Remembering Roadside America: Preserving the Past as Landscape and Place

Preface

PREFACE How is early Roadside America to be remembered? Along almost any urban thoroughfare or rural highway in the United States today, there are relics left over from the early days of motoring—something derelict and essentially abandoned, something still standing but substantially modified in reuse, or, more important, something fully restored as if back to its original glory. It might be a gas station, for example, that has been turned into a lawyer’s office on a city street near downtown, or it might be a tourist information office located at the edge of a smalltown.Or,forthatmatter,itmightbelovinglyrestoredasamuseum,perhaps by an enthused collector of vintage cars or maybe by a local historical society. Hard—if not impossible—to find, however, are building ensembles variously surviving at the scale of landscape or place. Yes, a building here or there offers a sense of time, a depth, to a contemporary scene. But whole roadsides surviving even from but a few decades back are not to be found. Roadside America by its very nature has been, and remains, ever changeful. The automobile’s historical impact on life in the United States has been most significant and deserves to be well remembered. Perhaps nothing else has made as great an effect on built environment in the United States as automobilty. Use of cars and trucks over the past century has virtually remade American geography, particularly by turning cities inside out and pushing them ever outward through suburbanization, even congealing them together as giant conurbations. Small towns caught in the flux of big city expansion, or otherwise located favorably along highways connecting the nation’s metropolises, have been restructured through growth; towns bypassed, on the other hand, have been re-formed more through decline. Central to this process, the commercial strip with its gas stations , drive-in restaurants, motels, and literally every other kind of retail entity xvi Preface has made life convenient for those employing automobiles. But how are Americans to remember how it all came to be, especially if little evidence of automobility ’s early decades survives and especially on the scale of landscape or place? Will Americans fully understand how the early allure of automobile convenience translated commercially into roadside opportunity? It is doubtful that admiring isolated architectural residuals will fully suffice. Or for that matter, what of viewing old photographs; films or reading travel diaries, short stories, and novels; or even singing old songs that early Roadside America inspired by way of popular culture? We think there ought to be more. We advocate remembering through material culture constituted via landscape and place. This book is intended for the general reader, especially the reader with an abiding interest in the American past as expressed through evolving landscapes and places. So also might public historians, historic preservationists, and museum curators find interest, since we write to extend their work. We offer straightforward prose, supplemented by a generous use of photographs, to report on Roadside America as a particular kind of landscape or place in the American experience and to pose a line of argumentation regarding how its past might to be better remembered. We deliberately avoid the jargon of social theory (or critical analysis) so fashionable among many scholars in both the humanities and the social sciences today. Offered instead is our personal take on what little survives from the early days of motoring along the nation’s streets and highways, why protecting what does survive is important, and how those resources might best be interpreted by way of lasting cultural record. We consider the automobile as technological instrument, the motorist as seeker of roadside convenience, and the roadside entrepreneur as commercial provider of that convenience. Change has always been a fundamental aspect of life in the United States. And in recent decades new ideas and new technologies, and thus new ways of doing things, have come to the fore with ever-increasing frequency and rapidity. Ours is indeed a world of ephemerality. We see change in our surroundings everywhere . But nowhere, we assert, has change been more apparent than in landscapes and places affected directly by automobile use. It been has especially true of Roadside America, the focus of this book. The internal combustion engine, and all the other technical innovations associated with putting that technology on wheels, wrought a revolution in American life, the effects of which play out through an ever-accelerating restructuring of American geography. It is not just [18.189.170.17] Project MUSE (2024-04...