Main Street of a Western Highway Town, Intermountain West, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Main Street of a Western Highway Town, Intermountain West, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Main Street of a Western Highway Town, Intermountain West, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1953–1959

AA-2026-D26320

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Somewhere in the arid intermountain West — Nevada, Wyoming, or southern Idaho are all credible candidates — a two-lane highway widens briefly into a commercial strip and calls itself a town. The log-cabin motel on the left, complete with a wagon-wheel sign, was built on the precise theory that a traveler who had been staring at sagebrush for three hours would pay extra to sleep somewhere that looked like the frontier, even though the frontier had running water and a vacancy sign. Across the road a coffee shop advertises itself with the confidence of an establishment that knows it is the only coffee shop within forty miles, which is a business model that requires no further refinement. The whole strip exists because U.S. highway travel in the 1950s turned every stoplight-free corridor into a franchise of the same American roadside economy: motel, diner, gas, repeat. Within a decade the Interstate Highway System would reroute through traffic around exactly these towns, and the wagon-wheel motel would discover that authenticity is less compelling when nobody drives past it.

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