Origin of "rolled up the sidewalks"

Solution 1:

How did the expression 'roll up the sidewalks' arise?

I think that the expression is simply a form of humorous exaggeration, indicating that the people doing the "rolling up" have ceased to welcome foot traffic to their door (or through the town) until the next day. I don't think that sidewalk rolling up was ever a phenomenon in the United States.

Traditionally, many small shops in towns in the United States have had canvas awnings over their front doors and/or windows. The shopkeepers would unroll the awnings with a handcrank every morning before they opened for business and then roll up again when they close for the night. During the day these awnings added a decorative touch to the storefront, as well as providing shade from the sun and shelter from the rain or snow, and thus giving passers-by a practical reason to linger at the store's windows.

Awnings have been subject to municipal ordinances in various U.S. towns and cities for more than a century. From Annual Reports of the Various Departments of the City of Columbus, Ohio (1910) [combined snippets]:

To prohibit the erection of awnings, signs and sign posts, boards, poles or other devices, structures or things in the streets and alleys of Columbus except under certain conditions. Be it ordained by the Council of the City of Columbus, State of Ohio:

That no owner or occupant of any house, store or other building, shall erect or construct, or cause or permit to be erected or constructed any awning, sign, signpost, board, pole, or other device, structure or thing, in front of such house, store or other building, on any street in this city, that shall project over the sidewalk of such street more than eight feet from the wall of such house, store or other building; nor that shall be less than eight feet above the pavement of the sidewalk in front of such house, store or other building; ...

Provided, That no wooden awning or other roof shall be constructed over any sidewalk in the city, but all awnings shall be made of canvas or other like material, and so constructed as to be rolled up to the wall when not in use; and, provided further, that this section shall not be construed or understood as applying to railings or other protection around entrances to vaults, basements or cellars.

Although the most common technical name for the design these awnings is "retractable," they are also sometimes called "rollup awnings"—as, for example, by this company. The rolling down and rolling up of shop awnings is familiar to anyone who has spent time in towns and small cities. It's a representative early-morning activity in Joni Mitchell's 1970 song "Morning Morgantown," set in the West Virginia city of Morgantown:

When morning comes to Morgantown/ The merchants roll their awnings down./ The milk trucks make their morning rounds/ In morning Morgantown.

Because not much else is going on in a town or small city at 7:00 a.m.—no hordes of office workers crowd the sidewalks as they head to work—the rolling of the awnings becomes conspicuous activity—and the rolling up of the awnings signals the end of the town's commercial life for the day.

Suggesting that at a certain time of the evening or night the town rolls up not merely the awnings on its storefronts, but even the sidewalks is a humorous way of saying that there is no commercial nightlife at all after a certain time. It's similar to the old Texas joke, "Nightlife in Waco [Texas] ends when the Dairy Queen shuts down at 6:00."

Another possible influence on "roll up the sidewalks" is the expression "roll out the red carpet," meaning to great someone important with appropriate fanfare and respect. What's rolled out may presumably be rolled up afterward, and that notion might be extended humorously from a carpet to a sidewalk. However, "roll up the red carpet" isn't an especially common expression: a Google Books search turns up only 21 unique matches for the phrase.

How old is the expression?

With regard to how old the expression is, the discussion of "roll up the sidewalks at night" at Barry Popik's The Big Apple suggests that the expression goes back to the very early 1900s at least:

I don’t know if there is a “correct” version, but I’m pretty certain that “roll up the sidewalks” is the older one. It used to be a staple in the comedian’s or writer’s repertory for referring to quiet towns. Small, “sleepy” towns have been characterized probably for a century or more as places where they roll up the sidewalks at night. It has become a very common cliché.

And Jonathon Green, Chambers Slang Dictionary (2008) pushes the probable origin date back to the middle 1800s, in its brief coverage of the expression under a longer entry for sidewalk:

roll up the sidewalk v. {mid-19C} (US) of shops and entertainments in towns or cities, to close down at nightfall.

But actual instances in print from the 1800s seem hard to come by. Popik's discussion of the phrase lists instances from 1922 (in an [Portland] Oregonian newspaper article), 1924 (in an item in The Journal of Electrical Workers and Operators), and 1926 (in a Charlie Chan novel by Earl Biggers, serialized in the New York Post in 1925). A directed Google Books search for these instances finds matches only for the Biggers novel (in reprint form). Green doesn't cite any examples. The earliest Google Books match I could find is from Kenneth Collings, Just for the Hell of It (1938):

After depositing our combined mountain of luggage in the Hotel des Arcades, two newspaper correspondents decided to hire a car and go out to look at the night life.

There is none," I assured them.

"How do you know? Ever been here before?"

"No, but there is no night life. I can guarantee that they roll up the sidewalks at nine every night."

And the earliest match in an Elephind search is from "Collegian Curiosities," in the [Urbana, Illinois] Daily Illini (23 December 23, 1933):

Dartmouth college, one of the granddaddies of American scholastics, prides itself on its magnificent isolation on the banks of the Connecticut. . . . Hanover [New Hampshire] is a sleepy little burg where they roll up the sidewalks at 9 o'clock. . . . And on moonlight nights the village fathers don't turn on the street lights. . . .

An interesting variant pops up in Spencer Bayne, Agent Extraordinary (1942):

The tiled lobby of the modernistic hotel was sparsely populated. Damascus pulls in its sidewalks by eleven o'clock.

Here the rolled-up awning image yields to a withdrawn welcome mat or portable cart image. The same wording appears in Loften Mitchell, "'Home' Makes It to Jackson," in The Crisis (March 1972):

Waites and I said goodbye to Margaret and her family and went to visit Dr. James Anderson. He and his wife, Selena, had a barbecue going on next to his backyard swimming pool. I have never seen so many barbecued ribs in one place in my life. And the lies were so long that I nearly forgot the Jackson State dormitory pulls in its sidewalks.

And Catalog of Copyright Entries: Third Series, Volume 17, Part 5, Number 1, Music, January–June 1963 (1964) lists a 1963 song performed by Al Hoffman titled "Ev'ry Night at Nine O'Clock (They Pull in the Sidewalks)."

A very different theory

John Hart & Susy Ziegler, Landscapes of Minnesota: A Geography (2008) offers a completely different explanation of the phrase:

At the end of a hard day or week working in the snow, most lumberjacks were much too tired to walk into town, even if one was near, during the working season. Most jacks went to work in the sawmills, or back to their farms, when they were paid off at season's end, but some earned a reputation for carousing in bars and brothels. Small towns were said to roll up their sidewalks when the lumberjacks were coming. Many sidewalks were made of boards held together with wire, and the jacks' cleated boots would have chewed them to splinters. (In 1887 alone the city of Minneapolis laid no fewer than sixty-seven miles of board sidewalks.)

Tearing up boardwalks with their hobnailed boots would certainly ensure endless work for lumberjacks. But this vignette doesn't exactly claim that towns actually removed their boardwalks (by rolling them up or otherwise) when the threat of visits from lumberjacks became acute—it asserts only that they "were said to."

Conclusion

As I said at the outset of this answer, I think that the likeliest source of the expression is as a humorous exaggeration of the idea that at a certain time of night, visitors and (especially) potential customers are no longer welcome in a town, neighborhood, or business district. The image of rolling up a sidewalk also indirectly implies that the town is very small, since any large-size municipality is likely to have a lot of sidewalks laid.

The idea of rolling up sidewalks may be rooted in the practice of rolling up awnings in front of businesses at the end of the business day, and may also be influenced by the idea of rolling up a red carpet after using it to welcome visiting dignitaries. Removable boardwalks are a phenomenon in some beach towns and may have been known in the nineteenth century, but whether anyone would have characterized them as "sidewalks" is unclear to me. Still, they may contribute yet another influence to an imaginary phenomenon invoked for startling effect. I find the hobnail-booted lumberjack explanation that Hart & Ziegler put forward highly implausible.

Like JEL, I can't find any nineteenth-century instances of the expression "roll up the sidewalks." But I couldn't find any as early as the 1917 example that JEL cites either. In fact, the best I could do was to confirm a 1925 instance from a Charlie Chan mystery novel. On the evidence turned up so far, I think early twentieth century is a more likely origin period than middle nineteenth century.

Finally, the existence of the variant "pull in the sidewalks" from no later than 1942 suggests that the usage in either case is metaphorical, not descriptive of actual practice anywhere.

Solution 2:

I have not been able to find an original source and the phrase doesn't seem to be more than a century old (and not even that). The OED gives a definition, but no origin.

A comment I read somewhere, however, seemed to make a bit of sense. Rolling up the sidewalks are a simile of sorts; just like you'd roll up the carpet when it's no longer needed, the sidewalks are no longer needed when there's nothing going on, so they metaphorically roll them up.