The conservation of the street presents a difficult problem. If one chooses to restore a streetscape back to some past period of significance, one almost certainly renders that street useless for the unconstrained demands of daily life. And yet, many of us desire to visit and perhaps even inhabit places that show their age and which maintain their associations with the past, even if these places cannot function completely as they once did. As the contemporary historic conservation movement grapples with ever larger of scalesScale of treatment, from the monument to the district to entire cultural landscapesCultural landscapes, the street appears to be becoming a flashpoint between historicity and modernity. The experience of an historic street differs from both that of a monument and that of a district. The conservation of a street requires a set of treatments that blends those used for both. These strategies must account for the physical aspects of the street, but also engage with its social and economic functions, as nearly all historic streets possess a blend of private and public stakeholders. Early efforts, such as at Charleston, South Carolina, responded to the forces that were endangering that community’s physical fabric, but inadvertently promoted gentrification. The Main Street America networkNetworks’s program is a successful example of a multi-pronged approach to historic preservation and social and economic development that fulfills the preservationist’s purpose in conserving historic streets: to create a living city, a growing organism, in which new must blend with the old to accommodate modern life.