Our Favorite Roadside Attraction in Every State
A collection of bite-sized buildings creates a magical mini village in the Pennsylvania mountains. joedissolvo / Atlas Obscura User
From Atlas Obscura: It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. Especially if the journey includes a pit stop to visit a giant fiberglass dinosaur park, or an apple emporium, or an outlet store selling lumpy-textured candles.
Roadside attractions like these—and the 50 listed below—once flourished in small towns across the United States, back when America had a rising middle class with money to spend, and before the interstate highway system all but obliterated the amusements and curio shops that had set up along smaller roads.
You can still find many roadside attractions these days. Though we’re far from their heyday, their appeal endures. They offer a welcome diversion, breaking up the monotony of a road trip and providing the occasional photo opportunity. More importantly, they provide a window into the country’s past—a potent hit of Americana nostalgia.
And sometimes you just want to see a really big penny.
A Googie Icon Was Supposed to Die. Instead, It Became a Chick-fil-A
Chick Fil-A restaurant in Sherman Oaks, Ca.
From Architect Magazine: For years, the old coffee shop on Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles lived on mostly in photographs: a swooping roofline frozen in mid-flight, boomerang geometry slicing through space, neon once blazing like a promise of a jet-age tomorrow. By the time the doors finally closed in 2020, after decades as Corky’s, the building had become something else entirely—a patchwork of alterations, a shadow of its original self, and eventually a vandalized relic slipping toward oblivion.
Today, improbably, that future-facing past has returned.
Last week, a 1958 Googie landmark in Sherman Oaks reopened as Los Angeles’ newest Chick-fil-A—not as a casual pastiche or a nostalgic set piece, but as a near-forensic reconstruction of a lost modernist interior and exterior. The result is a rare thing in Los Angeles preservation: a building that looks, feels, and spatially behaves like it did in the optimistic aftermath of World War II, even as it serves chicken sandwiches to a 21st-century crowd.
Word from the Smokies: The search for a vanished Smokies poster
The reproduction Smokies poster started with an incomplete black-and-white slide of a scene from Newfound Gap Road toward Chimney Tops and progressed to color studies in paint. The final poster benefitted from a trip to the Smokies by Leen to determine the colorization.” Provided By Doug Leen
From USA Today: The iconic adage “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” coined in 1939 by Winston Churchill, the famous British statesman, has been used to describe all sorts of mysteries over the years. In fact, there’s no shortage of mysteries in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where long-standing stories of vanished personsor the locations of old cemeteries persist. One unsolved Smokies mystery involves an 80-year-old piece of government art.
During the Great Depression, the Federal Art Project, a Works Progress Administration program designed for unemployed artists, created 14 beautiful posters featuring iconic scenes from several national parks and monuments. One of the posters featured Great Smoky Mountains National Park and was entitled “Naturalist Service—So That You May Enjoy the Smokies All the More.” Estimates are that 50 to 100 copies of each WPA poster were printed and shipped to their respective National Park Service sites years ago. Today, originals of most of the WPA posters have been found, but not the Smokies poster—not even in park archives.
Humboldt Park restaurant owner is on his way to deportation flight to Pakistan, family says
From the Chicago Sun-Times: Every year on New Year’s Eve, Asif Amin Cheema’s five children rushed to wake him after he fell asleep before midnight, all vying to be the first to greet him in the new year.
Cheema, 63, the owner of Best Sub #2 on North Avenue in Humboldt Park, usually went to bed early to prepare for the next day at work, though his children never wanted him to miss the holiday.
This year, his five kids prepared for his deportation to Pakistan, which was slated for Thursday evening, according to his family.
Washington: This painting by an unknown artist may hold secrets to a Green Book hotel’s past
The Avalon lobby painting, which Gregg Mitchell purchased from a stranger decades ago for $25. (Courtesy Gregg Mitchell and Natalie Victoria)
From the Minnesota Star Tribune: Gregg Mitchell didn’t set out to preserve a piece of Minnesota history. All he was doing, he says, was offering a stranger a ride through a snowstorm.
“It was Christmas of 1973,” he told me from his home in Baltimore. “I was away at college and came back and was visiting friends in southwest Rochester.”
The radio reported the road headed south was closed because of a growing blizzard. As Mitchell eased onto Highway 52, he noticed “an African American man by the side of the road with a trunk,” and thought: “My goodness! He’s not going to be able to get out of town hitchhiking.”