Whenever Lileks posts an entry Main Streets: Remnants of the American Downtown, I like to check to see if I’ve been there before.
And I have:
- Berryville, Arkansas in 2021 and 2024–and remember to carry cash, because a couple of places on the square, including the book store, did not take credit cards into the 2020s
- Sarcoxie, Missouri (which he posts about today). Sarcoxie is the exit you take off of I44 if you’re going to a middle school basketball game in Avilla, Missouri, which we did a couple of times. You can take US96 due west, or you can take I44 southwest and get off at Sarcoxie and then take US37 north. They take about the same amount of time due to the higher speeds but greater distance via I44. A couple times, though, when going the I44 route, we stopped in Sarcoxie. Sarcoxie is one of those pseudopod towns where the big highway runs outside of the existing town, so the town annexes land to reach out to an interstate interchange. We’ve eaten at the gas station Subway more than once. One time, we went south into town itself and could not find somewhere to eat, so we probably ended up at the gas station Subway again.
I definitely have better chances in southern Missouri than Wisconsin because I’ve had more time to wander in a car down here, but if he picks a distant suburb of Milwaukee, I might have a chance. Although many of them do not have the traditional downtowns because they’ve grown up later.
