A lot of American roadside history does not disappear dramatically. The motel closes. The neon sign is replaced. The diner gets beige siding. The giant fiberglass animal survives one more winter and then quietly vanishes. RoadsideArchitecture.com exists because Debra Jane Seltzer keeps photographing this stuff before somebody decides the property needs a pharmacy.
Visit RoadsideArchitecture.com.
The site is enormous: more than 3,500 pages and 75,000 photographs, covering buildings, signs and statues across the United States. Its strongest sections include mid-century modern buildings, gas stations, eateries and signs, with a general focus on surviving roadside material from the 1920s through the 1970s.
That description still undersells the rabbit hole.
There are Greyhound bus stations, tire stores, car showrooms, beverage plants, diners, drive-ins, five-and-dime stores, tiki architecture, Art Deco buildings, Egyptian Revival, mini golf, fairy-tale parks and giant objects. If somebody built a restaurant shaped like the thing it sold, there is a decent chance Seltzer has driven past it with a camera.
This is not a collection assembled from postcards or other people’s Flickr accounts. Seltzer’s travel writing shows how much of the archive came from long road trips dedicated to photographing the material in person. A 2008 trip covered more than 18,000 miles in six weeks, with thousands of dollars spent on fuel and vehicle maintenance. The archive is physically expensive in a way that is easy to forget when looking at a free website.
The site is also continuously revised. Descriptions change when businesses close, buildings are remodeled or signs disappear. Seltzer asks readers for corrections and tips, but the photographic core is hers.
The historical value grows every year because roadside architecture is unusually vulnerable. A courthouse may get a preservation committee. A goofy neon motel sign usually does not. Commercial property is remodeled specifically to stop looking old, which means yesterday’s ordinary business frontage can become scarce evidence surprisingly quickly.
There is also no need to romanticize every object. Some are beautiful. Some are tacky. Some were tacky when they were new. That range is precisely what makes the archive useful. It records the commercial landscape people actually drove through, not a tasteful selection made afterward.
Browse RoadsideArchitecture.com, especially the signs and archived sections. It is one person’s long-running attempt to photograph an enormous country before the interesting parts are value-engineered into rectangles.