Main Street in Antioch, IL.

    Antioch, IL -- If you are looking for the quintessential American Main Street you don’t have to look any further than Antioch, IL, where we are staying while visiting Roxie’s cousin and his wife. It’s got the tree-line thorofare complete with park benches, wide sidewalks and a historic monument or two for good measure. 

    What’s most impressive is that there are actually thriving, year-round, small businesses in every building. Along with the usual pubs, small restaurants and bakeries, there is a tattoo shop, dog groomer, stock broker, tile broker, movie theater, hobby shop, coin dealer, a folk music hangout with tables with chess boards out front even when they aren’t open, some antique places and a consignment store. An old granite bank building is now a Mexican place, and the former Masonic Hall contains unique shops and a florist. I counted more than 50 shops in just a one-block area. The place is thriving, even with the usual commercial strip of chain restaurants and retailers, including Wal-Mart, right on the outskirts. 

    It’s a sharp contrast to home in Bar Harbor where, the only locally-owned, year-round retailers are Ace Hardware, Sherman’s Bookstore, Cadillac Mountain Sports, and Window Panes. The rest of downtown is pretty much dried up and dark from November until April. The irony is that the shuttered store fronts in Maine are not symbols of economic hardship—quite the opposite. The places are dark because folks can make a year’s income in just a few months and don’t need to be open the rest of the time. Empty commercial structures in Bar Harbor don’t signal hard times or lack of demand, they testify to the fact owners can hold onto them for months and months awaiting a buyer willing to pay “crazy money.” 

    In talking with folks in Antioch it seems the general prosperity of the area, just an hour north of Chicago where there are plenty of good jobs with high incomes, certainly helps. Merchants explain that rents are reasonable—unlike Bar Harbor. They aren’t forced to sell inexpensive merchandise at high prices, just to cover overhead. To be fair, where Antioch isn’t hemmed in by an ocean and a national park, there is a much larger surrounding population for businesses to draw from although it probably doesn’t equal the buying power of 4 million tourists. Antioch residents value these year-round businesses, make an effort to patronize them, and wouldn’t want it any other way. 

Monument in downtown Antioch, IL.

    Plus, parking is plentiful and free which certainly helps. 

    As part of our Mid-West explorations on Saturday, we crossed the border into Wisconsin three miles north of Antioch so we could “tag” another state. We went to the Reef Point marina in Racine to spend some time on Ernie and Kathy’s cabin cruiser Cooler on the Lake used for adventures exploring Lake Michigan from Chicago to Milwaukee. Our brief foray into “America’s Dairyland” was fun although the transitory exposure to the land of the cheese heads did little to dissuade me from my belief that Green Bay Packers Quarterback Aaron Rogers did a sucky job earlier this year guest hosting on “Jeopardy.” Still you’ve got to love a place where every couple of miles bright yellow and black signs pierce the darkness advertising the availability of “Cheese and Brats.” 

    But even this bucolic landscape is going through historic changes. For miles and miles along the Interstate Highway, farm fields stretch to the horizon in every direction the flatness punctuated by the occasional bulbous water tower or two. The waves of corn are like a terrestrial twin of the lake, just a few miles east. However, thousands of acres of fields that once provided feed for dairy farms, are being plowed under for massive structures (some as large as 300,000 to 400,000 square feet with multiple buildings on each campus), to house the giants of the tech era such as Amazon. 

    All small towns have their charms; all have their challenges. In the end I guess every community just has to try and figure it out as it goes.