Main Street

Main Street is the central commercial artery of Derry, Maine, a street that runs through the heart of the town's business district and serves as the primary stage for many of the novel's most significant public events, from the apocalyptic rockfight to the final catastrophic collapse of the town's infrastructure.

Geography and Character

Main Street runs through the valley formed by the Kenduskeag Stream, which is channeled into the Canal as it passes through downtown. The street is a key part of the three-way intersection of Kansas, Center, and Main, a traffic rotary described by a Derry News editorial as "conceived in hell." This intersection is where the Canal goes underground for half a mile before resurfacing at Bassey Park. The street is lined with businesses that define the town's commercial life, including the Aladdin Theater, Freese's Department Store, The Shoeboat, and Bailley's Lunch. The street's topography includes Up-Mile Hill, a steep incline that runs from the business district up toward the residential areas, a route that figures prominently in several chase sequences.

Events on Main Street

Main Street is the site of the apocalyptic rockfight between the Losers' Club and Henry Bowers's gang, which spills out from the alley behind the Aladdin Theater onto Center Street and then toward the police station on Court Street. The street is also where the Bradley Gang was gunned down in a pitched battle in 1929, an event that the town's official histories attribute to the FBI but which was actually carried out by local citizens. In 1985, during the final confrontation with It, Main Street collapses into the Canal below, taking with it the Northeast Bank, The Shoeboat, Alvey's Smokes 'n Jokes, Bailley's Lunch, and Bandler's Record and Music Barn. The street's surface cracks and gapes, and the marquee of the Aladdin Theater crashes down. The collapse creates a huge crater that leaves the downtown area impassable and marks the beginning of Derry's physical and economic decline.

Narrative Significance

Main Street functions as a symbol of Derry's ordinary, public life, a space of commerce and community that is repeatedly invaded by the extraordinary violence that haunts the town. The street's destruction in 1985 is a literal and figurative collapse of the town's civic center, mirroring the defeat of the ancient evil that has fed on Derry for centuries. The street's fate—from a bustling commercial hub to a flooded crater—encapsulates the novel's theme of a town that is both a real place and a haunted landscape, where the boundary between the mundane and the monstrous is always thin.