Remembering Roadside America: Preserving the Past as Landscape and Place

6. Experiencing the Past as Landscape and Place

CHAPTER SIX EXPERIENCING THE PAST AS LANDSCAPE AND PLACE Can Roadside America’s rapid and ever-changeful evolution be remembered more accurately?1 How might a very fluid past, and yet one most significant in the American experience, be better assigned historical meaning and thus better sustained in public memory? Material culture is an essential key. The concern hereiswithwholelandscapes—builtenvironmentsexperiencedatscalesbroader than that of mere architecture. Building ensembles have in the relatively recent past characterized places organized around automobile convenience, especially along the margins of streets and highways. Butroadsidelandscapesandplaceshaveprovenmostimpermanent,afeature, it could be said, that has been preprogrammed. Especially early on, Roadside America was quite changeable, being, for the most part, highly experimental given the uncertainties of success. In the early days of motoring, the automobile by no means enjoyed a certain future. Auto-oriented landscapes and places in the United States very much evolved through trial and error. And yet understanding that process, irrespective of the general lack of durable built environment that has resulted, remains important to comprehending how automobility in the United States ultimately triumphed. It appears that the historic preservationist’s approach to remembering early Roadside America has but limited application when it comes to matters of landscape. Preserving significant buildings that are relics from the past, especially in situ, remains important. Such activity potentially contributes much to contemporary environmental diversity, giving today’s landscapes a sense of time depth, and this heightens our understanding of the past. Additionally 172 Experiencing the Past as Landscape and Place it adds visual interest to contemporary scenes. It represents good stewardship whereby architectural resources of the past are recycled toward future use. But the fact remains that such activity, as important as it is, mainly heightens how we experience contemporary places by sustaining elements of pastness that would otherwise be missing. Only in a limited way does it encourage experiencing landscapes or places in ways fully reminiscent of past circumstances. To bring the past—or at least some version of the past—more fully alive, the historic preservationist’s penchant to conserve would seem to require adding something of the museum curator’s penchant to simulate or replicate. If early roadside landscapes are largely gone, then perhaps they ought to be reconstituted in some sense, if only on a limited basis. It is that thinking that has brought us to consider the outdoor museum as a means of celebrating early Roadside America. What would such a museum contain? As important a question as that may be, it is not the purpose here to detail the kinds of buildings and other artifacts that an outdoor museum of Roadside America might contain, as interesting a speculative exercise as that might be. It is certainly not intended to suggest just howamuseumoughttobelaidout—howperiodlandscapesoughttobesimulated as history-based places. Nonetheless the appendix does offer a checklist that outlines the museum elements that future planners might consider in replicating Roadside America as an outdoor-museum display. Why a Museum? There are some eight thousand museums in the United States.2 Do we really need another one? Yes, because what is lacking is a museum—particularly an outdoor museum—that fully explores the automobile’s impact on the American experience, especially its impact on and through built environment. A museum is needed that effectively interprets early-twentieth-century landscapes and places that were specifically auto-oriented and auto-convenient, or, in other words, a museum that considers frontally the rise of Roadside America. As we have argued, nothing has affected American landscape more dramatically than use of motor vehicles. The nation’s geography has been substantially reorganized around the use of motorcars and trucks—what first emerged along the nation’s highways but now dominates life nearly everywhere. Yes, there are car museums. Many old gas stations have been restored. There are old stretches of highway that have been preserved as well. But will such venues suffice to communicate fully Experiencing the Past as Landscape and Place 173 the important historical and geographic lessons fully implicit in the roadside’s rise to prominence? Perhaps the nation’s numerous car museums point the way, especially those that have added aspects of vintage Roadside America to their displays of vintage automobiles. In the Studebaker National Museum in South Bend, Indiana (containing the former Studebaker Corporation’s collection of historic vehicles dating back to the 1890s), a vintage gas pump and the figure of a gas station attendant stands...