Is That a Giant Fish? The “Roadside America” of John Margolies

—This is a guest post by Zoe Herrera, an intern in the Office of Communications. It also appears in the July-August issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

What would you have found along American roadways in the latter half of the 20th century? The answer lies in Roadside America, a collection of more than 11,000 photographs that captures the unique, odd and one-of-a-kind commercial structures that lined the country’s main streets, byways and highways in that era.

Photographed by architectural historian John Margolies over a span of almost 40 years, from 1969 to 2008, the Roadside America collection provides insight into a wonderfully kitschy bit of Americana that has largely gone by the wayside. (A StoryMap offers a look at the truly impressive range of the country he stopped in and photographed.)

Margolies became interested in roadside attractions as a child growing up in Connecticut in the 1940s and ’50s. As an adult in the mid 1970s, he began crisscrossing America on extended road trips, photographing what he saw: colossal replicas of dinosaurs in Utah and Colorado, grand casinos in Atlantic City, restaurants shaped like giant fish and steamboats.

This wasn’t just kitsch, he felt, it was a genuine part of American culture and an expression of the national identity. He was concerned that modernism and growing corporate influences were erasing the delightfully idiosyncratic bit of advertising and local color. In 1978, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for this work.

He liked to shoot first thing in the morning, with clear blues skies overhead. “I love the light at that time of day; it’s like golden syrup,” he wrote in “Roadside America,” a 2010 photo book that includes many of his favorite images. “Everything is fresh and no one is there to bother you.”

The Library’s collection, most of which was acquired in 2015, consists of nine categories, encapsulating different types of structures, scenes and travel-related items.

“Signs and Billboards,” for example, showcases advertising, from giant neon signs to oversized pizzas and toy rockets. “Miniature Golf” displays the playful designs of the era’s courses: Young golfers could putt their way through and around obstacles of whales, cows, coyotes, houses and windmills and, at one Pennsylvania course, into the base of the Statue of Liberty and out the other side.

As the “Restaurants and Bars” category demonstrates, entrepreneurs were willing to try any gimmick to lure hungry travelers from the road — like the place in New Jersey that erected a leaning Tower of Pizza or the Texas seafood joint that topped its sign with a giant shrimp wearing a cowboy hat and carrying six-shooters.

Margolies put all this into several photo books, mostly in the 1980s and ’90s, including “The End of the Road: Vanishing Highway Architecture in America,” “Home Away From Home: Motels in America” and “Pump and Circumstance: Glory Days of the Gas Station.”

He died in 2016 at age 76. The places he spent much of his life photographing were symbolic of an ever-expanding and increasingly prosperous and mobile country — and the joy Americans found in hitting the road and exploring it all.

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