Dr. Patrick’s Postcard Roadside

Downtowners, Rowntowners and five stories of breeze block in Danville, Virginia!

This circa 1930 postcard of Husted Cabins on US 40 between Marshall and Clark Center, Illinois, captures a time during the early auto age when farmers lucky enough to be on a major trunk route reaped a windfall of auto-oriented commerce.

The free motel postcard was once a vacation standard. Proprietors expected guests would send a pile of postcards to their friends and family telling them what a wonderful vacation they were having and the motel would reap the free advertising.

“Pig and Whistle” is an old English phrase that meant to fall upon hard times or ruin.

In the roadside world of Big Food, California has giant citrus lying around all over the place including Lemon Grove’s Giant Lemon.

World’s Fair Refugee: Vulcan in Birmingham, Alabama.

Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where a sign perched at a precarious curve on U.S. 40 seems to challenge motorists to take their cars for a swim.

The Plank Road constructed across the Imperial Sand Dunes in 1915 was rebuilt by the California Highway Department a year later.

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.

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.

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.

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.