by Earl Swift
Within months of MacDonald's faint praise, motorists hungry for Norman Bel Geddes' vision of the future could pretend they were part of it: the nation's first road to merit the label " superhighway" opened in southern Pennsylvania. Here was a homegrown equal to the autobahns, a 160-mile-long path through the Appalachians from Middlesex, just outside Harrisburg, to Irwin, a little east of Pittsburgh, built to standards that made it a model for the interstate system to come.
The Penn Turnpike was conceived as a make-work project, like so many road jobs of the thirties, but it also served a long-term need for a passage through country that had confounded westward migration for two centuries. At the time the best road over the mountains was U.S. 30—the Lincoln—and it wasn't all that good, being icy and snow-covered in winter, and steep, narrow, and wriggling all the year long as it negotiated the hogbacked ridges that rose, one after another, across the state's middle.
The Lincoln's veterans knew too well the obstacles, could even recite them in order: Cove Mountain, Tuscarora Mountain, Scrub Ridge, Sideling Hill, Ray's Hill, Tull's Hill, Allegheny Mountain, Laurel Hill. The turnpike would flatten the bumps, straighten the hairpin curves, and ease the anxieties that punctuated the journey—so much so, the state wagered, that a lot of motorists would be willing to pay for it; they had better, anyway, because as a toll road, the turnpike was disqualified from Federal Aid.
The state surveyed the line from 1935 to 1937. Not for the first time; its people had eyed the corridor as a train route a full century before, and in the 1840s the Pennsylvania Railroad considered running its track from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh that way. It took another path, however, and the corridor landed in the hands of a smaller railroad that did nothing with it until 1883.
That year, William H. Vanderbilt lost his temper, and in doing so he unwittingly made the turnpike a viable proposition. Vanderbilt possessed a rampaging pair of muttonchop sideburns, the world's fattest wallet—he had a personal fortune of just under $200 million—and the New York Central Railroad, the fiercest rival of which was the Pennsylvania; relics of their long competition survive in their respective depots in New York, Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station. Vanderbilt learned that the Pennsylvania planned a route up the Hudson River, a corridor his line had to itself. He decided that if he was to put up with competition, then cost be damned, so would his rival. He gained control of the idle corridor through the Alleghenies.
Vanderbilt floated $40 million in stocks and bonds, won the backing of financier J.P. Morgan, and in the fall of 1883 let contracts for tunnels and bridges along the route. Three thousand workers flocked to the job. In two years, they carved long cuts through some ridges and blasted nine tunnels through others; they built stone bridge piers across the Susquehanna; they were well along building fifty-four miles of rail bed. Then, with about eight months' work to go, Morgan forced a halt to the project, alarmed that full-on war between the railroads would prove ruinous. Vanderbilt's workers scattered. Weeds consumed the line. The unfinished tunnels filled with water and over time were colonized by white, sightless trout.
Fifty-two years later, the state embarked on a new survey, and in 1937 the General Assembly created the five-member Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, with authority to construct, operate, maintain, and finance a road along the line. The federal Public Works Administration stroked a check for $29.25 million of the bill; the federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation covered the balance by buying up nearly $41 million in revenue bonds.
There was a catch: the feds required that most of the work be wrapped up by the end of May 1940. Pennsylvania made appropriate haste. Four days after the financing came through in October 1938, the turnpike commission advertised the first ten-mile paving contract. Twelve days later it closed the bidding. It awarded the contract on the same day. The contractor's crews were on-site less than twenty-four hours after that.
Ten thousand men worked around-the-clock shifts to move twenty-six million tons of earth and stone, cutting through hills and filling clefts along the highway's two-hundred-foot right of way. They poured 4.3 million square yards of nine-inch-thick, steel-reinforced concrete, creating parallel pavements of two lanes each bulleting straight over the smoothed terrain. In a fraction of the usual time required, they built 114 bridges, among them the six-hundred-foot New Stanton Viaduct, a graceful and gleaming concrete span that carried the turnpike over two highways, a railway, and a creek. Old-hand Pennsylvania coal miners dug out six of the old railroad tunnels to fourteen feet tall and twenty-three wide, big enough for two lanes of traffic, and shored them up with steel, concrete, and structural glass. They bored a seventh, through Allegheny Mountain, from scratch; like the tunnels through Sideling Hill and Tuscarora Mountain, it was more than a mile long.
Twenty-two months after work started, a convoy of congressmen, reporters, and government bigwigs, including a contingent from the bureau, drove the turnpike from end to end. The party marveled at its easy grades, which never exceeded 3 percent, and its straightaways, which at one point stretched for a dozen miles, and its broad, banked curves. The openness of the landscaped right of way, the long sight distances made possible by a roadway seventy-eight feet wide and cleared of obstructions, was a striking new experience; so were the tunnels, which together were nearly seven miles long. And, of course, the interchanges guiding traffic on and off the highway on looping ramps were the first many in the cars had ever seen.
Other features presaged the standards that would define the interstates, nearly a generation later: broad, paved shoulders; reflectors marking the roadside; acceleration lanes 1,200 feet long at each entrance. No wonder that Popular Mechanics proclaimed it " America's first highway on which full performance of today's automobiles can be realized." MacDonald was duly impressed, calling the turnpike " a magnificent accomplishment that will be a monument to the foresight of its builders." He could take some personal pride in the technical assistance the bureau had lent the project's chief engineer on any number of questions.
He was bothered only by the toll, which he believed had no place on this or any public highway. Roads were a birthright akin to free public schooling, for which motorists already paid licensing fees and taxes on gasoline and tires. To slap them with a toll amounted to a double tax—and a big one, too, because a toll of a penny a mile was the equivalent of a gas tax of 12 to 16 cents a gallon.
And tolls saddled engineers with no-win choices. To attract users, a toll road had to offer better service than parallel free roads, which limited the improvements that could ever be made to those free roads, no matter how badly needed they might be; improve the free road too much, and your state turnpike would lose customers and require subsidy. The problem remained if tolls were lifted. Now you could improve the free road, but you'd end up with two parallel highways where one would probably do—and you'd likely find the turnpike wasn't properly placed to function efficiently.
The Chief stuck to that position even after cars and trucks descended on the turnpike like the Mongol hordes, and toll income blew away all forecasts; the road had been built with a massive government handout, he noted, without which it might not be such a runaway success. After all, one of the east-west toll routes studied in Toll Roads and Free Roads had used essentially the same footprint, and the highway surveys had left little doubt that the Pittsburgh-to-Carlisle leg couldn't pay for itself. The bureau study had shown it would meet only 34 percent of its expenses from 1945 to 1960; at the end of the period, when traffic would be heavier, it would still be earning only 40 cents.
What was not yet apparent, but would become so, was that superhighways didn't pay much mind to projections and surveys. They were akin to mountain ranges that create their own weather—they created new users, new traffic. Build more, and the process would repeat. As fast as they were laid down, they seemed to fill with cars.
At turnoffs alongside the new turnpike, motorists could stop for gas and to stretch their legs, or to experience another harbinger of the future:
a sit-down meal at a restaurant serving fried clam strips, chicken potpies, " Frankforts" in pleated cardboard troughs, and, most famously, twenty-eight flavors of ice cream. Howard Johnson's already had been around for fifteen years, but it was the chain's exclusive contract on the Penn Turnpike that really established it as an icon of the American road.
The company was a prototype for many of the restaurant chains that ply their wares at highway exits today. Howard Johnson's was reputedly the first franchise business and, decades before McDonald's or Burger King came along, built its reputation on offering the customer an unvarying experience. No matter where you were, a Howard Johnson's Frankfort was sure to be grilled and wedged in a toasted roll that resembled a miniature loaf of bread; there'd be a Friday night special on fried seafood; you'd be sheltered by a low-pitch, squint-inducing orange roof topped with a cupola in equally bright turquoise, and surrounded by architecture that married a New England town hall and a ranch house in the Orlando suburbs. And, of course, you could count on finding peppermint stick ice cream—along with butter crunch, burgundy cherry, peanut brittle, and macaroon—of an almost carnal creaminess.
The chain was the brainchild of Howard Deering Johnson, who in 1925 scraped together the cash to take over a small drugstore in a beachfront neighborhood of Quincy, Massachusetts, and enticed customers to its soda fountain by offering the richest ice cream in town, which he hand-churned with gobs of extra butterfat. He expanded the ice cream business to a stand on the seashore, adding flavors along the way, and eventually opened a bona fide restaurant in downtown Quincy. His twenty-eight flavors became a signature. His fried clams became a destination.
Johnson intended to open additional locations, but the Depression intervened, so instead a friend agreed in 1935 to share ownership in a second restaurant on Cape Cod, using the Howard Johnson's name and menu. That was the first roadside HoJo's, and both the business and the franchise arrangement were hits. The following spring, four more opened, and Johnson was honing the visual cues that would instantly identify his restaurants to hungry carloads—the color scheme, the architecture, a distinctive typeface on the oversized neon signs out by the curb, and the silhouette of Simple Simon meeting the Pie Man, replicated on signs, menus, wall hangings, and the rooftop weathervane.
By year's end there were thirty-nine of them. By the close of 1939, when a gargantuan, thousand-seat HoJo's operated just up the street from the New York World's Fair, the chain was 107 restaurants strong. The following year, when the company opened for business on the turnpike, it had about 125 locations on highway shoulders from Maine to Virginia, plus a couple more in Florida. To ensure that a Frankfort tasted the same in Richmond as it did in Bangor, Johnson supplied all the food himself, shipping it via refrigerated truck.
Other chains sprouted alongside America's roadsides in the thirties to meet the motoring public's growing appetite for speedy service and a predictably pleasant experience. You can still spot one of these on occasion: swooping blue roof; window signs pitching discount cigarettes, burgers, pecans, and souvenirs, the closers to a campaign started by billboard thirty miles back; and overhead, a word that to this day evokes vacations by station wagon, endless afternoons of endless whining on endless four-laners, and sharp smacks from the front seat.
Hundreds of Stuckey's " pecan shoppes" dotted the web of U.S. highways below the Mason-Dixon Line, each in the middle of nowhere but en route to somewhere, all promising " sparkling clean restrooms," good food, and huge assortments of candy, nuts, and mementos. Stride through the door and the chain's famed Pecan Log Rolls were smack in front of you, stacked into a fortress of nut and mysterious, calorie-packed nougat, and in sizes suited to a range of appetites: The dainty two-ouncer. The whole-meal four. The mighty twelve, a shaft of crunchy sweetness big enough to qualify as instant party or deadly weapon.
It was in 1934 that Williamson'S. Stuckey Sr., out of work and living in Eastman, Georgia, a nut- and fruit-farming burg south of Macon, took up selling pecans in a desperate bid to feed his family. Old Man Stuckey, as he came to be called, didn't know much about nuts, but he knew they were popular with the snowbirds traveling through town to Florida, so he opened a stand on U.S. 341, advertised with signs up and down the highway.
Before long, Stuckey's wife, Ethel, supplemented the nuts with pecan candies she cooked in the family kitchen, among them the Pecan Log Roll, the center of which she fashioned from white molasses, chopped maraschino cherries, and powdered sugar by the cubic yard. Within a couple of years, the family had several stores in Georgia and Florida, each combining an ever-expanding line of sweets with souvenirs, a snack bar, and gas.
Like Johnson, Stuckey recognized the value of the familiar. People stopped there knowing what they'd get. For children, that meant rubber snakes, milk shakes, and miniature license plates. For parents, the draws were food, restrooms, and peace offerings: an approaching store, announced on billboards bearing mileage countdowns, was handy for brokering a truce in the back seat.
Unlike modern convenience stores, which are engineered to sweep customers from entrance through purchase to exit in a smooth, speedy arc, a pecan shoppe was designed to hold them captive. Restrooms were always tucked in the far left corner, the snack bar in the far right, and getting to either required multiple turns past the merchandise. All the items geared to kids were on low shelves.
For many years, Old Man Stuckey further strengthened his stores' grip with live parrots and mynah birds, a tropical touch he reprised with coconut milk and papaya juice at the snack bars. Outposts spread like the flu, and their billboards, many of them hand-painted, with a forceful, folk-art simplicity, became a ubiquitous feature of the southern landscape.
9
FOR TWO YEARS after producing Toll Roads and Free Roads, the government's engineers fussed with its details, refining the network's routes and extending them, in myriad small additions, to 29,300 miles. They had plenty of time to fiddle, because the report earned no action from the White House or Congress; war was almost surely coming, and Washington's attention was fixed on girding the country for a fight.
But in April 1941, with Pearl Harbor still eight months off, Franklin Roosevelt was already thinking beyond the struggle against Germany and Japan. He recognized that the feds needed a plan for absorbing millions of fighting men into the economy and retooling the country's high-revving war industries once the shooting stopped—and they needed to start work on the plan soon, rather than wait until victory approached. His interest returned to highways.
That month, the president appointed a committee to revisit the bureau's 1939 recommendations and, if they held up, work out the details of a " limited system of national highways." The new panel was an interdisciplinary bunch, its members the Chief, a former governor, a couple of state highway officials, and three big-name planners. At its first meeting that June, the group elected MacDonald its chairman and appointed Herbert Fairbank its secretary. The pair who'd envisioned America's highway future in Toll Roads and Free Roads thus oversaw its refinement into a virtual blueprint of the interstates to come.
The committee first reconsidered the size of what it called " inter regional" highways. It mulled a bare-bones system, just 14,300 miles long, that resembled what the president had sketched for the Chief in 1938, and a 78,800-mile option that approximated the War Department's Pershing Map of years before. It weighed other variations that split the difference between these two extremes and, using hard data from the highway planning surveys, eventually decided that a 39,000-mile model made the most sense; its average daily traffic was about as high as could be achieved, it passed through counties that were home to 45 percent of the rural population, and it connected all of the country's principal cities—the biggest not actually touched by the roads were Akron, Canton, and Youngstown in eastern Ohio, and they weren't far off the grid. It would span " as much as possible of the productive agriculture area of the Nation," as a committee draft said, and " include the more important routes of the strate
gic network of principal traffic routes of military importance." Plus, it would " give convenient access to principal recreational areas."
Motorists on the interregional system would be able to punch their speed to seventy-five miles per hour with confidence. Curves wouldn't exceed three degrees and climbs wouldn't top a gentle 3 percent, or a gain of just 158 feet over the course of a mile. Lanes would be wide enough to " relieve the strain of holding the vehicle to a narrow path," as the draft said, " especially when passing large vehicles." The right of way would be 300 feet wide whenever possible, and overpasses (always made of steel or reinforced concrete) would give drivers at least 14 feet of headroom.
This was an amazingly big vision. No highway system in the world had such specifications. And consider when it was born: the country was at war on two fronts and just emerging from a decade-long depression; money was nonexistent. The scheme was so vast, and so expensive, that it must have struck many as an impossible abstraction, nothing more than an academic exercise in wishful thinking. That may well have been a blessing; with the prospect of actual financing, the committee might have aimed for a feasible, best-we-can-do system, rather than the ideal indicated by the data. Hard times, in this odd sense, might have freed it to conjure up the costliest public works project in history.
Like Toll Roads and Free Roads, the committee didn't argue for a uniform system of superhighways. It insisted that all of the dream network be limited-access but suggested that twenty-one thousand lightly traveled, rural miles could remain two-lane, undivided roads. What's more, those sections attracting fewer than three thousand vehicles on an average day wouldn't have to pass over or under crossroads; they could meet at grade.
