Mainstream and Marginal: Situating the American Roadside

gabrielle esperdy Mainstream and Marginal Situating the American Roadside Photographs of John Margolies Beginning in 1972, the photographer John From Resorts of the Catskills (1979) to Roadside Margolies (born 1940) spent thirty- six years America (2010), Margolies has published more documenting commercial vernacular buildings than a dozen books.2 Resorts is a serious exhi- across the United States. His body of work, now bition catalogue in which scholarly essays on including an archive of thirteen thousand photo- architectural and social history by Elizabeth graphs and related ephemeral material, is an un- Blackmar, Elizabeth Cromley, and Neil Harris paralleled record of the American roadside in the accompany one hundred of Margolies’s photo- second half of the twentieth century. Margolies’s graphs. Roadside is a sumptuous coffee table book photographs have appeared in numerous popular with a foreword by architecture curator C. Ford magazines, books, postcard collections, and even Peatross, a profile by design writer Phil Patton, magnet sets. He has presented his work in slide and more than four hundred of Margolies’s pho- lectures, for the general public and academic au- tographs packaged as a fine art publication. Most diences alike, for more than three decades. He of the intervening volumes strike a different tone. has attracted a devoted following of roadside With titles like Fun along the Road (1990), Ticket enthusiasts, including many who, as is evident to Paradise (1991), and Pump and Circumstance on the Internet, have followed in his tire- tracks, (1993), these books are breezy, cutesy, even crossing the country to visit and photograph the goofy, with jam- packed pages that idiosyncrati- same roadside buildings.1 While most scholars cally document a range of commercial building of commercial vernacular architecture are famil- typologies through vintage postcards, maps, bro- iar with Margolies’s photography, his work as a chures, matchbooks, and, most especially, the whole has received little scholarly scrutiny. The photographer’s own pictures.3 The one notable current acquisition of the Margolies’s archive by exception is The End of the Road, Margolies’s first the Library of Congress is an opportune moment solely authored book, which appeared in 1981. to consider the significance of this collection and Introduced by a highly personal, almost ele- to examine, in depth, the contextual and theo- giac text, The End of the Road is a collection of retical framework from which Margolies’s work color photographs of gas pumps, neon signs, emerged. This consideration will reveal how his roadside stands, drive- in movie theaters, and mo- architectural photography evolved from his ear- tels. Each building is framed in dignified isola- lier activities as a critic and curator and will make tion emphasizing sculptural form and graphic evident the relationship between his work and sensibility in a manner that would characterize the mainstreams and margins of architecture’s much of Margolies’s subsequent photographic evolving discourse during the past half- century. output. The Trail Drive- In Theater, on Route 66 in What follows provides the critical backstory for Amarillo, Texas is typical (Figure 1). Built in 1954 a singular documentary archive of commercial and in operation until around the time Margolies vernacular architecture in the United States. photographed it in 1977, the Trail Drive- In is past 53 Figure 1. trail drive- in theater, route 66, amarillo, texas. Photograph by John Margolies, 1977. courtesy of John Margolies. its prime, with a turquoise- painted exterior that loosely, on the Mission San Antonio de Valero, is faded and peeling. The photograph depicts the was the key architectural feature of the southern side flank of the theater’s screen tower with a motel chain, which opened its Memphis unit in ticket kiosk in the foreground. Shot with a 50mm 1939.5 Here, as in so many of Margolies’s pict ures, lens and slow film, this is a straightforward por- the framing of the image enhances its represen- trait of a building, although Margolies obviously tation of a particular, rather than a generic build- chose the façade with signage to individualize ing. This distinction is not insignificant because his depiction. With a deep depth of field, sharp it underscores the presence of Margolies’s point outlines, and saturated colors, the subject is of view and the subjectivity of what sometimes at the center of the frame. The sky is blue; the seems to be a neutral photograph. This partial- shadows are long; the scene is depeopled. There ity does not lessen the documentary value of the aren’t even any cars— an especially noticeable photographs for historians, preservationists, and absence in a roadside picture but a hallmark of enthusiasts viewing them today, but it signals Margolies’s work, intended to present the build- that the individual images are part of Margolies’s ing with as few distractions as possible.4 larger photographic project. Not all of Margolies’s subjects are buildings These images of the Trail Drive- In and the on the verge of abandonment. His 1979 photo- Alamo Plaza Motel, like the 124 other photograph of the Alamo Plaza Motel on Route 70 in graphs in The End of the Road, were produced Memphis, Tennessee, depicts a building with a during a five- year, 100,000 mile, NEA- funded tidy lawn and a freshly painted façade (Figure 2). odyssey across the United States. In the book’s Here, Margolies pulls back far enough to capture Introduction, Margolies compares himself some- the sign facing the highway and the full extent what facetiously to Christopher Columbus, but of the low- rise façade, especially the bell- shaped Meriwether Lewis is a more appropriate par- parapet above the projecting bay of the motel allel.6 This is not just because Margolies, like office. This swelling form, based obviously, if Lewis, explored the country’s vast interior while 54 | Buildings & landscapes 19, no. 2, fall 2012 bankrolled by the federal government but be- finally produced a culture that was entirely, and cause Margolies, like Lewis, paid attention to incontrovertibly, its own. As early as 1938, the the kinds of things that were easily overlooked editors of Life magazine summarized it this way: and would all too soon disappear as settlement “along 3,000,000 miles of highway” the coun- and development progressed. For Lewis it was try had created “the Supreme Honky- Tonk of All the flora and fauna; for Margolies it was the Time,” cluttered, in the editors’ view, with little Main Streets and strips. Ivan Chermayeff’s bold more than ugly signs and “roadside junk.”8 In the design for the book— its heavy black bands al- succeeding decades, and well into the 1970s, this most suffocating the photographs they bound— negative assessment of “the mess that is man- captures the tension between the continual mod- made America” and “God’s Own Junkyard,” be- ernization of a culture and its material and came commonplace, especially among American spatial detritus (Figure 3). That same tension intellectuals interested in architecture and ur- sounds the cautionary note of the book’s title banism, many of whom accepted it as something and subtitle, The End of the Road: Vanishing very near a universal truth.9 Highway Architecture in America. When the book appeared in 1981, however, the commercial landscape it eulogized was finally receiving a measure of consideration from critics, academ- ics, and architects. Almost from the moment urban populations in the United States began moving out of cen- tral cities, and especially after World War II when automobiles (along with federal interstate and mortgage programs) engendered the de- centralized growth of strips and subdivisions, the emerging commercial landscape provoked fervent critiques.7 Ranging from smug amuse- ment to moral outrage, from social commentary to reformist polemics, from popular magazines to specialized journals, these critiques were united by recognition that the car had spawned something new and that the United States had Figure 2. alamo Plaza Motel, route 70, Memphis, tennessee. Photograph by John Margolies, circa 1979. courtesy of John Margolies. Figure 3. The end of the Road, double- page spread with buildings from Missouri, iowa, california. Graphic design by ivan chermayeff; photographs by John Margolies, 1977–80. courtesy of John Margolies. GaBrieLLe esPerdY, MainstreaM and MarGinaL | 55 At the same time, however, critics like Douglas which stimulated fierce debates about precedent, Haskell (beginning in the 1930s) and J. B. influence, popular architecture, and everyday Jackson (beginning in the 1950s) defended the landscapes.13 roadside as a populist landscape and forcefully ar- As interest in the commercial vernacular ex- gued for a nuanced consideration of its architec- panded, gas stations and roadside oddities so re- tural value.10 Eventually, and for reasons that will cently dismissed as honky- tonk and derided as be assessed in this article, this dissenting view kitsch found their way onto the National Register fostered a new appreciation for the commercial of Historic Places. Lucy the Elephant in Margate, landscape— or at the least an interest in taking New Jersey, one of the country’s oldest mimetic it on its own terms— within the milieu in which buildings, was listed in 1971; the Shell Service Margolies operated.11 Painters and photographers Station in Winston- Salem, North Carolina, the like Ed Ruscha and Richard Estes were exploring only survivor of eight originals, was added in the artistic possibilities of gas stations and din- 1976. Two years later, the Modern Diner in Paw- ers already in the 1960s. This interest continued tucket, Rhode Island, joined them, the first— and in the 1970s in the New Topographics of John for many years, the only— diner to be included on Schott and Stephen Shore, whose photography the register (Figure 4).14 Margolies photographed captured the “man- altered landscape” without the diner the same year it was listed (1978) and affect.

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