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1984
- Revival's potential was apparent even before the route's widely lamented death knell in Williams, Arizona, where in 1984 a stretch of 1-40 opened and the last segment of Route 66 in service was replaced by the interstate system.
www.jstor.org › stable › 29763951A Sign of the Times: Commentary on the Route 66 Revival in ...
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Jun 6, 2016 · Route 66 got its official designation as a national highway in 1926. For John Steinbeck in "The Grapes of Wrath," it was the mother road, a major artery for migration during the Dust Bowl of the...
Route 66: Radiance, Rust & Revival on the Mother Road. Conceived in honor of the 90th anniversary of Route 66, this exhibition celebrates the art, history and popular culture of the iconic Mother Road.
US Highway 66 was inaugurated as an official Chicago-to-Los Angeles route on April 30, 1926 in Springfield, Missouri. Like many early highways, Route 66 was cobbled together from existing roads, such as a large section of the older National Old Trails Highway. As a result, 66 had a meandering path.
May 3, 2023 · SMART NEWS. Ahead of 100th Anniversary, Route 66 Will Get Much-Needed Upgrades. Approved in 1926, the historic highway grew to become a cultural icon. Sarah Kuta. Daily Correspondent. May 3,...
- Overview
- Background and construction
- Rise and demise of the route
Route 66, one of the first national highways for motor vehicles in the United States and one that became an icon in American popular culture.
The system of major interstate routes—12 odd-numbered ones, running generally north-south, and 10 even-numbered ones, running generally east-west—was laid out in a proposal created by the American Association of State Highway Officials and accepted by the U.S. secretary of agriculture in November 1925. The route from Chicago to Los Angeles was designated U.S. Highway 60. Various states raised objections to this designation. For example, Kentucky protested that the plan left that state out entirely and that, based on the placement of the other proposed east-west roads, a highway numbered 60 logically should run through Kentucky. Kentucky subsequently received the route number 60, and the original Route 60 was changed first to 62 and then to 66 in the final version of the plan, approved on November 11, 1926.
The original eastern terminus of the route in Chicago was at the intersection of Michigan Avenue and Jackson Boulevard; a few years later it was moved some blocks east to U.S. Route 41, better known as Lake Shore Drive. The western terminus in Los Angeles was originally at Broadway and 7th Street; later it was moved westward to U.S. Route 101 ALT (now Lincoln Boulevard at Olympic Boulevard) in Santa Monica, California. Among the other cities served by the route were, from east to west, Springfield, Illinois; St. Louis, Springfield, and Joplin in Missouri; Tulsa and Oklahoma City in Oklahoma; Amarillo, Texas; Tucumcari, Santa Fe (later bypassed), Albuquerque, and Gallup in New Mexico; Holbrook, Flagstaff, and Kingman in Arizona; and Needles, Barstow, and San Bernardino in California.
By the mid-1930s, Route 66 was already being called the “Main Street of America.” Early promoters, notably John Woodruff of Springfield, Missouri, and Cyrus Avery of Tulsa, had envisioned a great road linking towns across the continent, and the organizations they founded to advance the idea were in effect multistate chambers of commerce. True to the promoters’ foresight, traffic on the highway increased, a growing share of it long-distance, and the need for food, fuel, repairs, and shelter transformed the economies of the towns through which the route passed. The development of novel methods of merchandising to the transient customer that became commonplace in mid-20th-century America—drive-in and drive-up businesses, fast food, motor inns, and roadside advertising—can to a great degree be traced to the influence of Route 66 in those towns. The large-scale migration to California of the “Okies,” dispossessed rural people from the Dust Bowl states during the 1930s, accelerated that development and also produced yet another byname for the highway, the “Mother Road,” so called in John Steinbeck’s novel of that migration, The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
The explosion of automobile traffic that followed the end of World War II provided the perfect milieu for a song memorializing the journey “from Chicago to LA, more than two thousand miles all the way.” Written by Bobby Troup and recorded by Nat King Cole in 1946 and by many other artists in subsequent years, “Route 66” invited the listener to “get your kicks” on that very road. From 1960 to 1964 a television series of the same name featured two adventurers who cruised the highway in a Chevrolet Corvette sports car. At the same time, the rapid expansion in traffic meant that Route 66, even more than many other interstate routes, was carrying far more vehicles than it was designed to bear.
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More and heavier traffic, more stringent safety requirements, and improved construction methods created a demand for a new kind of federal highway system. By the time U.S. Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a few segments of Route 66 had already been superseded by newer, wider, and safer roads. The act authorized federal funding for an Interstate Highway System of such roads, and, despite an appeal by the state of Missouri on behalf of all the Route 66 states, there was to be no Interstate 66. Route 66 gradually was replaced by portions of several of the new high-speed limited-access superhighways. In many places these highways paralleled the old route or were built over its right-of-way. By 1977 the route had ceased to exist in Illinois, and in October 1984 the last segment was bypassed in Arizona. Route 66 was formally decommissioned on June 27, 1985.
Many private individuals, organizations, and towns have preserved portions of the roadway, businesses that throve on it, or collections of memorabilia. Among several museums dedicated to the route are those in Clinton, Oklahoma, and Barstow, California.
Jun 27, 2022 · Route 66 had its official beginnings in 1926 when the Bureau of Public Roads launched the nation’s first Federal highway system. Like other highways in the system, the path of Route 66 was a cobbling together of existing local, State, and national roads.
In the 1850s, U.S. Navy Lt. Edward Beale traveled this route, along centuries-old Indian trails, with 44 men and 25 camels imported from Tunisia. Beale and his men created the first federally ...
