Why America Abandoned the Motels of U.S. Route 1

In the summer of nineteen fifty nine, a family from Cleveland packed a station wagon, drove out of Ohio on U.S. Route One, and took four days to reach Miami. They chose where to sleep each night at around four in the afternoon, on the strength of a neon sign they could see from the shoulder of the road. That was the American road vacation, and the businesses built to serve it stretched from Fort Kent, Maine, to Key West, Florida, along a corridor of two thousand three hundred and sixty nine miles of asphalt that ran through the middle of every town it touched. By nineteen ninety, roughly three quarters of the independent motels along that road were closed. By two thousand and fifteen, most of them had been demolished. The neon signs went into warehouses in Fort Lauderdale and Cincinnati. The pools were filled with sand. The lots were sold for chain drugstores and condominium towers and bank branches. The road itself is still there. Every mile of it is still open to the public. The country that drove it is the thing that went missing, and to understand how that happened, you have to go back to a decision made in Washington on the twenty ninth of June nineteen fifty six that changed what the word road meant in America.