Dr. Patrick’s Postcard Roadside

The Plank Road constructed across the Imperial Sand Dunes in 1915 was rebuilt by the California Highway Department a year later.
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The Molly Pitcher Hotel opened on South Hanover Street in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1919. It was built tight against the sidewalk and up against the adjacent buildings in the traditional way of the Pennsylvania Dutch towns.
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The Westporter was a sprawling, U-shaped motel complex built in the 1950s on the burgeoning Boston Post Road commercial strip between Norwalk and Westport, Connecticut.
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Route 36 was the not-40 way across the Midwest in the pre-Interstate past, a less-traveled shortcut that went for miles and miles with nary a curve through not-much.
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The mobile, prefabricated restaurant known as the diner originating in the mill towns of New England in the 1870s, but shifted to New Jersey in the early 20th century where manufacturers like O’Mahony, Fodero, Kullman, Paramount, Paterson Vehicle, Mountain View, and Swingle scattered diners to the roadside.
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The dinner-dance club was a staple in every urban entertainment district in the country from the 1930s into the 1960s.
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The gateway arch sign to Mineral Wells, Texas, advertises the home-ground CRAZY Water, the mineral-laden water that caused this small spot on the prairie west of Fort Worth to be the mineral springs spa of central Texas from the 1880s to the 1940s.
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On the Day the Music Died, February 3, 1959, the plane that lifted Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson into a fateful snowstorm departed from Clear Lake, Iowa, bound for the next venue on their Winter Dance Party tour in Moorhead, Minnesota.
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This 1950s view of The Dalles, Oregon, preserves the "Gas Station Cluster at the Edge of Town" that once book-ended America's small town Main streets.
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Back in the 1950s the Lazy L Motel served those lonely motorists traveling through Osborne, Kansas on US 281.
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Northern Delaware’s Mid-Megalopolitan location between Philadelphia and Baltimore helped make its section of US 40 a motel strip, especially after the opening of the Delaware Memorial Bridge to New Jersey in 1951.
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