A (Road) Trip Down Memory Lane

What would you have found along American roadways in the latter half of the 20th century? The answer lies in Roadside America, a collection of photographs that captures the commercial structures that lined the country’s main streets, byways and highways in that era.

Photographed by architectural historian John Margolies over a span of 40 years, from 1969 to 2008, the Roadside America collection provides insight into what traveling through the country once was like.

Margolies became interested in roadside attractions as a child growing up in Connecticut in the 1940s and ’50s. As an adult, he began crisscrossing America on extended road trips, photographing what he saw: colossal replicas of dinosaurs in Utah and Colorado, grand casinos in Atlantic City, restaurants shaped like giant fish and steamboats.

The collection, held by the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division, consists of nine broad categories, encapsulating different types of structures, scenes and travel-related items.

“Signs and Billboards,” for example, showcases the many styles of advertising throughout the years, from giant neon signs to oversized pizzas and toy rockets. “Miniature Golf” displays the playful designs of the era’s courses: Young golfers could putt their way through and around obstacles of whales, cows, coyotes, houses and windmills and, at one Pennsylvania course, into the base of the Statue of Liberty and out the other side.

As the “Restaurants and Bars” category demonstrates, entrepreneurs were willing to try any gimmick to lure hungry travelers from the road — like the place in New Jersey that erected a leaning Tower of Pizza or the Texas seafood restaurant that topped its sign with a giant shrimp wearing a cowboy hat and carrying six-shooters.

Places like those were symbolic of an ever-expanding and increasingly prosperous and mobile country — and the joy Americans found in hitting the road and exploring it all.