Average house on Main Street in Castroville

A short residential street on the edge of the highway. We start taking photos and striking up conversations. Halfway the block, we hear a man calling at us to come back. Clearly not thrilled with our presence and his arms taught at his waist, he asks, “Is there a good reason why you’re taking pictures of my house?” I responded with “Yes!” and then I explained. He said, “With what I’m trying to do here, I can’t have any pictures posted of my house.” He was really upset. We didn’t ask “what he was trying to do here.”

A few houses down, we met a much friendlier soul. He told us his block of Main Street was safe but one block farther down the street it got dangerous. Maybe it had something to do with what people were trying to do over there.

We headed to this town because we’d heard about Full of Life Flatbread restaurant, a place that’s only open on the weekends. During the week, they survey local farmer’s markets to buy up fresh produce and conceive the next weekend’s menu. Before sitting down, we traveled up and down Main Street (1 block away), a residential street dead-ending into a field with central-coast vineyards lining the distant hills.

S&M Liquor

As we continued up Main Street out of the city limits through Lincoln Heights we passed the LA river and then spotted a mural of the Virgin Mary and S&M Liquors. We had to stop. When we pulled into the parking lot, we immediately met Rico. He asked me if I’d seen the fire down the block and warned that this was one of LA’s craziest corners. Before he had even finished his sentence, a woman in cut-off jeans shorts with stringy bleached blonde hair shot out running across the street while screaming at the top of her lungs at a man who has picking up the pace as she gained on him.

“See?” said Rico.

As we drove a few blocks further, we passed a wonderful, stoic, smiling older man selling peanuts and rainbow umbrella hats.

He smiled at us when we drove by.

Main Street crossing the LA river.

This very well might be the longest Main Street in the country. It spans from the northeastern edge of the city through downtown and then straight south almost all the way to Long Beach. We started our short tour downtown and made our way north towards the LA river.

Food warehouse along Main Street.

Up past the freeway overpass, we noticed a wild, decaying mural advertising some form of Wholesale market. We knew we had to stop. The parking lot was packed with people bustling in and out of this giant warehouse. Amidst the traffic, we noticed a man with a fishing net engrossed with a tiny coy pond cut out of the concrete sidewalk. It was unclear whether he was really trying to get a coy fish to eat (can you even eat coy?) or just practicing his own form of relaxation amidst LA’s chaos.

Surprising place to fish in a coy pond.

After walking past this man, we entered the largest wholesale food market we’d ever seen. It felt like a mega Wal-Mart shipping warehouse that served all of the larger LA’s regions Asian food establishments. People were traveling on forklifts between massive freezers and rows and rows of large boxes. In the meat freezer, you could buy an entire frozen pig head. In the dried food aisles, there were heaps and heaps of mushrooms and salted fish.

Inside the warehouse.

Sometimes when you’re living amidst the numbered blocks and wide avenues of Manhattan it’s hard to imagine that sleepy little towns exist just a borough away. So I enlisted a friend and decided to take the road slightly less traveled (Route 25A) and explore the Main Streets of Long Island’s North Shore.

The convenient thing about 25A is that it winds through towns, often briefly turning into Main Street as you pass through.

On Main Street in Cold Spring Harbor, there are old houses with chipping paint and plaques boasting construction from the early 1800’s which abut refurbished cottages.  Amongst the houses sits Cold Spring Harbor’s Whaling Museum, displaying an old whaling boat and other relics from the town’s fishing days. Richard Timm, the volunteer docent at the Museum, told us that Main Street actually used to be called “Bedlam Street” due to the rowdy drunken fishermen and the mixed tongues of foreign sailors.

Cold Spring Harbor's Whaling Museum

The Whaling Museum, founded in 1936, is surprisingly modern compared to the rest of downtown.  T.V. monitors play old videos of fisherman, a light-up screen shows the paths of whale pods across the Atlantic, and a detailed diorama shows Cold Spring Harbor in the mid 19th century, the days of thriving commercial fishing. The tiny Main Street of old is a tree-lined dirt road leading out to the water where the big ships once moored.

A diorama of Old Main street in the Whaling Museum

Richard tells us that though the museum is popular for school groups (16,000 kids came through last year) the walk-in crowd is modest, to say the least. But Richard still enjoys being there.  “After all,” he tells me “Whaling is the background of Long Island, the culture, it’s the way Long Island grew up.”

According to Richard, Main Street hasn’t changed much in appearance.  But other things have.  “I remember towns before shopping malls when every neighborhood had a little shoe store and a penny candy store. My mother never drove to buy food, she walked down the block!”

“Death” he says.  “So many places have died.”  The towns are trying to bring them back, he says, but it’s tough.

Today my friend and I are the only foot traffic along Cold Spring’s Main Street.  A few cars honk, bewildered, as they whiz by on their way to the beach.