Remembering Roadside America: Preserving the Past as Landscape and Place

2. Observing Roadside America

CHAPTER TWO OBSERVING ROADSIDE AMERICA With the coming of mass motoring, Americans in ever-increasing numbers answered the siren song of the open road, not so much as migrants moving to newplacesorasbusinesspeopletravelingforwork,butmoreasmotoristsmaking use of increased affluence and leisure time to explore the nation’s highways as a form of recreation. Slowly but surely, however, motoring of all kinds came to congest the streets and roads and to affect American roadsides, especially the locations of automobile-convenient businesses. Thus was Roadside America created, a highly ephemeral world characterized by slow but constant change. The quintessential signature of automobile-influenced roadsides quickly evolved: widely spaced buildings, low in profile and set back from rights-ofway in parking-lot surrounds; bold signs announcing driveways at curbsides, and even buildings themselves covered by signs; and then, on occasion, sign like buildings, with iconic structures (sometimes called “ducks”) whimsically shaped like lighthouses or windmills or some such thing to attract attention. On previouslyruralroadsoutsideoftownsandcities,andthenwithinthemaswellon major traffic arteries, commercial strips steadily evolved: thoroughfares where automobile convenience (or automobile orientation) came to dominate business dealings. Although such change came incrementally, a revolution nonetheless was underway, one that would seemingly overnight, at least in retrospect, fully reinvent urban development in the United States. There had always been roadside commerce, but not necessarily in places organized around rapid vehicular traffic. Early in the twentieth century, commercial streets in towns and cities were organized mainly for pedestrians and slow-moving, horse-drawn vehicles, and in larger urban places for streetcars 30 Observing Roadside America also tended to be slowly paced. Along commercial streets, stores with narrow frontages closely clustered. Often of multiple stories, they were set perpendicular to rather than parallel with traffic flow. Signs were designed mainly to attract customers who walked, not just signs placed on building facades or projected out over sidewalks, but those placed in show windows alongside merchandise displayed for the lingering pedestrian to browse. Sidewalks were usually improved, and streets were usually paved, except, perhaps, in the smallest of urban places. Before 1910 motorcars and trucks tended to fit right in whether they were moving up and down streets or parked at curbside. Automobiles in small numbers required no special accommodation. They were not a problem. Most American assumed it would always be that way. Inthecountrysidemostroadswereunpaved,andruralroadsidesforthemost part remained quite unimproved. Fences and hedges, often ill-kept, hemmed in road traffic. On main roads utility poles marched endlessly, their wires tending to dominate visually. In many parts of the United States, the earliest modern rural highways closely paralleled railroad rights-of-way, themselves fully utilitarian to say the least. Road margins, however, were largely devoid of commerce, save for the occasional vegetable or fruit stand or other farm-related enterprise or perhaps, at a key intersection, a general store or tavern. Before 1910 motor vehicles might attract attention for their novelty, but they did not stimulate anything revolutionary regarding land use adjacent to rights-of-way except in urban places. That, however, would not last for long. Improving America’s Roads What motoring did stimulate was road improvement through what came to be called the Good Roads Movement. With the coming of railroading, the nation’s rural roads had for the most part been left to languish under the aegis of county or township road commissions acting for municipalities that were usually quite impoverished and geared only to meeting limited local needs. Much road maintenance was done through corvée labor, where property owners of a jurisdiction agreed to work on road rights-of-way in lieu of paying property taxes. Lacking in almost every locality, once the auto age dawned, were intercity highways that could facilitate long-distance motor travel. In many localities farmers actually opposed road improvement despite the benefits that might accrue in their moving crops to market. The belief was widespread that Observing Roadside America 31 road upgrades mostly benefited big-city, auto-owning elites. For locals such improvements brought mainly higher taxes. Additionally, fast cars on fast roads were a safety hazard for those in horse-drawn vehicles. Farming and motoring seemed to be in fundamental conflict. The smooth, free rush in the winey breeze, By open field and by tangled brake, By curving roads where the stately trees Are mirrored deep in the placid lake, Past town and village, by farm and stream, Through peaceful valley and rugged glen, Is life that rivals a poet...