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"...the long concrete path across the country, waving
gently up and down on the map, from the Mississippi to Bakersfield"
— John Steinbeck, 1939
The Grapes of Wrath
"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier
watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land
that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast,
and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it..."
— Jack Kerouac, 1954
On the Road
According to my research, much of the initial planning of the interstate "freeway" system was done in the 1920s, with the original intent being to replace US highways with "Interstates" as soon as practical. This contradicts the popular myth of the beloved highways being unsentimentally swept away after Eisenhower came back from fighting World War II in Germany having seen the Autobahn.
But it can't be denied that the U.S. highways are perhaps the most beloved transportation system in the country today. It is similar to the way railroads were beloved in the 1950s. Media guru Marshall McLuhan claimed that a "medium" is invisible until it becomes obsolete, and then it turns into an object of nostalgia and preservation attempts. We see this in the history of transportation technologies. Since Route 66 was officially decommissioned as part of the U.S. highway system in 1984, it has become the rallying symbol of highway preservation, and through citizen pressure the "National Historic Highway" designation (the brown signs) was created. This designation has since also been applied to US-80, US-99 and US-101, with surely others to follow.
In the final analysis Route 66 isn't really that important in and of itself (though I'm a huge fan, don't get me wrong); it is as a symbol of history, preservation and cultural memory that it is significant. In pondering its significance, I came up with this list of "paradoxes of Route 66" (inspired by a table of Robert Venturi's which we shall see later):
| then | now |
|---|---|
| path of least resistance | dead-ends and double-backs |
| symbol of the future | symbol of the past |
| escape from community and history | rallying concept for community and history |
| path to a destination | a destination in itself |
| temporary expedient while interstates planned | permament memorial to a life now gone |
| boon to those who want to be mobile | boon to those who want to stay put |
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Last update 12:37 PM Fri. 27-Feb-2004 by ABS.