Roadtown U.S.A.
by Douglas Haskell
Roadtown is what we might as
well call
it because it is indeed a city a thousand miles long. Professional
language
has slighted it by referring to it as mere ribbon development: a term
which
is pinched and static. Roadtown is the folk creation of that industrial
man whom we might as well call the Roadite, along with is inseparable
inanimate
companion, the automobile, which we might as well call a Roadbeetle.
Roadtown
is out in the country but it is not of the country. Its situation in
direct
contiguity with Nature is incidental, not organic. The presence of
Roadtown
in the country is not connected with farming or with raising animals.
It
belongs to travel and communication. The roots of Roadtown are widely
spread
among a large population but it is not that 13% of our population that
still operates agriculture; it has nothing to do with the peasant or
his
heirs; it grows out of industry.
Between the people who create
Roadtown
and the professional architect or planner there is a wide hiatus due to
the fact that the Roadite has an almost incredible lack of education so
it is difficult in the extreme for an educated man to understand him.
Roadtown
has a virile if barbaric life of its own, often hideous beyond belief
but
not to be dismissed as either weak or consciously hostile to
improvement.
The sublime obliviousness of Roadtown to the natural scene and to
civilized
architecture as we know it almost suggests a strange species of human
animal
producing its own vast network of diggings and structure and lights and
intense
self-supporting colors along its concrete road- ribbon. This ecology is
destructive to what has been loved in Nature, like a tornado or volcano
- as if something from outside Nature had crashed down upon Nature; yet
the inner purpose of the Roadite, however feebly grasped, is one of
peaceful
adjustment.
An exploration of Roadtown may as
well
start at the opposite end from where the Roadile started, who radiated
out from the metropolis. Here is a mountain road 300 miles from New
York.
Roadtown is not yet here. Only a few Roadbeetles have penetrated, and
are
strewn here and there in front of mountain shacks that recall Tobacco
Road
in their poverty and disorder. Innocence of real Roadtown invasion is
attested
by absence here of wires on poles. These outermost feelers of Roadtown
we encounter the minute this little dirt road, beautiful and
tree-lined,
meets a more important thoroughfare. The wire will be there whether or
not the surface of the road has yet been converted to hard-top-asphalt
or cement. Here, too, we encounter another element of Roadtown which is
integral to it just as drums and horns are integral to jazz: the
billboard.
The billboard had its early beginning when advertisers would paint a
farmer’s
barn if he would let the paint carry a message. Today these faded
barn-sides
announcing “Mailpouch Tobacco” are scarce, for the billboard has been
dignified
with a standard braced structure of its own, planted out in the grass.
Today much of the ink or paint used is fluorescent, and many a
billboard
is night-lighted. The billboard has become so ubiquitous a symbol of
the
road (or rail-road) that the leading manufacturer of toy trains says he
has distributed 30 million toy replicas of billboards in the past five
years. To the American boy, a billboard parade makes his toy railroad
or
toy highway seem “real”. It is a form of heraldry, an instrument of
communication,
a ritual reassuring the Roadite that, he is still loved by those
producing
the pickles, chewing gum, automobiles, cigarettes and gasoline which
his
fellow roadites are happily purchasing.
Out here in the country the
butchery of
trees for the sake of signs makes a sensitive person wince, it is such
a violation of Nature’s mystery. Nearer the city the billboard parade
is
so thick it becomes virtually a phenomenon of Nature, or rather
non-Nature,
to be studied as we study the army ant. Roadtown has another essential
equipment: the gas garden. It is now undergoing development and change.
Formerly gas stations were frequent, spaced every mile of two along
even
the less traveled roads. That was when the Roadite’s gas tank had small
capacity and no reserve. Today gas gardens still line major highways
tightly
but on minor ones are found mainly at the fringe of those old-fashioned
towns through which Roadtown passes. The gas garden has grown more
elaborate.
Clusters of bright painted pumps, tall poles carrying highly colored
signs,
some of them illuminated within and translucent; masts flying clusters
of little red pennants, all announces the joyful interruption of
driving
for the ritual of “filling up”, plus incidentally using a toilet, or
perhaps
dropping a coin in a slot for cigarette, pop or ice cream.
The Roadite fills himself up
preferably
at a “diner”. Some prehistoric Roadite entrepreneur once bought a
discarded
street-car, set it up alongside the road, ran a counter full-length
down
the middle, put facilities for preparing “short order” meals of
sandwiches,
coffee, pies and the like on one side, and a row of stools on the
other.
This caught on with the Roadites. The name “diner” was a brilliant
stroke
in conjunction with the old car, for it derived from the sumptuous and
expensive dining car of the railroad. By now the “diner” has evolved
beyond
recognition. Permanently set on a foundation, recalling only faintly
the
old streetcar, it has been extended by outgrowths of conventional
(though
illiterate) building that have dwarfed the nuclear diner the way a
gosling
hatched by a hen outgrows its mother. Inside there is a proliferation
of
stainless steel on counters, refrigerators, and other equipment; there
is quilted aluminum up the back wall: there are juke boxes, in gaudy
colors,
all lit up, furnishing nickel-in-the-slot music to the booths along the
front. The diners where truck drivers stop employ fetching
countergirls,
with a good gift of gab added to Nature’s gifts, as a lure against
competition.
Other games abound along Roadtown. The various “Disneylands” or
“Storytowns”
are Roadite’s elaborate and un-mysterious substitutes for the French
puppet
show: whole series of “crazy” structures doing the pantomime in
construction
as well as in acting, and always in candy colors. The drive-in movie
theaters
let the Roadite sit in his own car in the dark with his girl watching
and
hearing the latest Hollywood; night clubs along the road likewise
strain
for fantasy, being usually built in parody of Mother Goose or other
familiar
lore. Yet occasionally there is a degree more of abstraction in the
concept,
where some struggling but immature spirit has translated Frank Lloyd
Wright’s
forms into a type of architecture known as “googie”. Unlike other
Roadtown
builders this young man is likely to be an architect and a high priest,
not an abashed showman.
At night the Roadite stops at a
motel.
Unlike the old hotel it gives him a bit of curb, or a place alongside a
cabin, where he can park his car close to his own door. His cabin may
be
a separate one - perhaps a miniature log cabin where he can play Daniel
Boone with modern comfort. Or it may be in a closed row, forming a
“tourist
court”. Here he has a choice of masquerades: he can play George
Washington
at Mt. Vernon, or Alpinist, or roast beef Englishman at a half-timbered
inn, or the owner of a mill-in-the-floss with waterwheels under him and
wagon wheels ranged solidly all around. Like all children’s games the
motel
game gets along on a minimum of verisimilitude.
The motel has become a major
industry,
with an investment estimated at $30 billion in buildings alone and with
a gross income of $11/2 billion annually, probably optimistic figures:
and the old-line hotel is being obliged to transform itself to meet the
competition. (A good motel gets higher rates). Surprisingly not many
Roadites
live permanently in motels, convenient as these are; perhaps this is
because
the motel has the reputation of providing escapes not only from the
city
but from strict family mores. Trailer owners, by contrast, drag their
own
elaborate house-cars all along the US, and will take any amount of
trouble
to find the trailer camp where they can mingle with one another and
have
ready water and electric connections while playing at the deluxe gypsy,
often for long periods of time.
In quick review we have been
talking of
strictly popular manifestation that have created Roadtown. The Roadite
is twice removed from Nature, for his ancestors escaped from the
country
into town and he is now carrying the city out into the country with
him.
He cares little or nothing for natural landscape, for trees, for
natural
materials; he has not the peasant’s tradition to offset ignorance, nor
any subservience to any master as “authority” in taste – he has been
taught
all his life that his own taste is as good as anyone’s; he is cheerful
and well off and generous and gregarious, ever ready for little games –
rather juvenile in fancy – there is no training in his background for
esthetics
either, nor does his radio or TV give any now; he is ever on the move;
the 1950 census figures show that one-fourth of his number were born in
states other than they now live in; presumably one-half were born in
towns
other than they now live in; and according to the Bureau of Labor
statistic
figures, not one in five has the same job he had ten years ago. We
speak
of course of industrial population for Roadtown has nothing to do with
farming.
Now however Roadtown is running
into complications
brought about by more sophisticated people operating at larger scale.
The
Roadite will soon cease to dominate the road as the pioneer ceased to
dominate
the frontier. For example, driving along the road one now passes an
automobile
factory, an abstract urban structure transplanted complete onto a
well-shaved
roadside lawn, its parking lots to the rear filled with an acreage of
Roadbeetles.
Or, the product of the factory may be surgical dressing. Or, the
“factory”,
slightly more polished may be the immense office building of an
insurance
company that has migrated into the country.
Yet again, what we have here? A
sudden
outcrop of city stores, but planned as you cannot find them within a US
city: they are lined-up on a mall, as a coordinated “shopping center”
put
up by single promoter with heavy backing including big department
stores.
What else is new? The attack of highway engineers. To clear away slow
local
traffic from through-routes, a classification of roads is under way,
resulting
in new superhighways, throughways, speedways, expressways for
long-distance
movements. These have a gathering effect: since their entrances and
exits
are widely spaced, all the little droplets of gas station, motel,
roadside
diner, that are spread out along existing roads tend to be drawn
together
into big drops at intersection or interchange. This means elimination
of
whole strings of motels, signs, other Roadtown paraphernalia, which
must
die because the driver has no way to get off the road till he reaches
an
intersection. If these attractions try to extend too far on side-roads
they will die again, from being too far from the motorist’s eye.
Consequently
such highway engineering tends to kill ribbon development and restore
nodular
new-town development at the major intersections. And here the scope of
operations is large enough, the distribution dense enough, so
professional
skill may once again be called. Moreover the motels and roadside
restaurants
have begun to be organized by larger promoters to chains, and this
again
gives the architect the chance to design the prototype, and impose
something
like a sensible pattern for the landscape. Again, from time to time an
exceptional manufacturer acting with an exceptional architect has found
it not only good but profitable to clear up such ugly roadside
manifestations
as the small warehouse facility for course goods like pipe.
With endless education we can make
such
efforts spread, appealing to the basically good, constructive,
cooperative
temper of the Roadite. What must not be done is to attempt a
“counter-revolution”.
One must resist those who too often preach. The “parkway”, for example,
is counter-revolution, an attempt to answer Roadtown by eliminating it
altogether. As one who has driven on parkways a great deal I must
testify
that their particular form of beauty ends in boredom. It is wholly
artificial
and induced, a thin ribbon of landscaping as an art entirely for itself
and insulating the highway from all natural surrounding. Gone is all
life
of men, all that activity which, for us as for the old-time farmer,
might
make the road a book. Nothing is left but prettiness; and although, in
today’s terms, a switch from hard-boiled “Route 9” onto a parkway is a
momentary relief for a civilized man, it is no genuine answer. For,
although
the Roadite still has an endless amount to learn, before he rediscovers
truths larger and more authoritative than his own, he also has a little
to teach. His “instinct” for living in an industrial age is in some
ways
more “natural” than that of sophisticated educated people because less
inhibited by irrelevant taboos. He has his little spark of fantasy and
wonder. To meet him and absorb him, a modern architecture must be a
little
less
stiff, esoteric, blue-blooded and precious than today it is.