Modernist Rest Pavilion and Footbridge, Coastal Causeway, 1950s

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Modernist Rest Pavilion and Footbridge, Coastal Causeway, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Modernist Rest Pavilion and Footbridge, Coastal Causeway, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-AC2F58

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Someone in a planning office decided that motorists crossing this stretch of water needed a place to stop, stretch, and admire the view, and so they built this flat-roofed pavilion on stilts, all clean lines and open air, because that was what optimism looked like in concrete and steel at midcentury. The building has no walls to speak of, just columns and a roofline, on the confident assumption that nobody would ever need shelter from anything but the sun.

A handful of figures make their way across the footbridge toward it, dressed for a Sunday outing rather than a hike, because in this era a walk along the water was itself the destination. The cars lined up in the lot behind them are doing what cars did in the 1950s, which is sit patiently and wait to be admired alongside the scenery.

Nobody in the frame appears to be in any hurry, which was rather the point of the whole enterprise: the postwar highway system promised speed, and then, having delivered it, built places like this expressly so travelers could stop using it.

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