Route 66

The 66 is the "mother of all routes." He began to be built in the 20s and was for decades the large artery that served as a communication and commercial hub between East and West. With the Great Depression of the 30s, thousands of families were circulating in their old cars headed to Los Angeles in search of work. Later, at 60, from the hand of Jack Kerouac, the route became a symbol of the beat generation, who left after the release of the golden California. The route also inspired the film and TV. The movie I'm looking for my destination, with Peter Fonda goes into the gray asphalt, as the number sixty Route 66, with Martin Milner. Much closer, the pictures of the movie Cars was slipped by the cracked asphalt of the road. Will cross cities of millions of people and small towns lost in time with special equipment to transmit live, real-time. It was cut through plains, deserts, the Grand Canyon of Colorado and the golden Californian vineyards.

At the beginning of the 19th century the first federal subsidies of roads and highways were granted. East of the Mississippi River, postal roads and public thoroughfares like the Cumberland Road benefited from limited government appropriations for construction and maintenance. Meanwhile, west of the Mississippi, land-hungry settlers traveled wagon roads forged earlier by U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers. When Mexico ceded to the United States the vast western territories from Texas to the Pacific Ocean, the great trails Santa Fe, Oregon, California and Mormon made possible a mass westward movement of Americans in search of economic prosperity and free land. A century later, the rut-filled corridors of the western frontier yielded to the smooth-surfaced, all-weather highways of a highly urbanized, postwar America. U.S. Highway 66 was one of several roads that hastened the continuous flow of migrants west during the most recent decades.

The urbanization of the 20th century West resulted in no small measure from America's love affair with the automobile and the longstanding belief of millions of enthusiastic motorists that the federal government should underwrite the cost of a comprehensive network of all-weather,cross-country highways. U.S. Highway 66 was one of only a handful of east-west corridors to appear early in the 20th century as a result of federal and state partnerships. Still, the genesis of one of America's most popular modern highways is rooted in the mid 1800s. Like the       primitive trails that tenuously linked the vast open spaces of the west to the population centers of the East and Midwest, U.S. Highway 66 evolved from a government-sponsored wagon road program initiated just before the Civil War. In the 1900s America's infatuation with personal mobility brought forward the notion of an all-weather, surfaced highway connecting Chicago to Los Angeles. Proponents joined a populist-based national cause known as the "Good Roads Movement."  

One response to the public outcry for an ocean-to-ocean highway was U.S. Highway 66. What sets Route 66 apart from the other roads that were absorbed into the body of national highways is (1) it was America's first continuously paved link between Los Angeles and Chicago, gateway to the industrialized Northeast, and (2) it (along with the segments of interstate highway that replaced it) remains the shortest all-weather route between these two cities. To the average motorist the importance of Route 66 was that it reduced cross-country travel between the Midwest and the Pacific Coast by at least two hundred miles. Beginning at the corner of Jackson Boulevard and Michigan Avenue in Chicago, Route 66 wound 2,400 miles across America to Santa Monica, California. Its oiled surface etched a trail across the landscape by way of St. Louis, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Albuquerque, Flagstaff, San Bernadino, and Pasadena. Its broad, sweeping arch connected Illinois with Missouri, then sliced through the agricultural Midwest, rolled across the Great Plains, and crossed the desert Southwest. To many Americans, Route 66 represents more than just an official highway. According to cultural geographer Arthur Krim, it (Route 66) was the symbolic river of America moving west in the auto age of the twentieth century. For others, the well traveled public road was a commercial lifeline. From its inception in 1926, U.S. Highway 66 was designed to connect rural communities to their respective metropolitan capitals. In so doing, gas stations, motels, "Mom and Pop" restaurants, and grocery stores were built in the hope of servicing an increasingly mobile public. When bypasses and interstate freeways were introduced in the 1960s to increase speed and reduce travel time, the economic base stimulated by the appearance of Route 66 began to erode.  

Route 66 is an excellent physical illustration of the method by which the nation's highways evolved. There was a strong government commitment to serve its citizens, who were becoming more dependent on highways for their livelihoods. Although it is only one of several notable highways in America, Route 66 is revered by hundreds of thousands of motorists as the model of the modern American highway and the emerging automobile culture it serviced.