The Brooklyn Rail

I grew up surrounded by nostalgia that didn’t belong to me. It arrived secondhand in images and objects from my parents: 1960s TV shows (The Munsters, Gilligan’s Island, and Jonny Quest), along with a rotation of classic cars in the driveway. Most vividly, they spoke of the motels they stayed at during road trips along Route 66 and showed me hand-rendered postcards of turquoise pools and neon signs. The postcards were beautiful. I always wanted to know if they were real. Images last forever in memory, materials cannot.

In the summer of 2025, I set out to recreate the iconic Route 66 road trip memorialized in popular culture from the 1930s to the 1980s, in films movies such as It Happened One Night (1934), Detour (1945), Easy Rider (1969), Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). I imagined driving the trip in a car from the sixties or seventies. Instead, I rented a more modern steed. I started in Amarillo, Texas, driving through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California before I reached the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, a journey that lasted five full days.

Route 66 connects the Midwest to the West Coast. It was especially important during The Great Depression, as migrants escaped the Dust Bowl with dreams of better lives in California. Over the years, the route became synonymous with road-tripping. If you were between eight and twenty-eight years old in the 1930s through the ’80s, you most likely drove Route 66, or a version of it. In 1964, there were sixty-one thousand motels in the US to serve travelers looking for quick, inexpensive roadside accommodations. Families would stop in for the night, exchange stories from the road, and continue driving in the morning. Those trips, and their stories recollected afterwards, helped render Route 66 into a national image of American expanse and abundance.

Today, large portions of Route 66 have been absorbed into Interstate 40; part of the interstate system established under the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, created by Dwight D. Eisenhower. Finding the original road now involves searching for poorly marked exits and alternate names. As a result, I was forced into a continual conversation with the interstate. I-40 is smooth, fast, and flat, blurring together the landscape and the “fast food towns.” Route 66 drips in nostalgia, by contrast, and slows everything down. One feels the undulating topography beneath the car. At sunset, saguaro cacti cast long shadows across the asphalt, while mountain silhouettes and clouds merge into an undefined mass. Route 66’s magic lies in its slowness; the dread of I-40 is its speed.

The difficulty in locating the original road stems from its fragmented oversight. Responsibility was split: the federal government funded the route and the interstate, while individual states managed the construction. Without standardization, each state built its portion differently using varied methods and materials. Subgrades ranged from compacted earth to gravel, with a 4 to 6-inch base layer made from brick or concrete. These are typically topped by a thin layer of asphalt, which was uncommon in 1938. It was these very inconsistencies that led to the creation of the Interstate System in 1956 under Eisenhower. Unlike Route 66, the Interstate enforced a strict standardization: 8 to 12-inch concrete bases topped with multiple asphalt layers, consistent across all states. Maintenance of the roads reveals a similar divide. I-40 is consistently maintained by state agencies, while Route 66 is not. Within towns it becomes the “Main Street” and is maintained locally; outside them, responsibility often disappears, leaving stretches overgrown or impassable. This uneven division explains the confusion I encountered beyond city limits.

Motels are the architecture of fast mobility, designed for travelers who arrive late, leave early, and rarely return. I documented twenty-two motels built between the 1930s and the 1970s, all located off or near Route 66. Their present conditions range from pristine to dilapidated. The sign is often the definitive image of the motel: outsized, graphic, and suspended between road and sky. Travelers once sent postcards home depicting the motel façade and its sign. Over time, it is often the sign, not the buildings that remains fixed in memory

Signs are easier to remember and retell because they condense a place into a single image. The De Anza Motor Lodge in Albuquerque, New Mexico, made this especially clear to me. Built in 1939, it was known for its distinctive architecture and its association with Charles Garrett Wallace, who collected Zuni tribe art and pottery. When I arrived, I was greeted by a slew of “strip mall-like” services such as a lawyer’s office, a dentist, and other small businesses. Only after some frantic research did I realize that the motel had been demolished in 2017–18 and replaced. What remains is the restless ghost of a building, memorialized through the sign. New Mexico has several heritage programs dedicated to preserving Route 66 history administered by the National Park Service, some of which are primarily dedicated to the restoration of its signage. It is remarkable that Albuquerque and other cities celebrate these unique pieces of roadside heritage, while much of the architecture they advertise has disappeared.

The image of a place ultimately shapes its relevance. Motels embodied the impermanence of the traveler: drive, sleep, drive. That transience was reflected in how they were built—quick, economical structures made of stacked cinder blocks painted with vibrant colors, and interiors finished with vinyl. Once I-40 diverted travelers away from Route 66, many of these motels lost the steady flow of guests that once sustained them. Motel owners explained they couldn’t justify major repairs if they will never recoup their investments. The results remain visible: holes in the floor, insects, mold, poor patch jobs, peeling paint, and cracked toilets. The motels aged poorly, but the images attached to them remain vivid.

In Gallup, New Mexico, the El Rancho Hotel is thriving, while many of the other motels around it slowly fall into disrepair. Historically, the hotel hosted celebrities during the filming of Hollywood movies from the 1940s through the ’60s, including the likes of Jane Fonda, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, John Wayne, Rita Hayworth, and Ronald Reagan. People do not stay here because of the size of the rooms, the amenities, or even the location. They stay here because of the mythology attached to it because movie stars once temporarily called it home. That mythology has preserved El Rancho while the other motels around it must rely on their sign and nostalgia.

Recreating the famous road trip based on someone else’s nostalgia proved disorienting. The motels and the road rarely resembled the postcards or movies I grew up seeing. As Elvis Presley once claimed, “It’s hard to live up to an image.” Nostalgic memory and physical reality rarely align, especially not ninety years later. But images have a strange endurance. Long after buildings deteriorate or disappear, the pictures people carry—postcards, signs, stories, bits of neon—continue to circulate. The Route 66 I encountered could not have existed in quite the way it was imagined from the 1930s through the ’80s. If anything, the road now holds a layered history: motels, preserved signs, demolished buildings, and the memories that continue to shape how the place is understood. Images cannot decay, but the material that produced them can.