Writing about the Joad family’s adventure from Oklahoma’s Dust Bowl to the California Promised Land in The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck Route 66 is the “Mother Road. “But today, she’s more of an impoverished great-grandmother.
The 2,400-mile highway, which starts in Chicago and crosses Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona before ending in Los Angeles, will turn 83 this year, and doesn’t age gracefully. Fuel stations, abandoned restaurants and counters, vandalized, line its rural s extensions, its long-extinct neon signs. Developers are demolishing original motels to make room for generic skyscrapers. And in places where traffic was once so dense that a pedestrian took ten minutes to cross the street, you can put up a rag and have a picnic, says Michael Wallis, one of the main advocates of steering preservation.
Increased car sales, coupled with the Federal Highway Aid Act of 1921, which required the creation of highway networks, gave the highway a boost. Cyrus Avery, an Oklahoma state highway officer, and businessman John Woodruff in Springfield, Missouri, mapped the direction of Route 66 based on existing trails drawn through Native Americans, explorers, and foot soldiers and, Although it is neither the first nor the longest of its kind, Route 66 is the shortest and most temperate route year-round between the Midwest and the West Coast. After the war, Americans used the roads like never before, and a unique road culture – dinners, short cars, and kitschy tourist traps – evolved along Highway 66 to find them.
“It’s a level where Americans have leveled their aspirations,” says Roger White, truck curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Nicknamed “Main Street of America” through Avery, he encouraged Bobthrough Troup’s song “Get Your Kicks on Route 66”. “(recorded through Nat King Cole and later the Rolling Stones), Jack Kerouac’s beatnik bible On the Road, the 1960s television series Route 66,” and, more recently, Pixar’s animated cars.
The popularity of Highway 66 led to its downfall, with increased traffic beyond its two-lane capacity. In 1956, the law created the interstate system, and for 3 decades, five separate roads diverted segment after segment of Highway 66. The black and white shield markers were removed and, in 1985, Route 66 was officially desired.
But Route 66 didn’t pass quietly. ” I was tired of other people talking about the road in the past,” says Wallis, who in 1990 wrote Route 66: The Mother Road, a historical biography of the highway. Highway 66 remains satisfactory and some businesses thrive among the victims. Ted Drewes’ Frozen Custard post still serves cones in St. Louis; Stanton, Missouri’s Meramec Caves offer tours; and the famous Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, Arizona, still offers an overnight stay at a 30- to 16-foot concrete wigwam. “It’s hard work of love, those motels,” says John Lewis, owner of Wigwam. “I don’t think visitors fully realize the effort it takes to keep those things going on. “
Driving a stretch of road between Albuquerque and Gallup in the 1980s, New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici was saddened by deteriorating gas stations and the completion of family shops. He brought a bill to keep the road. Authorized in 1999, the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program has participated in 86 projects, adding the Lewis Wigwams solution. But while the law allowed the program to earn up to $10 million over its ten-year lifespan, actual credits have averaged about $300,000 according to the year, which is reduced by more than one component through the salaries of two staff members and administrative costs. . ” She did wonderful things,” says Kaisa Barthuli, program director. ” But other people are a little discouraged. “And the ten-year conservation effort is expected to end this year. A proposal to extend the program is part of a bus bill that deserves not to be approved. “We keep our hands crossed,” Barthuli says. We still have a lot of paintings to do. “
Most advocates of the preservation of Highway 66 agree that the road wants money, awareness and a national voice that can speak and act on its behalf. The Global Monuments Fund placed Route 66 on its 2008 endangered site watchlist, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation indexed its motels as one of the “11 Most Endangered Historic Sites in the United States” in 2007. Wallis and others, along with representatives of the 8 national Associations of Route 66, are forming a national nonprofit organization called the Route 66 Alliance to raise funds.
“It’s a wonderful cross-section of American history over those 2,400 miles,” Barthuli says, “if we lose those stories, we lose our sense of ourselves. “
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Megan Gambino is editor and editor of Smithsonian. com and founded Document Deep Dive. Previously, he worked for Outside magazine in New Mexico.