One Century, One Road

Route 66, ‘The Main Street of America,’ turns 100

By Jonathan Bullington and E. Jason Wambsgans

Somewhere along California’s Inland Empire, we saw it: layers of American history, compressed and twisted into a kind of alchemy we would come to recognize throughout our Route 66 trip.

Mountains rose in the distance — the same ones that daunted scores of Dust Bowl refugees who crossed them fleeing Oklahoma and, later, delighted vacationing families seeking a version of the American West they’d only known in movies and on television.

In the foreground, a train pulled shipping containers stacked and painted with a bright-blue arrow curved into a grin, an ubiquitous ecommerce logo that hints at why mom-and-pop retail stores are such a novelty along the famed highway.

We spent 21 days last summer driving from Los Angeles to Chicago along Route 66 ahead of this year’s centennial celebration. We wanted to know what the road could tell us about the state of our country and to explore whether its 2,448 miles still had the power to connect a nation whose divisions have increasingly felt like chasms.

That was the goal, after all, back in 1926, when Oklahoma highway commissioner Cyrus Avery and others fused a chain of existing roadways — many unpaved — across eight states and three time zones.

Some of the route’s most passionate advocates will tell you it’s not the things you see that make it worth traveling — it’s the people you meet. They, and many others, welcomed us in those 21 days and eagerly shared their pieces of those 2,448 miles.

Perhaps that’s where Route 66 still has the power to connect.

Chicago, Illinois

Route 66 begins at East Jackson Boulevard and South Michigan Avenue in Chicago, where a brown sign hanging 12 feet high on a light post tells people they’ve reached the venerable road’s threshold.

While the route often conjures images of quaint small towns, its foundation, said historian and author Jim Hinckley, has always been rooted in Chicago. The existing roads and trails that would eventually become Route 66 nearly 100 years ago largely followed the railroad, with Chicago as its hub. Read more here.

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St. Louis, Missouri

There was no warning siren, only the sudden sound of what seemed at first like a locomotive speeding through her neighborhood a mile off Route 66.

Lea Davis heard trees snapping. Glass shattering. The front door to her 122-year-old two-flat slammed open and shut. Open and shut. She thought to grab her partner, Reginald, who is blind, and run to the basement, but figured they might not make it in time. They could take shelter in the closet, she thought, or the bathtub.

“You didn’t have much time to think,” Davis, 55, remembered that May 16 afternoon. “The only thing I could say was: Jesus, please save us. Please help us.” Read more here.

Meet the people keeping iconic Route 66 motels alive

Their stories follow a remarkably similar path. It starts with frustration, over skyrocketing housing prices in The Hague, or the pandemic’s impact on their jobs in Illinois, or the tedium of arranging flowers for weddings and funerals in Missouri.

They each wanted to drastically change their lives, and they were willing to gamble that the way to achieve such change could be found in a Route 66 roadside motel.

These are the innkeepers who form the backbone of the iconic highway’s continued existence. Beyond hosts, they are de facto plumbers and landscapers, housekeepers and historians, preservationists and tour guides. Read more here.

• Route 66: Photos from the ‘Main Street of America’

Galena, Kansas

She wrote front-page stories about changes to the city’s animal ordinance and the county’s efforts to clean up an illegal dumping site. She laid out the rest of the week’s 10-page paper: Obituaries on page two. Columns from local contributors on pages three and four. School news on five. Classifieds on eight. A back-page photo spread on three-dimensional Route 66-themed chalk art in a park along the historic road in nearby Joplin, Missouri.

By 4 p.m. that day, Machelle Smith moved to her next task. Seated at her cluttered desk inside the Galena Sentinel-Times newspaper’s office on Route 66 near the Missouri border, she converted each page of the upcoming issue to PDFs to send to the printer before the 5 p.m. deadline.

The newspaper has existed in one form or another in this part of southeastern Kansas since 1880, three years after the town was founded around the discovery of lead in the area. Read more here.

Tulsa, Oklahoma

Bruce Goff has been called the best architect the public’s never heard of, an “outsider” and a “rebel,” a unique talent whose name should be — but is not — mentioned with the same reverence given to Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

While he’s not considered a part of the Route 66’s fabric, there are parallels. Consider that most of the 500-plus built or unbuilt projects he designed in an architectural career that started at 12 and ended with his death 66 years later were located in states that claim a portion of the 2,448-mile route. Several are on or near the route’s Oklahoma stretch. Four are at its endpoints: Two in Los Angeles and another two in Chicago, where, pre-World War II, he established a private practice in Rogers Park and taught at what is now the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.

And like the route, which celebrates its centennial April 30, Goff is in the midst of a cultural resurgence of sorts. Read more here.

Luther, Oklahoma

It is, at first glance, an unassuming building that stands along Route 66 in this central Oklahoma town, a bungalow with a gabled roof and sandstone walls etched with the names of the many visitors who have stopped here over the last century.

Look through the Rev. Allen Threatt III’s eyes, though, and something else comes into focus. Read more here.

El Reno, Oklahoma

The air downtown smells of grilled onions, wafting from the flat tops of three Route 66 restaurants that have helped give this small town about 25 miles west of Oklahoma City a distinct culinary identity.

They’re called fried onion burgers. Plenty of places put onions on burgers. Few have been doing it as long, or as well, as they do here.

“They’re not like any burger,” said Lyndsay Bayne, 48, the city’s public information and marketing manager. “It’s hard to explain. You have to eat one.” Read more here.

Elk City, Oklahoma

Few, if any, thought they were going to change minds by standing on a patch of grass along Route 66 and holding signs decrying Donald Trump’s presidency. All 77 Oklahoma counties voted to return him to the White House. Here in Beckham County, at the state’s western edge, he carried 84% of the vote.

Still, many of the 40 people who gathered Saturday for Elk City’s piece of the nationwide “No Kings Day” protests said, at least for that moment, they felt less alone.

“When you live in a rural area and you’re a blue dot, you can feel very isolated,” said Shelly Larson, 61, a native Oklahoman who has been counted among the town’s 11,000 residents for the last five decades. “Just knowing there are others, it’s good for the soul.” Read more here.

Amarillo, Texas

Route 66 extends nearly 180 miles across the Texas Panhandle, starting in the ghost town of Glenrio, which straddles the border between Texas and New Mexico. About 20 miles east, the town of Adrian advertises itself as the route’s midpoint, equidistant to Chicago and Los Angeles.

The road passes vast farm fields, undulating grasslands dotted with towering wind turbines and sprawling cattle ranches before entering Amarillo, the Panhandle’s largest city. At its western edge sits one of Route 66’s most photographed attractions: Cadillac Ranch. Read more here.

Albuquerque, New Mexico

This probably isn’t the Route 66 that most people imagine. Here, there are no restored 1950s diners or art deco gas stations-turned-gift shops.

Here, homeless encampments occupy an entire city block, and it is not uncommon to see people openly injecting drugs while sitting on a curb.

This neighborhood that surrounds this roughly 2-mile stretch of Route 66 in New Mexico’s largest city goes by two names. Read more here.

Glenrio, New Mexico

It seemed, for a moment, like this town was about to die a second death.

Gabi Tuschak and her crew had already raised considerable sums of money. They bought close to 20 acres. They figured out how to get water and septic and utilities to a site that was going to be a crucial first step in their dreams of resurrecting this Route 66 ghost town that straddles the New Mexico-Texas border.

Then, one day in early 2023, a New Mexico county worker who came to set up their street address gave them troubling news: The building they were about to construct was actually going to be on the Texas side of the border. Read more here.

Flagstaff, Arizona

The El Pueblo Motor Inn, or what’s left of it anyway, sits vacant behind a chain-link fence along Route 66, its stucco walls clad in weathered sheets of construction tarp.

At first glance, the nearly 90-year-old motel appears to be another crumbling relic from the famed highway’s early years as a bustling thoroughfare for hundreds of thousands of Americans traveling between Los Angeles and Chicago.

But this isn’t just a fading Route 66 roadside attraction. Read more here.

Seligman, New Mexico

They came suddenly and in numbers, cars and trucks weighed down with their owners’ worldly possessions. Angel Delgadillo was a boy when those hundreds of thousands of Dust Bowl refugees drove through his tiny hometown on Route 66, heading for California and the promise of work on farms so fertile, it was said, that fruit fell from the trees.

He and his friends used to run to a nearby building at night and wait for the passing vehicles’ headlights to cast their shadows on the white stucco wall. They danced and watched their shadows change as the cars neared.

“And as a car left,” he remembered, “our shadows went with them.” Read more here.

Hackberry, Arizona

The mayor stretched on the couch under the air conditioner in the Hackberry General Store and looked slightly annoyed at the tourist who woke him from his nap.

In addition to his duties as the unofficial leader of the unincorporated former mining town’s 334 residents, Charlie the 10-year-old cat is also the store’s night security guard and its exterminator.

“He was dropped off as a kitten,” remembered store clerk Eva Rodriguez, 66. “He was feral, just a mess. But he decided he liked this place.” Read more here.

Kingman, Arizona

There is a roughly 8-mile section of Route 66 at the western edge of this state that is considered to be one of the most scenic and white-knuckled drives this country has to offer.

It’s known as the Arizona Sidewinder, or to locals, simply, The Sidewinder.

Local lore says the town was named in honor of Olive Oatman, an Illinois woman whose family was killed by a Native American tribe in the area and who, the story goes, was eventually adopted and raised by a different tribe. Read more here.

Amboy, California

Water is the key to the future of Roy’s Motel & Cafe, the lone survivor in a Route 66 town that, at its peak, boasted 200 residents, three gas stations, three motels, two cafes, a post office, a school and a church.

Then Interstate 40 came a half-century ago and offered travelers a faster way through this remote stretch of the Mojave Desert in eastern California. “It was like they turned off the cars,” said Roy’s manager, Ken Large. “Everybody just left.” Read more here.

Rancho Cucamonga, California

Three generations of Nicolsons have grown strawberries on this roughly 9-acre patch of land along Route 66, nestled in the shadows of Southern California’s San Gabriel Mountains and tucked between a gas station, a golf course and a Walmart.

Kyle might be the last. Read more here.

Santa Monica, California

On a breezy Sunday afternoon, the first day of June, a steady stream of visitors waited their turns to pose with one of the pier’s most popular attractions: a Route 66 sign, perched on a pole 12 feet above the wooden planks, advertising the spot as the “end of the trail.”

When first commissioned, the highway ended at Seventh Street and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, in the city’s once-thriving theater district. Today, most of the buildings have been converted to other uses. Jewelry shops dominate storefronts. Street vendors dot the sidewalk. Some sell produce; others, like Roberto Cruz, sell rings, batteries, nail clippers, phone chargers and key chains and magnets, including some that advertise Route 66. Read more here.

• Route 66: Photos from the ‘Main Street of America’