A city overrun with Panhandlers

Sept. 9, 2007 – Amarillo, TX

It's as if they built the city by spilling out a box of dominoes onto a coffee table and calling it a day. The town is scattered loosely about the plain, without regard to zoning or the need to cluster into anything resembling a community. Dropped casually upon the gridiron of roads is a repetitive array of convenience stores, weather-beaten homes, light industrial concerns, and taco stands. Downtown is two pairs of one-way, high-speed arterial streets sprinkled with commercial buildings—some attaining high-rise stature—at an average density of one per city block. (The remainder of each block is an expanse of asphalt or gravel or general uncategorized vacancy.) The resulting rarefaction is heralded as "Center City" along its approaches. Indeed.

Elsewhere, the city stretches out along Interstate 40, with the usual clutch of motels and fast food restaurants at each milepost-numbered interchange. Whatever nostalgic charm was brought by Old Route 66 is tough to spot here today. Or maybe it shows as plainly as the rain on the plain, how the Mother Road helped build this part of America.

Amarillo, the Spanish word, is pronounced "ah-ma-REE-joe" (more or less, according to dialect) and means "yellow". But the name of this northern Texas city is pronounced more closely to "armadillo" and so, I assume, transliterates more accurately in the Panhandle idiom to "yaller".

Welcome to Texas, the space bar on the keyboard of America.


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