Is there an ‘original’ street of premodernity? And if so, what can we gain from it? Is looking back an exercise in human utopia or a perfect primer on what to avoid? Is the street before modernity Hobbesian (‘brutish’ and ‘nasty’) or Rousseauan (‘perfectable’)? Or is there no street before modernity? History can be a powerful reservoir of urban possibility, but is also a limited view on what is possible. On the one hand, the history of the streets teaches us what had been and what can be, but on the other hand, there is the danger of idealizing a ‘golden age’ that hides past inequalities. This contribution aims to shed light on what perspectives on the historical street can mean for the improvement of current-day streets.