The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

by Earl Swift

  Not everyone was so enamored of the system's unrelenting predictability. Critics had decried the sterile nature of high-speed roads since long before limited-access became a reality, since the very year that Benton MacKaye had proposed the townless highway. Phillips Russell of North Carolina's Chapel Hill Weekly wrote in 1930 that "as fast as improvements are perfected, highways constantly tend to become dull and uninteresting to travel over," lulling travelers into "a state of silent torpor, with no more animation than a box of hibernating terrapins."

  The interstates' careful geometry amplified this effect. The system didn't rely on straightaways (or "tangents," as engineers call them) nearly as much as its detractors suggested, but even so, they're out there. One, on I-80 in Nebraska, stretches seventy-two miles, and plenty of others take a half hour or more to travel. Where the roads aren't straight, their curves are so gentle and banked so exactly that they go all but unnoticed; with rare exception, they cause no centrifugal pull, no sense, even momentary, of lateral movement.

  Over time, the bureau came to view a gently undulating expressway as an improvement on tangents, and it preached this view to its state partners. A well-executed curve in even relatively flat country might accomplish multiple goals—might save millions of dollars by swinging around a rise, rather than drilling through it; might look better, and be more interesting to drive, if it followed the land's contours, rather than defying them; and might help combat "highway hypnosis," a lethal daze that was said to descend on motorists who had too little to do behind the wheel. "Some drivers just fall asleep under the spell of the passing miles. Others are lulled into a trance, insensible to what is going on around them," Changing Times magazine warned. "'This one factor more than any other,' says the AAA, 'has accounted for most of the multiple-vehicle chain-reaction accidents we read about on superhighways.'"

  Open-country bends not only kept a driver's hands busy, but they gave him features on which to focus his gaze, and thus instinctively stay on top of his speed; the same went for "vertical curves," dips and rises that relieved the monotony of an unchanging horizon and saved tons of money in fills and cuts. Like every aspect of the new roads, their wriggles were rigidly standardized. Not only did each maintain a prescribed minimum radius, but the point at which it met a tangent was softened with a "transitional curve," so that a driver experienced no kink in his smooth glide, no need to consciously move the wheel.

  Of course, the critics were right about the downside to such safe and seamless motoring, though in fairness, travel had been moving toward monotony for a long time. A pilgrim of centuries past, on completing a day's walk across roadless terrain, would have had much to report about the country he'd traversed—the details of flora and fauna, the land's shape and character, the sounds and smells of village and field. He would have noticed the moss on tree bark, the conversation of a fast-moving stream, the lacework of afternoon light on the forest floor. He might have startled deer and bear, unalerted by his soft approach, or reveled in bird song.

  A later traveler, riding horseback, might have spoken of the views he'd enjoyed, but they would have been limited views, next to the walker's. He would have moved at a faster clip, and thus missed the tiny details of his surroundings that only a leisurely pace revealed. Further on, a stagecoach passenger had an even tighter range of experience; he beheld landscape not only from a road's fixed path, but as a moving picture framed by his window, and his description of a long trip would likely dwell less on the scenery than on the discomforts of the stage, the bumps in the road, the passage itself. Trains erected a pane of glass between traveler and country, and further insulated him by boosting his speed.

  But with the modern car on the modern freeway, the modern traveler was left with practically nothing to celebrate but the ever-briefer time he had to devote to getting from one place to another. He was sequestered not only from his setting, but from fellow passengers, if he so wished; he met strangers only when he pulled off the highway to gas up or grab a bite. He was insulated from sound, smells, and climate. The details of all that surrounded him were blurred by speed, too distant to make out, or too distracting to enjoy. Scenery was held at arm's length, beyond the well-manicured right of way; one drove through a piece of country, rather than becoming one with it. As John Steinbeck famously observed in 1962's Travels with Charley: In Search of America: "When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing."

  To Turner, ever-faithful to quantifiable results, the system's strengths were irrefutable, its flaws matters of opinion; he was far too busy to dwell on whether John Steinbeck enjoyed driving the interstates—or to read anything Steinbeck wrote, for that matter. He took an early bus to work, put in twelve to fourteen hours at the office, and, once back at the modest brick ranch he shared with Mable, changed and watched the evening news before dinner. Most nights, he had plans to attend an after-dinner meeting, either to speak about highways or as a member of his Masonic lodge; otherwise, he pulled out his briefcase and worked until 10:30 or 11:00 P.M.

  Motorists seeking relief from the monotony of the drive found that the system's sameness wasn't limited to its right of way, for it wasn't but a handful of years before the mom-and-pop businesses that had moved out from Main Street were joined by national chains, and the mercantile knots at the exits soon seemed cut from a stencil. To this point, the conventional wisdom held that the best bet for a good roadside meal was a restaurant with long-haul trucks and police cruisers parked outside; now, restaurants waiting at the end of one ramp were not much different, if they were different at all, from those one exit back, or two exits, or ten, and they used a visual shorthand—logos, signature colors, the shape of roofs and other architectural details—to identify themselves. Filling-station chains did likewise, their outlets sharing designs as standard as the bureau's signage.

  The aim of the companies responsible for the shift was standardization, providing the customer a predictable experience, no less than it was for Frank Turner. The first Holiday Inn had opened outside Memphis in 1952, a few months after a local homebuilder, Kemmons Wilson, packed his wife and five kids into the family station wagon for a drive to Washington,D.C.,and found the lodging along the way tight, uncomfortable, and expensive. He incorporated the business in 1954 and franchised it in 1957; a year later, fifty Holiday Inns dotted the country, and a year after that, the number had doubled. By 1968, there were a thousand, and half were at the end of exit ramps.*

  Howard Johnson enjoyed spectacular success as an interchange mainstay, as well. All but a dozen of the restaurants had shut down in response to gas rationing during World War II, but the company rebounded with a vengeance, its orange roofs spreading westward until they numbered more than nine hundred, better than half of them with a motel out back of the coffee shop. Turnpikes remained a HoJo specialty. A trip on the state-of-the-art superhighways of Maine, New Jersey, and Ohio, in addition to Pennsylvania, put travelers in close quarters with those trademark fried clams.

  Old Man Stuckey raced to set up shop at remote interchanges to lure the full of bladder. Before long, he had 350 cookie-cutter outlets, each with predictably spotless bathrooms. And in time there appeared competitors even more precisely geared to the road-weary and time-starved. McDonald's had been around since 1940, when brothers Dick and Mac McDonald opened their first restaurant on U.S. 66 in San Bernardino, California, but the chain had expanded to only four locations when, in 1954, milk shake machine salesman Ray Kroc convinced the brothers to grant him franchise rights. In ten years, he was drawing income from five hundred restaurants.

  The same year Kroc got his start, the first Burger King—called Insta Burger King at the time—opened in Miami, its burgers and shakes priced at 18 cents apiece. One of its founders, James McLamore, had visited San Bernardino, as well, and, like Kroc, had been riveted by the McDonald brothers' simple menu and efficient service. And the brothers inspired yet anot
her national chain. A Marine Corps veteran named Glen Bell ran a burger joint and later a taco stand in San Bernardino as the McDonalds perfected their system. He built the Mexican joint into a small chain and sold it to his partners—then repeated the process before launching Taco Bell in 1962.

  Whataburgers popped up in Florida, Tennessee, and Texas. Carl's Jr. and In-N-Out Burgers sprouted in California. Dairy Queens and Burger Chefs and Roy Rogers outlets spread like the flu. Why? What was it about assembly-line food that drew customers by the millions? For starters, it was cheap: Burger King's Whopper cost 37 cents when it debuted in 1957, and a plain McDonald's hamburger, just 15.

  But more than that, it answered a growing demand for speed and simplicity, as the auto cabin camps had decades before. A motorist making good time on the interstate wasn't inclined to squander his achievement with a fussy and time-gobbling sit-down meal, if he could slip in and out of a burger joint in fifteen minutes—or better yet, grab the goods and eat behind the wheel, while adding new miles to his tally.

  And the chains' drive for efficient mass production mirrored a desire in the American public for predictable quality—for preferring the everyday but familiar to a surprise, good or bad. Sure, you could stray from the corridor in search of local flavor, and you might get lucky—might discover a diner with spectacular coffee, or a café serving Angus burgers big and juicy beyond description, or a small-town wayside famous for its Little Round Pies. Then again, you might get ptomaine poisoning.

  And McDonald's coffee is pretty damn good. A Whopper isn't bad. Hardee's makes a creditable cinnamon roll. And they're right there, at the interchange. No need to hunt. They require barely a pause. Fast food and the interstates fed off each other. The highways provided the restaurants their customers; the restaurants, a service that kept the highways operating at maximum efficiency.

  In a few odd places, an interchange escaped the chains. In fewer still, an exit—the actual interchange—became a destination in and of itself. One, near Dillon, South Carolina, grew into the grandest of interstate waysides.

  Alan Schafer's place is dominated by a mammoth, neon-edged sombrero rising two hundred feet over Interstate 95 at its meeting with U.S. 301/501. Below, a sombrero-shaped restaurant serves steak. A ninety-seven-foot, sombrero-clad Colossus stands guard outside a gift shop, cars rolling between its legs. Motel guests swim in a pool enclosed by a sombrero-shaped solarium. Neon sombreros and cacti and rockets light the night. Supermarkets of fireworks and rubber whales and souvenir back scratchers abound.

  Even the billboards fail to prepare you for South of the Border, and if you've driven 95 between Baltimore and Orlando, you know the billboards—yellow lettering and fluorescent sombreros on fields of black, their messages a mix of pun and guileless outburst. "Camp Weeth Pedro!" screams one, a half hour out. "Pedro's Weather Report: Chili Today, Hot Tamale," another advises. "You Never Sausage a Place!" promises a third, illustrated by a massive, three-dimensional kielbasa. For forty years or better, scores of them straddled the interstate, and as you neared the line separating the Carolinas they came ever faster, blotting out the roadside's pines and cedars, trumping drabber signs for cut-rate smokes and porno shops. In the past few years they've dwindled a bit in number, but at their height in the nineties, on one curve you could see eight of them at once.

  Yet they understated the place. You see the sombrero tower first: curving steel legs, a glass elevator, the massive hat. Once off the interstate, you hit gas stations, arcades, restaurants—Pedro's Coffee Shop, Pedro's Pizza & Sub Shop, Pedro's Diner, the Sombrero, the Peddler Steak House, Pedro's Ice Cream Fiesta. In the stores (thirteen at last count) wait tiny Buddhas, lewd bowling towels, shot glasses, and key chains, all displayed under signs that push deals like carnival barkers. You want pig figurines? Here they are: pigs in baskets, in burlap sacks, playing cards. Want fireworks? The Border is among the nation's largest retailers of pyrotechnics, and some of the devices for sale are the size of trash cans. You can take your time browsing; roomy digs at the South of the Border Motor Hotel come with a carport. Twenty dirt-cheap honeymoon suites come equipped with headboard mirrors and Andre champagne.

  South of the Border reckons that 112 million travelers have pulled into the place over the past sixty years, a figure that, if accurate, places the 350-acre spread among the nation's top tourist shrines. It happened by accident. In 1949, the adjoining North Carolina county voted itself dry and Schafer, the Miller beer distributor thereabouts, suddenly found himself long on stock and short of retailers. So he bought three acres on the state line, planted a pink eighteen-by-thirty-six-foot cinder-block shack there, and called it the South of the Border Beer Depot. Trade was brisk.

  The name, however, didn't sit well with the state liquor folks. Schafer got them off his back by swapping "Beer Depot" for "Drive-In" and building a diner, its menu a short list of sandwiches. "Grilled cheese. Grilled ham. Peanut butter and jelly," he recalled when I visited with him years later. "That was the whole menu, except for soda and coffee—and beer, of course." So it may have stayed, a simple outlet for Miller beer, had a salesman not run out of cash one night in the early fifties, wandered into the diner, and pitched a deal: if Schafer gave him enough money to reach New York, he would hand over all of his samples. Schafer walked outside to the man's station wagon. It was filled with stuffed animals. Schafer bought them, "took about a five-times markup, and I put these animals on all the shelves," he said, "and in three weeks they were gone. And I said: Jesus."

  He put up a few billboards along U.S. 301/501, advertising his food and beer, and tourists showed up looking for shelter. The motel's first wing, forty rooms, opened in 1954. It did not have a vacancy for three years. By the time I-95 came through, the first big souvenir shop was open, and the original diner had grown into the Sombrero, a sit-down eatery with mock-cowhide booths and a sombrero-shaped salad bar.

  In those early interstate years, Cadillacs and Lincolns crowded the parking lot, and Schafer strove to pamper his guests with bellhop service and a par-three golf course. The links eventually made way for a bustling back lot of warehouses and offices (under a mustard-colored water tower marked "S.O.B.") from which he directed a small empire of interconnected ventures. He remained the region's Miller and Heineken distributor and sold only those beers in his stores and restaurants; his Ace-Hi Advertising firm built all of South of the Border's billboards, which he wrote himself; and he owned a truck stop just up 301/501 that didn't make money but kept the Border's parking lots clear of big rigs, leaving room for tourists.

  Just in case potential customers had missed the billboards—unlikely, but you couldn't be too careful—Schafer installed an enormous full-color, moving-image sign at the interstate's edge. Before he died of leukemia in 2001, its 24,576 bulbs had boosted his electric bill to about $110,000 a month.

  When I had lunch at the Sombrero one afternoon, a carload of Mexicans—actual Mexicans—was seated a couple of tables away. They had trouble deciphering the menu and got little help from the wait staff. Nobody spoke Spanish.

  18

  BACK IN BALTIMORE, city officials searching for a way to kick-start their downtown's redevelopment announced that they'd found it in a gleaming black office complex called Charles Center, which in short order rose from the business district's southern edge. The project caused an immediate ripple in the city's plans for an east-west expressway. In July 1959, the Sun revealed that planners were secretly discussing a new I-70 route that swung south of downtown, instead of north—an alignment that spared Tyson Street and snuggled up to Charles Center.

  This new secret plan routed the elevated freeway along the Inner Harbor's north shore, effectively sealing off downtown from the water, to meet north-south I-83 at an interchange built on or beside the harbor's docks. It promised to be Baltimore's version of the Embarcadero Freeway, a brutalist concrete veil over the city's most valuable asset, but that wasn't obvious at the time. Officialdom and the business community loved it. After all, it mes
sed with nothing anyone cared about, at least anyone important. The Inner Harbor was a cesspool. And sure, east of the harbor the road would take out some houses, but they were old, in seedy riverside neighborhoods. No great loss.

  When the planners' report, Study for an East-West Expressway, was formally released in January 1960, its language made plain its authors' driver-centric orientation. "Automobile driving along regular city streets is usually a rather dreary and dismal experience," it read. "Driving on urban expressways is often stimulating and even exciting. Not only is there the pleasure of being able to proceed continuously and at good speeds through highly congested areas, but also expressways sometimes can provide the opportunity for interesting and even spectacular views of the city... . Expressways driving in many cases can be an exhilarating experience." It was mute on how the road might look to those not on it.

  The city hired three local engineering firms to check the report's assumptions; it also encouraged them to weigh alternatives to the plan, and in so doing the engineers came on an idea they liked far more. So in October 1961, Baltimore found itself considering yet another new expressway proposal, this one the biggest and most extravagant yet. Dubbed "10-D," it called for I-70 to enter the city from the west via the two parks, slash through Rosemont, and cross most of west Baltimore along Franklin and Mulberry. Shy of downtown it would bend south and keep going in that direction past the Inner Harbor; eventually, it would meet I-95, coming up from Washington, and the two highways, merged into a single gargantuan stream, would snake eastward through a beloved landmark, Federal Hill, a dome of earth south of the harbor that offered the city's best views. From there, 70/95 would cross the narrowest point of the Inner Harbor's approach, its very neck, on a low-slung causeway. Interstate 83 would be extended southward to the same place, to meet 70/95 in a mixing bowl of ramps and flyovers built right out over the water. The sum would be a mammoth fourteen lanes wide and the signature feature for which Baltimore would become known the world over—as instantly recognizable, its straight-faced backers claimed, as the Golden Gate Bridge.