Can You Curate a Town?

Mr. Resnick, 50, a self-described “country boy” who has the hulk of a club bouncer but favors bright white sneakers and dad jeans, felt the same way. Six years ago, he bought 31 buildings in Mountain Dale — nearly all of them vacant — hoping to revive the town. He knew this required courting a new breed of visitors: weekenders, artists and escapees from New York City’s high rents. But as a high-school dropout who made his money manufacturing grocery store equipment, he didn’t know how to find them.Then a friend introduced him to DVEight, a regional magazine named for eight towns in the Delaware Valley that describes its audience as “a stylish and sophisticated readership interested in exploring modern rural life.”These were precisely the people Mr. Resnick wanted. And so he hired the magazine’s editor in chief, Nhi Mundy, 39, to be Mountain Dale’s “town curator.” Ms. Mundy’s role is to turn Main Street into a living version of the magazine. “If a museum does it, why can’t I do it?” Mr. Resnick said. Curating a town as one might an art collection is not a lonely pursuit. Wealthy individuals like Mr. Resnick, well-funded nonprofits and even corporations like Walmart have begun buying deserted American main streets, hoping to reinvent them with a fresh aesthetic. The people behind these ventures frequently install their friends and acquaintances in storefronts, while attempting to preserve (or exploit, depending whom you ask) local history. The practice is rarely free of conflict, even when developers have the best intentions.“Everybody in this country says Main Street America is dead. It’s a bad investment,” Mr. Resnick said. “I’m trying to recapture what I had as a kid. Everything was alive, every store was open.”And yet marketing the romance of rural living to city folk can seem like an affront to locals who are dealing with serious socioeconomic decline. Monson, a town in one of Maine’s poorest counties, was gutted a decade ago when the local furniture factory closed. Then a nonprofit called the Libra Foundation purchased 28 properties in town, hoping to create an artists’ retreat and, eventually, encourage painters and poets to settle there permanently.