66 Degrees of Separation

Sept. 23, 2007 – Amarillo, TX

It kind of surprises me that so much is made of Amarillo's pedigree as a Route 66 town.

Route 66 was, in its day, one of the better-known components of the US highway system, the web of numbered two-lane intercity roads conceived in 1926 and still used today. The Mother Road was by no means unique in the way it spawned a new breed of traveler-based businesses and attractions—motels, diners, truck stops, giant balls of twine—that today have become icons of nostalgia. But well before it was officially taken off the books in 1985, Route 66 became known as the trunk line of on-the-road Americana, and its decertification coincided with a regression in the American mindset to the glory days of automobile travel in the United States. A fascination with roadside America was born.

Amarillo, the only large Texas city along the line of Route 66, certainly has its share of waysides. In 1974, some guys buried ten Cadillacs in a field west of town. And about ten years before that, a restaurateur on the other end of the city began offering free 72-ounce steaks to anybody who could consume one within an hour. These were destinations along Route 66 as they are still along Interstate 40. They are enlightening places to visit, but they are just quirks.

In Amarillo, as in much of the American West, roadside America is more than quirks: it is an entire fabric. Roads and addresses are carefully portioned into impersonal cadastral grids; freeway interchanges are methodically numbered according to a scale of miles from the state line. Frontage roads allow the Interstate itself to be an address (72-ounce steaks: exit 75; half-buried Cadillacs: between exits 60 and 62). The majority of the city seems to be a wash of internally lit brand names and franchise logos, no different than the days of Burma Shave and Phillips 66.

Souvenir shoppers visit the Route 66 Historic District and the offbeat destinations to revisit a forgotten piece of roadside America in Amarillo. But what they're remembering has never gone away. They need only look around: Amarillo is roadside America.