ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 25, 1996 TAG: 9602270156
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 9 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: TED ANTHONY ASSOCIATED PRESS
John Margolies' road to paradise winds down Main Street, meanders past miracle-mile strip malls, and includes a lunch stop at, say, Bob's Big Boy. And odds are he'd stay in the Ho-Hum Motel along the way.
For more than two decades, Margolies has been roadside architecture's faithful chronicler, documenting the commercial scenes of mid-20th century everyday life before they are swallowed by the encroaching urban-suburban outback of dull sameness.
His is an incessant search for a sense of Americana, found in the realm of miniature golf courses, gas stations, movie palaces, roadside diners and oversized plastic cows on restaurant rooftops.
Kitschy? Margolies despises the word.
``I'm preserving a tradition in American design that was pretty much ignored by everyone - the `mom and pop' era,'' said Margolies, 55, a child of the early Connecticut suburbs. ``My parents' generation thought this was pretty tacky stuff - buildings shaped like hot dogs and doughnuts.''
Margolies' latest book, ``Home Away From Home: Motels in America'' (Bulfinch, $29.95) traces the history of the Holiday Inn genre to its beginnings as tourist cabins and roadside campsites for early adventurers who pulled on driving goggles and headed for the open road.
He denies that he's nostalgic, but his pictures, by his own admission, idealize. They lack people and, strangely enough, often cars. The result: clean, crisp shots that could appear on postcards or brochures.
``The sun is always shining, and I pick up litter,'' Margolies said. ``I'm manipulating these pictures and making them iconic. Because they are icons, and they are designed to be seen in that light.''
The motels Margolies documents are iconic in their own free-market expressions of individuality: color-splashed roadside signs with intricate artwork and such names as the Siesta, Rambler, Stardust, Kozy Kamp, Westward Ho and the curiously named It'll Do Motel.
Before motels, people stayed in downtown hotels with dressed-up concierges, uniformed bellhops, stuffed furniture and stuffed shirts. It was expensive, formal and too clean for early drivers.
``These people were dirty and exhausted, and walking into a hotel lobby was the last thing they wanted to do,'' Margolies said. ``They also wanted to be near their cars.''
So, something called an ``auto camp'' emerged - essentially a field filled with tents and a central area with running water, maybe an outdoor stove.
``Auto campers thought of roughing it as part of the experience of exploring their country,'' Margolies said.
Simultaneously evolving was the slightly more amenable ``motor court,'' the recognizable tourist-cabin prototype of today's mom-and-pop motels. The ``Mo-tel Inn'' in San Luis Obispo, Calif., apparently first used the term in 1925.
Margolies even dedicates a chapter to ``sleazebo motels,'' places denounced by former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as ``camps of crime.'' Indeed, one in Pratt City, Mo., was the site of a shootout between police and Bonnie and Clyde. This offshoot mutated by the early 1970s into such places as the more harmless Wigwam Motel, where a sign beckons motorists to ``do it in a teepee.''
Margolies, trained as an architecture writer, remembers as a child setting off on car trips with his family and being more excited at the peripheral attractions than the destinations.
``I looked at the Grand Canyon for about 30 seconds,'' he said. ``Not that it wasn't beautiful, but it wasn't what I was interested in. I loved it when we drove into towns, where I could see the buildings.''
His interest grew, and he began photographing the disappearing architecture before publishing some of his pictures in the 1979 book ``The End of the Road,'' his first.
Margolies' research has taken him down more than 100,000 miles of American roadway in 48 states. He has spent more than a thousand nights in motels.
Strangely enough, he hasn't owned a car since 1974. He always rents - the largest available, with a good radio and a cup holder for his takeout coffee. He lives in a cluttered Manhattan brownstone apartment festooned with roadside signs, paraphernalia and a postcard rack in his living room.
But he's always ready for a good trip.
``I go out there looking for idiosyncratic, one-of-a-kind and prototypical examples of roadside culture and design,'' Margolies said. ``This is such an inventive country, and the free enterprise system, given its chance to operate, did so with distinction.''
But in the late 1950s, the interstate highway system bypassed the mom-and-pops, which lacked the money to move and compete. So clusters emerged that Margolies calls ``Interstate Cities'' - islands of commerce at each exit, standardization the rule. Holiday Inn ads of the 1970s proclaimed that ``the best surprise is no surprise.''
``They homogenized the landscape,'' Margolies said. ``There used to be sort of this national feeling of `we're in this together' on the road. But it's been gone a long time.''
Thus, the stuff of Margolies' fancy is disappearing through attrition and replacement, and the tone of his books is always vaguely elegiac.
``Idiosyncratic symbols full of humor and life degraded into corporate abstractions,'' turning driving ``from a fascinating adventure into a time-consuming, boring chore,'' he wrote in 1993's ``Signs of Our Time.''
``Getting there used to be half the fun; now it's practically no fun at all.''
His next book, ``Hitting the Road,'' will be about road maps and ``how we got where we were going.''
``I'm not championing the old just because it's old. I'm a documentarian,'' Margolies said.
``I want to give Americans a whole new set of eyes - a way of seeing things they've always just driven by. When you're out on the road, everything is new. Every day is like a week of experience. And you never know what's around the next corner.''
Excerpts from Margolies' books
``Many of the old motels have gotten as old as the `moms' and `pops' who started them, and they will eventually fade away. But in the decline of these family-owned businesses beside the road, there is the loss of a certain personal touch, a little bit of individuality - a family pet wandering around the premises, a well-kept flower garden, a hominess that is lacking in the places that have everything all figured out. Some of these motels market themselves as a pleasant and economical alternative to the mold. Camps, cabins, courts and motels, lodging types that span the entire history of the genre, are still available to the adventuresome tourist. The most fabulous old motels of them all, however, are the ones that aren't there anymore - victims of progress and sophistication.''
-``Home Away From Home: Motels in America,'' 1995
``An ingenious architecture of illusion grew up to house the fantastic new invention called the movies. The buildings were ceremonial structures in which we could escape from reality into a communal yet anonymous space. Here we could be transported into a public yet somehow private dream world. Here, the rich and the working class could be swept away from ordinary time and space, together. ... Movie theater architects were pioneers in the promotional use of electric light. They designed broad canopies and towering animated marquees, wildly outlined in colorful tracer and chaser bulbs. Notices about attractions, coming attractions and special events throbbed and undulated with promise. Blazing lights illuminating the skies proclaimed gala openings. A riot of electricity beckoned toward the Xanadu of a luminous modern pleasure dome.''
-``Ticket to Paradise: American Movie Theaters and How We Had Fun'' (with Emily Gwathmey), 1991
``In miniature golf, nothing is sacred. Many of the great icons have been caricatured and pressed into service in these mazes of artificial delight: churches, Buddhas, Easter Island heads and totem poles. In one California course, the onion-dome church is so large that one could almost attend it rather than play it. It is these new courses in California, beside the freeways in miniamusement parks, that are the largest and most complex of all. The statuary and obstacles have increased in size to scream for attention to the motorist passing by at 55 mph.''
-``Miniature Golf,'' 1986
LENGTH: Long : 148 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. ``I'm not championing the old just because it'sby CNBold,'' says author John Margolies. ``I'm a documentarian.''