Main Street: How a City’s Heart Connects Us All

How do Main Streets contribute to our mental health? To answer that question, Mindy Thompson Fullilove '71 visited 178 cities in 14 countries. What she observed revealed how Main Streets are shaped for a vast array of social gatherings and processes and how they serve as a marker for the integrity of civilization. Main Street: How a City’s Heart Connects Us All concludes that Main Streets are essential for gathering people and sharing information—and emphasizes that tending our oft-neglected civic and commercial centers is very much worth the effort. (New York University Press, 2020)

Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, is a board-certified psychiatrist. She conducts research on the health effects of urban processes. She is a member of the faculty at Columbia University, and chair of the Board of Directors of the University of Orange.