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The Virtues of Avoiding Interstates - New York Times
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Wheelspin
The Virtues of Avoiding Interstates
Michael S. Williamson
Part of the Lincoln Highway near Lyman, Wyoming. The road ran from Manhattan to San Francisco.
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By PHIL PATTON
Published: August 5, 2007
THE chef Alice Waters and other foodies talk about “slow food“ as an antidote to fast food.
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Scenic Roads That Deserve a Detour
(August 5, 2007)
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Gary Johnson
The Blue Ridge Parkway, which goes from Virginia to North Carolina.
Now many connoisseurs of the highway are championing the use of slow roads back roads with scenery and history instead of faceless Interstates. The idea emphasizes savoring local detail and culture.“Taking the slow road is the best way to taste and feel the country, to use all your senses,” said Michael Wallis, author of “The Lincoln Highway: Coast to Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate,” with photographs by Michael S. Williamson. (W. W. Norton, 2007) .“Heritage travel is real,” said Mr. Wallis, reached on his way to Flossmoor, Ill., as part of a cross-country book tour chronicled at lincolnhighwaybook.com. “Shunpiking is real,” he said, using an old term for avoiding toll roads. The slow roaders favor back roads, parkways, motels and diners, instead of chain lodging and food. Mr. Wallis contrasts making time and having a time, and the traveler and the tourist, as symbols of the fast road and the slow road. While people collect antique cars, there has been little interest in antique roads until recently. Over the last decade, preservationists have begun to include old roads, along with old buildings and old gardens, in the list of things to be saved. Call them heirloom highways, curving, twisting roads sometimes requiring slow, patient driving.Saving slow roads and the sights along them has recently become a preservationist mission. In June, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the motels of Route 66 from Illinois to California to its list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places. The World Monuments Watch has also placed the Mother Road, as Route 66 is known, on its 2008 endangered list, right up there with sites like the Teuchitlán-Guachimontones archaeological zone in Mexico. The group calls Route 66 “an iconic getaway route” and “a pilgrimage route for modern travelers.”Some famous slow roads are showing signs of revival. Derelict motels have been restored and reopened, and neon has been replaced. The famed Blue Swallow Motel on Route 66 in Tucumcari, N.M., has a new owner and new paint. A federal law to provide money to help preserve and promote Route 66 was passed several years ago. Preferring the slow road the byway, the back road has a long tradition, of course. The author William Least Heat-Moon in his book from the early 1980s, “Blue Highways: A Journey Into America,” called the back roads blue highways because they were blue on the map, in contrast to the red of modern divided highways.In 1991, the federal Transportation Department introduced the National Scenic Byways Program, which marked and promoted roads, largely to help tourism, and many states have added their own efforts. (A list of the byways and “All American roads” is at byways.org.) The film “Cars” from last summer contrasted the Interstates and back roads as two wholly different ways of life: the former hurried and inhuman, the latter sensitive and slow. Hollywood’s vision of the Tao read “life begins at the off ramp.” The first slow roads were parkways. The parkway was the invention of Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of Central Park. Carriages rolled along amid greenery on Eastern Parkway and Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. The first motor parkway was the Bronx River Parkway. The Hudson, Taconic and Saw Mill Parkways in New York are other examples. The parkway concept was expanded with motor roads like the Skyline Drive in Virginia and the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, built mostly in the 1930s. Scenery and history are combined in the Natchez Trace Parkway, paralleling the old migrant trail in Tennessee and Mississippi.But preserving scenic and historical roads was an afterthought to a culture widening, and paving over, most of its old roads in the ’50s though the ’70s. Paul Daniel Marriott, a landscape architect, organized a conference on historical roads for the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1998. The conference became a biennial event; next year it will be in Albuquerque, close to the intersection of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro and Route 66. Mr. Marriott emphasized the scenic, historical and tourist potential of these roads. The conference explored making historical roads safe for modern traffic, while saving their appeal as history. “People are appreciating historic roads more and more,” Mr. Marriott said. “It used to just be Route 66, but now you hear people mention the Yellowstone Trail, the Dixie Highway and El Camino Real. People are looking at specific roads with specific purposes.”It is hard to update older roads, especially parkways, for safety and increased traffic without destroying their character. But the rehabbed Saw Mill River Parkway has retained the grace of its curves, and a 1798 stone bridge in Kingston, N. J., still carries traffic past a milestone marking distance to New York in one direction and Philadelphia in the other. Much smaller efforts at promoting local tourism through roads are flourishing. Not long ago I was on Highway 20 in western Massachusetts, a lovely rural strip of pavement that signs told me was the Jacob’s Ladder Trail Scenic Byway. Along the 33 miles of the byway between Russell and Lee, Mass., I passed a restaurant and gas station whose sign read simply “EAT” and whose facade bore a classic Mobil Pegasus sign. A few miles farther, two women sat by the side of the road in folding chairs reading, beside a table full of blueberries they had picked and packed for sale that morning. Mr. Wallis’s book, “Route 66: The Mother Road” helped set off a vogue for that road after the book was published in 1990. He became one of the road’s best-known guides. For Mr. Wallis, there is a close connection between slow food and slow roads. But, he said, the real finds along the slow roads are not food or nature, but people.“Yesterday we saw one our favorite waitresses, at the Paddock in York, Pa. She’s been there about a thousand years,” he said, “and told us to call her ‘Sarge.’ ”
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Past CoverageWHEELSPIN; The Virtues Of Avoiding Interstates (August 5, 2007)Scenic Roads That Deserve A Detour (August 5, 2007)AMERICAN JOURNEYS; Twisting Roads Take You to the Heart of Appalachia (July 27, 2007)Into the Big Sky (July 6, 2007)
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