Dr. Patrick’s Postcard Roadside

When New York City’s Hotel Pennsylvania opened in 1919 it was the largest hotel in the world, with 2,200 rooms each with its own private bathroom, then an unprecedented amenity for a hotel of this scale.

This mid-1960s postcard view of the Country Squire presents the diner and Philadelphia's western suburbs as cutting-edge Modern.

Walt Williamson started building his rustic, roadside wonder in 1936 using utility poles and old bridge beams.

Non-California’s introduction to the Los Angeles Basin’s San Fernando Valley came with the 1968 inauguration of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In broadcast from “beautiful downtown Burbank” at the Color City television studio opened there in 1952.

Robert Wagner and Joanne Woodward run around in the 1956 thriller, “A Kiss Before Dying,” but the real star is midcentury Modern Tucson, Arizona, presented in supersaturated technicolor and Cinemascope.

The soda fountain counter at Indiana, Pennsylvania's Rexall Drug Store in the Odd Fellows Building on Philadelphia Street.

The limestones of the Missouri Ozarks are pock marked with show caves that prospered on the traffic of Route 66.

The linen postcard with its soft hues, picturesque edits and eye-catching graphics was the perfect medium for image-making.

On this 1930 postcard, Bell’s Tourist Camp shouts out to U.S. 71 motorists coming into Texarkana from the north.

When Viennese architect Victor Gruen designed Minneapolis’s Southdale Center, he never suspected these retail mega-generators of auto-sprawl would replace the town centers he was trying to celebrate.

Nevada ended its frontier ways in 1909 when it made gambling illegal to project a sense of civilized modernity to the rest of the nation. Just 22 years later, it voted gambling back as an economic panacea to fight the Great Depression.

George Chinn opened up – literally, with dynamite – Chinn’s Cave House at Brooklyn Bridge, Kentucky, in the 1920s.