Route 66
An Uncropped View
Route 66 occupies a singular place in the American psyche. It conjures for many Americans the American Identity, a reflection of America’s self-proclaimed freedom and independence. It evokes images of smiling waitresses offering plates of burgers-and-fries, of vintage convertibles running open roads under blue skies, of small town main streets with stars and stripes flying on all sides. For some, the connection is so strong that the Route does not merely suggest the America Identity, it is instead a veritable living embodiment of it, a sanguine artery of the corporis Americae.
Ask this person for his feelings about the Route and you will invariably hear talk of the old days – in the past, America’s past – and how life was back then. You will hear how things were different, people were different, America was different, and oh what a great time it was. It is a rose colored image in the rear view that embodies a core American trait: American sentimentalism, American nostalgia. It is a fond recollection for the way things were – or, really, the way things are remembered to have been. Route 66, in this context, is an ideal, a conjured vision of what was.
That nostalgic vision is reinforced on the pages of books on Route 66 that line American shelves. They conjure the collectively remembered past through carefully framed and curated imagery, presenting readers with neon motel signs aglow in blue-skied dusk, fifties themed diners, and vintage cars, or with “ghost town” remains, faded roadside attractions, and near-past archaeology. To the extent that these books portray people – something they do remarkably rarely – they show an array of thematically dressed waitresses in the aforementioned diners, or an array of gift shop, motel, and museum owners and employees. Missing from these books is any true exploration of the current, complete and real, Route 66.
So what is today’s Route 66? Strictly speaking, Route 66 no longer exists – it was decommissioned in 1984, replaced by interstates 55, 44, 40, and 15. It is thus impossible to travel “US Route 66” anywhere from Chicago to LA. Still, the bones of what was Route 66 remain, and they can be retraced with the help of “Historical Route 66” signage and any number of published guidebooks. But to what ends? To discover what?
Starting with the road itself, the simple answer is this: Route 66 is not what it once was. In many places, the road has deteriorated through neglect and disuse into fragmented shards of tarmac, concrete, and dirt. These broken bits and pieces can be visited and viewed, but they lead nowhere. Where the road hasn’t been destroyed, disjointed, or paved under the interstate, it remains as local roadway, as interstate frontage, and at times as rural dirt back road. Because of the fragmentation, Route 66 is no longer a continuous motorway through America. It is at best a discontiguous assortment of roadway and rubble, running from somewhere in the middle to somewhere else in the middle, disappearing and reappearing in fits and starts. Some segments have lived on, others have died.
The same is true of the cities and towns along the Route. As the interstates came on-line decades ago and Route 66 was decommissioned, the cities and towns situated away from the new interstates found themselves deprived of traveler dollars. Stripped of their economic lifeblood, the communities divided into three groups: the unaffected, the reinvented, and the broken, with cities, in some sense, forming a fourth, distinct group.
The first of the groups – the unaffected – were relatively few. They exist today still, many as middle class, relatively affluent, suburban sub-division communities. Some wealthier residential communities also remain along the Route, including Beverley Hills in Los Angeles and parts of Saint Louis, with stately mansions and well-tended estates. Finally, some towns, particularly in the East, survived the interstate arrival not because they were suburban or urban residential, but because they had economic drivers beyond Route 66 travel services. These towns remained populated and employed, and, in relative terms, economically viable.
Towns in the second group – the reinvented – represent a similarly small minority. Towns like Williams, Arizona and Tucumcari, New Mexico, converted their stretches of Route 66, at least in part, from functional travel oases of service stations, restaurants and motels, into stage sets of period and place, much like a Colonial Williamsburg or a Disney Epcot. In these reinvented towns, tourists can “visit” the past, sipping lattes in a converted 1950’s service stations or lodging in neon-signed motels that once serviced weary cross country travelers. (One reinvented town, Oatman, Arizona, has none of that but does reenact old west gun fights, although what exactly they have to do with Route 66 is never explained.) In many of these towns, refurbished nineteen fifties automobiles not only complete the theming, but put a finer point on the conjured “when” of the place. And in each of these theme park towns, visitors can drop dollars on Route 66 mugs, pins, stickers, and t-shirts, even sodas, in any number of gift shops and Route 66 museums, before taking “we were there” selfies and scooting back to the interstate.
Locales in the first and second groups are the exception along today’s Route, however, not the rule. Most towns fell into the third group, the broken. For these, the interstate arrival and Route decommissioning heralded an economic collapse and exodus of populace so complete that the towns effectively voided themselves of residents. Left behind was little beyond detritus and decay.
Where holdout residents stayed – in nearly deserted towns – they now live largely impoverished lives, finding employment among Phillips 66 gas stations and McDonald’s restaurants servicing interstate rest stops, or at various national big box stores, like Home Depot, Walmart, or Dollar General, found in the next nearest “big” town, the town that continued to flourish astride an interstate while the left-behind town bled out. And while the nearly deserted towns do see a smattering of Route 66 tourists, the tourism yields no economic benefit. The tourists to such places come to see and perhaps to photograph one particular crumbling filling station or some other particular abandoned motel, and then to leave. It is hit-and-run tourism: get in, get a snapshot, get out, without any opportunity for a latte, overnight stay, or gift shop run that brings the dollars to the reinvented communities of the second group.
Finally, the few intra-city sections of the Route, through places like Amarillo Texas and Springfield Missouri, have been molded by a wider array of forces peculiar to cities, obscuring or sometimes even blunting the impacts of Route 66’s demise. The what-once-was is harder to find along these city stretches, as the dearth of Route 66 tourists attests. Yet in the cities, life continues along the Route with little resemblance to the pre-decommissioned days, whatever the cause of the urban change has been.
From town to city, desert to mountains to plains, all of this present day Route 66 is on open display for anyone willing to see. But despite this ready access, the truth is rarely if ever revealed in the books on Route 66. From these books, one gets the impression that today’s Route 66 is either a preserved-in-amber American yesteryear (in places like Williams and Tucumcari) or an archaeological remnants of that yesteryear (in any of the abandoned or nearly abandoned towns). The rest is simply cropped out and ignored. It is American nostalgia.
This book takes a decidedly different approach from these other works. It seeks to show the here-and-now reality of Route 66, the true what-is. There are no sepia toned “ghost town” images, no shot-at-dusk neon motel signs, no vintage cars. Abandoned lots and out-of-business store fronts have not been cropped from the record. Impoverished “we’re-still-here” communities along the Route are not ignored. There are no portraits of costumed staff in them-park recreations of 1950’s diners. No old-west shoot-outs. Instead, there is the truth: images of the place and people as they exist in and around the former Route 66, America and Americans today, “uncropped” and devoid of nostalgia.
Route 66 is dead, long live Route 66.