Interstate highways are designed for efficiency, to get travelers to their destinations as quickly as possible. But they’re impersonal, offering drivers little to no contact with the towns on their routes.
A new exhibit at New Haven Museum, “Road Trip!” is an homage to the decades before those superhighways were built, when families on vacation drove on local roadways and took in countless quaint, quirky and memorable sights: classic diners, oddly designed gas stations, rambling motels, offbeat amusement parks, souvenir stands, kitschy tourist traps.
“Americans took to the road as early as the 19-teens. That was when the development of car culture began,” said exhibit curator Mary Donohue. “Cars let people get off the beaten path. When you traveled by train or by bus, you got from point A to point B but there wasn’t a lot of stopping when you wanted, where you wanted, to see what you wanted to see.”
Donohue is assistant publisher of history magazine Connecticut Explored and was a historic preservation officer with the state Department of Economic and Community Development. She built the exhibit in collaboration with the Connecticut Historical Society, the American Diner Museum and the Museum of Connecticut History. Photographs published in Richard Longstreth’s photo book “Road Trip” are featured as well, alongside artifacts crowd-sourced from the local community.
New Haven Museum usually focuses on New Haven-centric topics. This exhibit, Donahue said, “is about where New Haveners went on vacation, where they went when they took a road trip.”
One of those places was “the college highway,” a nickname given to the route that Yale men used to get to Northampton, Mass., home of all-female Smith College. Koffee Kottage in Cheshire printed the map on a postcard.
One segment of the show celebrates “mimetic architecture,” structures designed to advertise the building’s purpose, such as The Milk Can, an ice-cream stand in North Smithfield, R.I. Other items call to mind gas stations such as Russo’s Esso in Malden, Mass., whose red dome is topped by a gazebo made of Romanesque columns with a globe on top.
The goofy architecture had a purpose: People who stopped to stare might also come in and buy. “Entrepreneurs were thinking, ‘how am I going to capture those people’s money?'” Donohue said. “To catch motorists’ eyes, they became more elaborate.”
The segment of the exhibit on diners features a tabletop jukebox borrowed from Clark’s Dairy of New Haven and a blueprint of the former Elm City Diner and Chapel and Howe streets (now Tandoor Restaurant), which was designed in the classic diner style.
A display case full of souvenirs is divided between childrens’ items — car bingo, a license plate game, postcards, knickknacks from Hershey Park — and adult items, which were primarily cigarette- and alcohol-related: matchbooks, swizzle sticks, a beer mug, shot glasses. Some of the tourist sites represented include the Hawthorne Inn in Berlin, the Glockenspiel in Higganum, Beau Chateau in West Haven, the Tasty Toasty Luncheonette in New Haven.
“Going on a road trip, you go somewhere out of your own head, seeing new possibilities, new insights,” Donohue said. “It makes you realize that now everything is like where you come from.”
Discrimination
Donohue doesn’t ignore one grim aspect to road trips: In the decades before the Civil Rights Act, African Americans were not welcome at many of these roadside attractions. “You think of that as being something in the Deep South, but it happened all over the country,” she said.
A booklet called The Green Book was published for years to inform black tourists of resorts, motels, restaurants, beauty parlors, barbershops and other places where they were welcome. “Some places were dangerous for them to travel in. And people didn’t want the indignity of not being served,” Donohue said.
Donohue said the book became a staple of the black traveling experience, used even by famous entertainers. “If Billie Holiday or John Coltrane was performing somewhere, they needed advice on where to stay,” she said.
The exhibit features copies of The Green Book and highlights one resort, King’s Lodge in Otisville, N.Y., which was beloved by black travelers.
Jews also were discriminated against; a lakeside strip in New Milford was nicknamed “Bagel Beach” because it was friendly to Jewish tourists. “That phrase could be either affectionate or derogatory, depending on who said it,” Donohue said.
The exhibit was mounted to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the National Historical Preservation Act, which was passed in 1966 to protect historical archaeological sites in the country, many of which at the time were being destroyed by urban renewal and highway construction.
“ROAD TRIP!” will be at New Haven Museum, 114 Whitney Ave., until June 17. newhavenmuseum.org.
