Remembering Roadside America: Preserving the Recent Past as Landscape and Place

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Illinois Center for the Book

This promethean story and its impact on the shape and pace of life in the American city is engagingly recounted by John A. Jakle in City Lights.

Jakle reveals how artificial lighting became a dynamic instrument that altered every aspect of the urban landscape and was in turn shaped by the growth of America's automobile culture. He examines the technological and entrepreneurial innovations that made urban illumination possible and then explores the various ways in which artificial lighting was used to enhance -- for reasons of commerce, safety, aesthetics, and mobility -- such public spaces as streets, festivals, world's fairs, amusement parks, landmarks, and business districts.

From the corner street lamp to the dazzling display of Broadway's "Great White Way," City Lights offers a lively and informative investigation into the geography of the night.

Postcards of the Night: The nation increasingly was growing more educated, upwardly mobile, and urban, and the nighttime postcard popularized this modernism for ordinary consumption. Coalitions of city planners and urban developers, politicians and the media utilized the picture postcard to strategize the role of the individual in the rise of the city.

It was the birth of leisure and of travel, the new tourist city to which the postcard needed forcefully to speak, in ways that were equal part artifice and art. Signs in America's Auto Age: With an emphasis on how to use signs the authors consider the vast array of signs that have evolved since the beginning of the 20th century.

Instead of reducing the amount of wheeled transport on public roads, the advent of mass-produced cars caused congestion, at the curb and in the right-of-way, from small midwestern farm towns to New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles.

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Lots of Parking examines a neglected aspect of this rise of the automobile: While most studies have tended to focus on highway construction and engineering improvements to accommodate increasing flow and the desire for speed, John A. Jakle and Keith A. Their lively and exhaustive exploration traces the history of parking from the curbside to the rise of public and commercial parking lots and garages and the concomitant demolition of the old pedestrian-oriented urban infrastructure.

In an accessible style enhanced by a range of interesting and unusual illustrations, Jakle and Sculle discuss the role of parking in downtown revitalization efforts and, by contrast, its role in the promotion of outlying suburban shopping districts and its incorporation into our neighborhoods and residences. Like Jakle and Sculle's earlier works on car culture, Lots of Parking will delight and fascinate professional planners, landscape designers, geographers, environmental historians, and interested citizens alike.

Published in association with the Center for American Places. Focusing on recreational travel between and , John A. Sculle cover dozens of topics related to drivers, cars, and highways and explain how they all converge to uphold that illusory notion of release and rejuvenation we call the "open road.

Here, with an emphasis on the driver's perspective, they discuss garages and gas stations, roadside tourist attractions, freeways and toll roads, truck stops, bus travel, the rise of the convenience store, and much more. All the while, the authors make us think about aspects of driving that are often taken for granted: The motive behind America's first embrace of the automobile--individual prerogative--still substantially obscures this reality. Jakle and Sculle ask why some of the early prophetic warnings about our car culture went unheeded and why the arguments of its promoters resonated so persuasively.

Today, the automobile is implicated in any number of environmental, even social, problems. As the wisdom of our dependence on automobile travel has come into serious question, reassessment of how we first became that way is more important than ever. My Kind of Midwest: Stereotypes both good and bad abound about Midwesterners, but in this incisive yet poignant book, John Jakle reveals a rich and telling portrait of the contemporary Midwest and its people.

They were usually grand, elegant buildings where families celebrated special occasions, local clubs and organizations honored achievements, and communities came together to commemorate significant events. Often literally at the center of their communities, these hotels sustained and energized their regions and were centers of culture and symbols of civic pride. America's main street hotels catered not only to transients passing through a locality, but also served local residents as an important kind of community center.

This new book by John A. Before the advent of the interstate system, such hotels served as commercial and social anchors of developing towns across the country. The authors explore the hotels' origins, their traditional functions, and the many ups and downs they experienced throughout the early twentieth century, along with their potential for reuse now and in the future.

The book details building types, layouts, and logistics how the hotels were financed hotel management and labor hotel life and customers food services changing fads and designs and what the hotels are like today. Brimming with photographs, this book looks at hotels from coast to coast. Its exploration of these important local landmarks will intrigue students, scholars, and general readers alike, offering a fascinating look back at that recent period in American history when even the smallest urban places could still look optimistically toward the future.

Jakle is emeritus professor of geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Remembering Roadside America

Sculle is the head of research and education for the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. Signatures of Landscape and Place and Lots of Parking: Land Use in a Car Culture. Rogers, they are also coauthors of The Motel in America. By its very nature, this landscape is ever changing, indeed ephemeral.

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What is new quickly becomes old and is soon forgotten. Certainly, museums have been created for frontier pioneering, the rise of commercial agriculture, and the coming of water- and steam-powered industrialization and transportation, especially the railroad. For the unrelated American production and distribution company, see Roadside Attractions. Another Roadside Attraction , novel by Tom Robbins Another Roadside Attraction festival , Canadian music festival Australia's big things , novelty architecture and large sculptures in Australia Enchanted Highway , collection of scrap metal sculptures along an unnumbered stretch of highway in North Dakota Giants of the Prairies , novelty architecture and large sculptures in Canada List of largest roadside attractions international Novelty architecture Tourist trap.

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Geography and Tourism Marketing. Retrieved 6 April Green 14 January Sterling Publishing Company, Inc. National Historic Route 66 Federation. The American automobile in the 20th century: University Press of Mississippi.

Roadside attraction

University of Tennessee Press. The new roadside America: Fun along the road: Marling, Karal Ann The Colossus of Roads: Myth and Symbol Along the American Highway. University of Minnesota Press. Category Commons Portal WikiProject.

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