Dr. Patrick’s Postcard Roadside

Constantine Spiridon and his two brothers opened the Blue and White Restaurant at 211 Liberty Street in downtown Warren, PA, in 1925. It was one and a half blocks north of US 6, certainly the coast-to-coast reference on this postcard showing its 1937 Art Moderne remodel.

A circa-1960 postcard shows New York City’s Transatlantic Steamship Terminal in the Hudson River between 44th and 54th streets ...

Westward across the plains of Kansas, US 40 originally split at Manhattan with the south branch following the Victory Highway through Salina (current US 40), and the north branch following the Midland Trail through Clay Center.

Gary Starling built his Duck Inn on the Orange Blossom Trail, marked out as the main tourist highway through central Florida in 1934.

When Mammoth Cave National Park was established in 1941, Great Onyx Cave, three miles from the entrance to Mammoth Cave, was not included, its owners continuing to operate the show cave in competition with Mammoth.

Cabins clustered around the home headhouse along the main road at the edge of town had become standardized by the time this 1940s postcard was produced to advertise Colonial "MODERN" Cabins just west of Richmond, Indiana.

The success of Andy Greiner's 1934 bakery in Parkersburg, West Virginia, allowed him to open this state-of-the-art Streamline Moderne bakery on Dudley Avenue in 1941.

On the pre-Interstate road to Florida, Richmond, Virginia, was a day away from most Northeastern cities and two days away from the rest. South from Richmond it was a long way to anywhere, making Richmond the place to rest-over.

A pile of postcards followed preserving the appearance of the Beartooth and the small towns of Red Lodge, Cooke City, and Silver Gate as they welcomed their first wave of tourists in the 1930s and 1940s.

Opened along the banks of Winter Haven’s Lake Eloise by Dick and Julie Pope in 1936, Cypress Gardens added “Southern Belle” posers in 1940 who became as famous as the flowers.

Two blocks of Burdick Street were closed and reconstructed with mall-like street furniture, water features, flower beds, trees and grass in an effort to reinvigorate a retail district actively being siphoned off to the suburbs.

The Streamline opened in 1941 as if a Miami Beach-Moderne hotel was dropped 260 miles north in Daytona.