by Earl Swift
" They were the strongest of all the Associations and with them with us, who could be against us?"
Everybody and his brother, as it turned out. When the secretary of agriculture signed off on the plan in November 1925, all hell broke loose. The Lincoln's fellow trail associations denounced the numbers their routes had been assigned, or the board's failure to include their routes, or their looming obsolescence. Eastern highway officials railed that midwestern states had far more mileage than their populations justified. And the governor of Kentucky, William J. Fields, charged that " Chicago influence" was " written all over the map," citing as evidence a curious exception to James's numbering system: U.S. 60 did not run from the East Coast to the West, as one might have supposed, but started in Chicago and cut a long southwestern arc to Los Angeles, passing through St. Louis, Tulsa, and Albuquerque on the way. Its numbering irked Fields for two reasons. First, U.S. 50 missed Kentucky to the north and U.S. 70 missed it to the south; logically, U.S. 60 should have passed right through his state, but Kentucky had been left without a zero-ending east-west highway—and a state so important should have one. Second, three members of James's committee lived in states through which the proposed U.S. 60 passed. One of them, Cyrus Avery of Oklahoma, had proposed the route.
This was by no means the only anomaly in the numbering sequence. U.S. 1 strayed inland while following the Fall Line, so several routes with higher numbers ran east of it. Highways braided, too, so that they might be in proper sequence at some points, but not others; U.S. 11, for instance, curved so much at its southern end that it wound up west of U.S. 49. Even so, the proposed U.S. 60 stuck in the Kentucky governor's craw. He took his beef to AASHO's Executive Committee, which elected to leave the number unchanged but to designate a route from Newport News, Virginia, to Springfield, Missouri—and through Kentucky—U.S. 62. The governor was not mollified. In late January 1926, he and a delegation of his state's congressmen took their case to the Chief.
MacDonald was won over. Fields used logic and a map of the system to make " an argument that could not be fairly met," and the bureau came down on the side of numbering the Chicago-to-L.A. route 62, and the Newport News-to-Springfield road 60, pending agreement from the other affected states. Now it was Avery's turn to steam, which he did with passion for nearly three months.
There were other disputes over the joint board's work. The network almost doubled in size in the process of state review, to 96,626 miles, and routing and numbering caused dozens of minor squabbles. But the Kentucky disagreement was by far the toughest, and the longest-lasting. It ended, finally, on April 30, 1926. Having learned from his state's chief highway engineer that the number 66 did not appear on the proposed system, Avery and his Missouri counterpart telegrammed the Chief: " We prefer sixty six to sixty two." MacDonald gave the label his blessing, as did Governor Fields. AASHO adopted the whole system late that year. So was born Route 66, the " Mother Road" made famous by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath.
And so began the end of the auto trails, America's first stab at an interstate network. It was inevitable that the old names would fall out of favor, for the numbering scheme took pains to avoid corresponding to them. The Lee Highway became routes 1, 11, 29, 45, 54, 60, 64, 70, and 72, at one point or another, and a few others besides; the Midland Trail became 6, 40, 50, 60, and 95. The Dixie Highway's branches bore dozens of numbers, and the Lincoln went by 30 only from Pennsylvania to Wyoming, carrying a half-dozen other numbers toward its ends. Henry Joy joked with some bitterness that it should be identified as " a memorial to the martyred Lincoln now known by the grace of God and the authority of the Government of the United States as Federal Route 30, Federal Route 52, Federal Route 29."
The trepidation that the new system caused the trail boosters turned out to be well placed. For every burg that thrived alongside the new numbered highways, for every business that earned its keep from their burgeoning traffic, there was another that had been bypassed by the grid and left to wither on now-unimportant lanes that were no longer on the way to anyplace of mention.
They're sprinkled all over the American West—towns like Lida, Nevada, which seemed a charmed place in the early years of the Motor Age. When the coast-to-coast Midland Trail was blazed in the teens, it was routed right through Lida. When the army drew its Pershing Map of principal military routes, Lida was on it. When the states selected the Federal Aid network in 1921, again, Lida was on a main line.
Named for a prospector's wife, built on the site of an old Shoshone camp, brought to life in a rush for silver, and swelled by another for gold, Lida had spawned newspapers, hotels, stores, and saloons; the town even stamped its own coins when cash ran low. Attracted trouble, too: In one affray, a self-styled gunslinger named George Chiles worked the nerves of card players in a Lida saloon until one clocked him. Chiles hit the floor and came up shooting, his aim wild, and wounded two innocents at the bar. Both men bled to death as others in the room rushed Chiles and killed him, too.
Then the numbered U.S. highways came—or, rather, didn't come. U.S. 95 passed nineteen miles east of town, and U.S. 6 was more than an hour to the north, and suddenly nobody took the Midland Trail anymore. Today it's a two-lane road to nowhere. In one direction is Death Valley; in the other lies the great cartographic blank of the Nellis Air Force Range Complex, the mysterious Area 51.
Minus traffic, Lida emptied, businesses moved out, the post office closed in 1932. When I pulled into town seventy-four years later, it was down to two year-round residents, an older couple whose declining health was about to force their flight. What little remained of the settlement rose rusted and wind-scraped from the sagebrush: a handful of sagging shacks and the ruins of a half-dozen more; a small graveyard fenced in barbed wire and steel pipe, ground littered with toppled wooden crosses; forever busted pickups sandblasted down to their bones. Mining gear decayed among clumps of buckwheat and scorpion weed.
In the sun, the wind, the desiccated Nevada air, colors had leached from wood and metal. An old Coca-Cola truck, windshield gunned out, was bubblegum pink; on the houses, paint had cracked and curled from clapboard and tin roof, revealing a spectrum of browns beneath. With each passing year, Lida moved a little closer to matching the coarse desert floor, the bare palisades that form the northern rim of its valley, a little closer to vanishing altogether.
The Lincoln Highway's end came just a year after the new numbers became official. Traffic crossing the desert was shifting more every year to the Wendover Road, now marked U.S. 40; elsewhere, the Lincoln was undergoing steady improvement. Not much remained for the association to do, it seemed to Henry Joy, especially with shields popping up all along the highway's shoulder, so in October 1927, he urged his fellow officers to pack it in—and, as a last act, to adopt the hated northern route out of Salt Lake City, now the most direct way west. " We have exerted every possible effort to prevent this change of route," he wrote, " but it has been done."
His fellow directors balked at the latter suggestion, choosing instead to support a hybrid route. The Lincoln would abandon the Seiberling Cutoff to follow U.S. 40 to Wendover, cut south on a new Federal Aid highway to Ely, and there resume its original course across Nevada on what was now U.S. 50. They agreed, however, with Joy's suggestion that they " cease active and aggressive operations" and voted to spend the association's remaining money on three thousand concrete markers, which the Boy Scouts would help plant on the Lincoln's shoulder.
Everyone seemed content with the highway's modified route out of Salt Lake but Joy, who argued that it made far more sense to follow U.S. 40 all the way to California. In a spate of letter writing, he complained that the association had " for the first time in its history approved a lengthening instead of a shortening of the road," thereby betraying its " very foundation principles." He worried to Sidney Waldon, his old Packard colleague, " that we have made a most disastrous move" and promised that if " we, with our great intelligence, are to put on the map of the United States a Lincol
n Highway with such a ‘broken back' in the middle of it, then I will regret all my life that I ever started the work, or ever had anything to do with it, as I feel that it is a total discredit to us all."
He wrote more, a lot more, but it didn't sway the others to revisit the decision. With the new year, the Lincoln Highway Association closed its Detroit office and assigned Gael Hoag, its field secretary, the task of distributing the concrete markers, each adorned with the highway's tricolor blaze and a bronze medallion of Abraham Lincoln's profile. At 1 P.M. on September 1, 1928, Scouts dropped the waist-high posts in place. It was the association's last official act.
Even as Scouts tamped flat the soil at the markers' feet, the old highway, now existing solely in the abstract, as a nostalgic recollection, was undergoing a very modern upgrade. At a busy intersection in Woodbridge, New Jersey, crews were building a novel type of grade separation that enabled motorists on either road to turn right or left onto the other without having to stop. Those on the Lincoln could turn right onto Amboy Avenue by veering onto a ramp that cut the corner on a descending diagonal. They turned left by crossing over Amboy, then veering right onto a descending ramp that curved 270 degrees and sent traffic under the overpass.
This arrangement had been patented a dozen years before by a Maryland engineer named Arthur Hale but hadn't been tried in the United States—not until an engineer on the Lincoln job saw a magazine cover depicting an Argentinian highway that put Hale's invention to use. The Woodbridge intersection took its name from the shape formed by its four curving left-turn ramps: a cloverleaf.
Carl Fisher was represented by proxy as the Lincoln entered its final days. He'd been busy, as always. He built three new hotels in three years as Miami Beach boomed around him, palled around with Will Rogers and other celebrities, threw lavish parties at his enormous mansion. And he wrestled with a succession of personal tragedies. His parents died. His young son succumbed to scarlet fever. Always a neglectful husband, he became so withdrawn after the boy's death that his marriage splintered. His longtime mistress—probably not a boon to the marriage, either—quit their affair to marry a preacher.
He took to drink. His hard-muscled body turned to fat, and his face grew bloated and splotchy. His cursing became so wall-to-wall that with every sentence he approached self-parody. He angered instantly, spun into loud, crazy fits.
For all that, he retained the entrepreneurial vision that had served him so well. In September 1925, enchanted by the windswept solitude of Long Island's eastern tip, he and a few partners bought 9,632 acres at Montauk Point, envisioning a summer retreat to bookend Fisher's winter playground in Florida. He promised tennis courts, stables, grand hotels, lavish homes, a saltwater yacht basin, and railroad service from New York City by " the finest club car trains."
In February 1926, Fisher took title to nine parcels covering virtually all of the point, including fifteen miles of rugged shoreline, an " eagle's beak" of surf-pounded bluffs that once had inspired Walt Whitman. He might have bought more, had it not been for the Long Island State Park Commission, which as he negotiated the purchase snatched up 1,750 acres at the point's western end, an area called Hither Hills. Fisher figured the grab was illegal and decided to fight it.
But his opponent was formidable. The commission's young president was a New Yorker named Robert Moses, who envisioned his own great project on Long Island, a system of parks and public beaches linked by landscaped motor parkways. Over a career that stretched into the late sixties, Moses would prove himself a brilliant politician, a bold and creative builder of highways, parks, all of New York's great twentieth-century bridges, and acre on acre of housing—and an artful manipulator who consolidated and wielded enormous power beyond interference from a procession of mayors and governors. In 1926 he was still gathering his tools, but already he was acquiring land for the future Southern State Parkway, the Cross-Island Parkway, and the promenades, parking lots, and bathhouses at Jones Beach. He'd been talking to property owners out at Montauk for a couple of years.
Fisher lost the skirmish. Hither Hills became a state park, as did a twenty-two-acre piece of property at the peninsula's tip. But aside from a small plot on which a government lighthouse stood, Fisher owned the rest, and he put a brigade of men to work there. Within a few months, the harbor was taking shape, a seven-story office building was open for business, and work was under way on a golf course and polo fields, the two-hundred-room, Tudor-style Montauk Manor, and sixty-three miles of roads. Fisher imported a thousand sheep to graze the property and predicted that within four years, Montauk would have a year-round population of fifty thousand, a summertime head count three times as big.
Ah, but then came September 17, 1926. Miami Beach woke to a breeze that by late morning ratcheted into a howl, and that night a hurricane smacked the resort square in the chops. For eight hours it blasted the spit with 130-mile-per-hour winds, easing at dawn just long enough to coax punch-drunk residents onto the debris-strewn streets—at which point the gale abruptly returned. Giant waves swamped the city. Yachts and a navy destroyer were beached among shattered houses. " The ocean-side hotels were battered, walls smashed, windows broken and the lower floors flooded," the Times reported, and " casinos, small apartments and bath houses along the beach were swept away or irreparably damaged."
Fisher hired a train for Florida. " As soon as the homeless are cared for the work of reconstructing Miami Beach will begin at once," he promised. " Miami Beach was built from a mangrove swamp to an artist's picture of reality. What was once done can be done again." So it was; most of his properties were repaired by the season's start. But tourists didn't flock to Miami Beach as they had in past years, and some property owners quit their payments. Fisher's income dried up, and with it his ability to bankroll cash-gobbling Montauk.
Scrambling to raise money, he sold his stake in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to auto racer and air ace Eddie Rickenbacker. It wasn't enough. Soon both of Carl Fisher's empires were in trouble. He'd lose what he had left in the stock market crash—his houses, his hotels, the land, his great dreams for Long Island. In years to come, he'd be forced to work for friends he once entertained on his oceangoing yacht.
The tycoon of Prest-O-Lite, creator of Indy and Miami Beach and the resort lifestyle, the millionaire, philanthropist, and visionary, the pioneer car buff who'd started America's first interstate auto roads when all about was mud and manure, slipped from the front page. In a very little while, he vanished from any page at all.
7
SLAPPING NUMBERS ON old roads made them easier to follow, sure enough, but old roads they remained—meandering and ditch-lined and, when they approached a city or town, totally inadequate for the traffic that snarled their narrow lanes. By the Depression's onset, two strategies had come into favor for addressing urban congestion, the first based on the assumption that a large share of it was caused by out-of-towners merely passing through. The new U.S. 30, for instance, drilled straight through the heart of most towns it encountered, following the Lincoln Highway's lead. At Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, it met U.S. 15 in the town square; at Pittsburgh it twisted and turned through the central business district and did the same in Fort Wayne and Ames, Omaha, and Carson City. Divert this over-the-road " through" traffic, the theory went, and you'd eliminate jams.
Lo, the bypass movement was born. In 1924, the First National Conference on Street and Highway Safety, chaired by secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover—and including the Chief and Edwin W. James—urged localities to consider " by-pass highways and belt highways which will permit through traffic, especially trucks, to avoid congested districts or even any built-up portions of the city or town." Five years later, the American City reported that bypasses had proved " a real benefit to the community, and this fact is becoming very generally recognized."
The benefit didn't last. Bypasses failed to ease congestion in most towns for long, and a glance at the country's shifting demographics spelled out one reason why. Between 1880 and 192
0, the American people had more than doubled in number, and the overwhelming majority of the newcomers now lived in the cities. The influx was sure to continue, along with a concomitant rise in the number of vehicles struggling to negotiate overloaded streets, because traffic wasn't going through cities, it was traveling from point to point within them. You could siphon off every bit of through traffic, and the typical American downtown would still slow to a honking standstill at rush hour.
Bypasses fell short for a second reason, perhaps even more important. They soon attracted businesses to their own flanks—which generated their own traffic, so that after a few years the bypasses needed bypasses. The Chief observed that the typical bypass was good " for perhaps five years. Then we will have more traffic on the bypass, and more congestion of new industrial establishments and other occupations of the land than upon the main streets that we are designing to bypass completely."
Desperate, city planners deployed a second weapon: the " superhighway," which as originally conceived was something like a modern-day boulevard—a surface street, often divided by a concrete hump or some such barrier, with at least two lanes in each direction and an emphasis on smooth but relatively slow travel. Through the late twenties, planners talked of building superhighways to move traffic from the fast-expanding suburbs to city centers. The best-known was Woodward Avenue in and near Detroit, which boasted four lanes each way astride an electric railway.
But these arterial streets were simply bigger versions of the roads they replaced, and they suffered the same fate as bypasses. Even the biggest and best of them bogged down as stores and cafés rose along their edges,* and cross-street tributaries emptied their traffic into the larger stream. You can get a taste of the problem with a spin on any " business route" or urban leg of a numbered U.S. highway today. Take U.S. 13, the old Ocean Highway, through Delaware. Between Dover and the New Jersey line, daytime movement on the highway is so hobbled by traffic lights, so gluey with the sheer number of vehicles squeezed onto its lanes, so crowded by the furniture stores and gas stations and pancake houses pressing its flanks, that you measure your progress in obscenities more than miles. Farther south in Norfolk, Virginia, and its suburbs, 13 crawls through a gantlet of fast-food joints and cinder-block motels, nail salons, discount mattress warehouses, cars for sale or rent, big-box hardware and army-navy surplus, all advertised with words and light of every size, color, intensity. Jesus, it's ugly, and slow and dangerous, besides—all those businesses pump more cars into the already thickened flow, launch others across the near lanes for left turns into the far.
