least they planted trees here and there.
The trolleys look similar to the ones in use today, but other than that, not much from the old image has survived.
