Car Country: An Environmental History

Photo Gallery Two

Photo Gallery Two 229 Evolution of typical road sections, 1900–1920. As vehicular traffic on rural roads changed in character and volume, so too did road design: pronounced crowns got flatter, and solid pavements replaced earth and gravel. From Federal Highway Administration, America’s Highways , 383. 230 An annotated aerial photograph of University City, Missouri, early 1930s, highlighting development according to the city’s zoning plan. As interwar city planners embraced zoning, they unintentionally wove greater transportation requirements into newly developed landscapes by segregating land uses into distinct single-purpose zones. Papin Aerial Service, St. Louis, from Bartholomew, Urban Land Uses, ii. A typical traffic-flow map of the era produced by Miller McClintock’s Erskine Bureau, 1930. Interwar traffic engineers responded to the crush of automotive traffic by systematically applying traffic-control techniques , ranging from stop signs to automated traffic lights, to create coordinated systems for traffic circulation across entire metropolitan regions. From Albert Russel Erskine Bureau, A Traffic Control Plan for Kansas City (Kansas City: Chas. E. Brown Printing Co., 1930), 56. 231 232 New houses in a car-oriented suburb, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1935. As real estate speculators began marketing areas without access to the streetcar system to motorists—note the driveways providing offstreet parking—residents of such areas relied on their cars to maintain easy access to important institutions and services. Carl Mydens, courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, lC-Usf34-000647-D. 233 Downtown Omaha, Nebraska, November 1938. Parking meters proliferated in the late 1930s as their dual benefit to cities became clear: they increased the turnover of prime on-street parking spots and created a reliable new revenue stream for city governments. John Vachon, courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, lC-Dig-ppmsca-10438. 234 Hi-Way Sandwich Shop, outside Waco, Texas, 1939. A legion of entrepreneurs followed swelling interwar traffic onto the nation’s highways, creating what the writer James Agee dubbed “the Great American Roadside”: a seemingly endless proliferation of gas stations, restaurants , bars, roadhouses, and overnight accommodations aimed at attracting the business of motorists. Russell Lee, courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, lC-Usf33-012503-m5. 235 “Sold into Slavery,” 1929. The cumulative effects of roadside commerce appalled critics who denounced the rampant commercialism as a cancerous blight. “Whole communities,” wrote one frustrated critic in 1928, “ha[ve] been thoroughly grounded in the practice of regarding ‘nature’ as a background for mercantile information.” William Ferguson , from Nature Magazine 13 (June 1929): 1. 236 Structure of major U.S. pipelines, 1929. Whereas coal’s bulk created dependence on rail- and water-based transportation, relatively small pumps could send oil, the lifeblood of the automobile, flowing at low cost through dedicated pipelines from field to refinery. A sort of national plumbing system dedicated to oil and its products evolved in response. Based on Williamson et al., American Petroleum Industry, vol. 2, The Age of Energy, 1899–1959, 342. Cartography by Sarah Horowitz, 2011. 237 “An Earthen Hell,” 1923. Beginning with the iconic gushers signaling a new discovery, oil seeped everywhere from the production process in ways that disrupted aboveground ecosystems. Oil leaked profusely from the chaos enveloping flush fields, contaminating nearby streams and farms, seeping into the water table, and fueling frequent oil-field fires that sometimes raced out of control. Frank and Frances Carpenter Collection, courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, lC-UsZ62-98529. 238 A Santa Fe, New Mexico, gas station’s tongue-in-cheek accounting of the various components determining gasoline’s cost, 1938. Because government assessed a gas tax on wholesalers rather than retailers, motorists could not (and, today, still cannot) see the tax at the pump, rendering curiously invisible the backbone of the dedicated revenue stream that funded the interwar highway construction boom. Dorothea Lange, courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, lC-Usf34-019287-e. 239 Diagram of the wooden parts in the Model T’s closed-body sedan, 1923. The growing popularity of closed-body designs in the 1920s stimulated demand for lumber, putting new demands on distant forest ecosystems. As designs changed and steel replaced wood, however, lumbering operations like Ford’s substantial Iron...