A Sense of Time and Place

Route 66, so richly celebrated in story and song, is without a doubt the most famous highway in America. First commissioned in 1926, U.S. Highway 66 suddenly opened up the remote byways to travelers in search of a frontier experience. What they found, however, owed far more to P.T. Barnum and the Hollywood back lot than to the Old West.

“The fact that so many Americans began taking to the road,” explains Thomas Arthur Repp in “Route 66: The Romance of the West,” “turned the Southwest upside down.”

Vast stretches of the rural Southwest were untouched by the coming of the road. “Indoor plumbing and telephone service were creature comforts difficult to obtain,” Repp reminds us. “Stores closed at dusk for want of electricity.” But, here and there, a few visionaries saw a way to separate the travelers on Route 66 from their dimes and dollars--they operated a string of “trading posts” that offered gas, food and souvenirs, and they resorted to sideshow antics to slow down and stop the passing motorists. “Route 66” offers a closer look at these roadside attractions and the folks who ran them in a series of richly illustrated profiles. John Edward Claar, for example, was born in Ohio and made his living by running games on carnival midways before buying the Hitching Post, a service station and curio shop located a few miles outside Moriarty, N.M. Drawing on his carny background, he opened a menagerie of wild animals--owls and eagles, bobcats and coyotes, and the so-called Den of Death, a snake pit stocked with diamond-back rattlers. At the bottom of the snake pit was a wishing well with a sign that invited the tourists to drop in a coin and promised that “your wish will come true.”

“In the spring, I’d scrape the money out of the pit,” Claar’s son, Bob, recalled. “My sister and I would wash it and roll it. Every year that well would take in hundreds of dollars in change.”

The spectacular natural beauty and rich native culture of the Southwest were deemed somehow lacking by these good-natured hucksters. At the Longhorn Ranch in Moriarty, actors posed as cowboys. The famous Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, Ariz., invited tourists to spend the night in a structure that looked like a tepee--but the architectural plans had been borrowed from the builders of an auto court in Kentucky. And the Beast of Barstow, as advertised on a sign outside a rock shop near Hodge, Calif., turned out to be nothing more exotic than a dusty old burro kept in a simple pen.

Now and again, a bit of authenticity might be glimpsed along Route 66--the town of Gallup, N.M., still is host to the Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial, an exhibition of traditional art, dance and athletics by members of the Zuni, Laguna, Santo Domingo, Navajo, Hopi, Acoma, Ute and Isleta people that was first held in 1922. Chief Joe’s Trading Post in Holbrook was one of the few such places actually owned and operated by a Native American entrepreneur--Joseph Sekakuku was an authentic Hopi “snake dancer” who performed for tourists at the Grand Canyon before going into business for himself. But Bob Claar recalls how his father reassured the tourists that all of the souvenirs on sale at the Hitching Post were actually made by Indians while “my sister and I would be in another room peeling the ‘made in Japan’ labels off everything.”

Colorful and kinetic in its presentation, full of arresting images and packed with tales told with a wink and a nod by various old coots and charming rogues, “Route 66” is clearly intended to satisfy an appetite for nostalgia. But the oral histories, vintage snapshots and richly evocative memorabilia on display here add up to something much more than a sentimental scrapbook of the so-called “Great Road West.” Indeed, “Route 66” can be approached as a serious study of American pop culture disguised as a coffee table book.

A full century separates the first trek into Yosemite Valley by John Muir, the 19th century naturalist and pioneering environmental activist, from the more recent expeditions of photographer Galen Rowell, but the juxtaposition of their work in “The Yosemite” is apt and illuminating. Muir’s classic work of natural history, first published in 1912, is here illustrated with more than 100 contemporary images that allow us to see for ourselves what Muir meant when he wrote that “the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light.”

The book reproduces the entire text of Muir’s original, but the glory of “The Yosemite” is the superb color plates, each one annotated with a quotation from Muir’s writings and a comment from Rowell. Although Rowell credits Muir for the remarkable fact that we can still see many of the same sights that the pioneering preservationist first glimpsed so long ago, Rowell is certainly not shy about showing us Yosemite through his own lens and answering Muir in his own words.

When, for example, Muir writes that “a wild scene, but not a safe one, is made by the moon as it appears through the edge of the Yosemite Fall,” Rowell responds by showing us his own startling image of the falls by moonlight. His 45-second exposure captures the rock face, the falling water and the stars in the sky with an intensity that the rods and cones of the human eye cannot match. “In this case,” the photographer explains, “photography allowed me to see more than met my eye.”

Only rarely does Rowell consent to showing us a human figure on the landscape of Yosemite, and even when he does, the human experience is always a solitary one. “Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness,” wrote Muir. “All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and clatter.” Exactly here, of course, is the unspoken irony of the whole enterprise--Rowell credits Muir with protecting Yosemite from unrestrained development, but his photographs also remind us that the Yosemite we see in these pages is a wholly different place than the hectic tourist destination that it has become.

Architect Richard Neutra is remembered for his work in and around Los Angeles, and so it is somehow fitting that his very first residential commission on the East Coast is now long gone. The so-called Windshield House, named for its lavish expanses of glass, was built on Fishers Island in New York in 1936, damaged by a hurricane within weeks of its completion and later destroyed by fire.

“Richard Neutra’s Windshield House,” an elegant monograph based on an exhibition at Harvard University and the Rhode Island School of Design, documents and illustrates what editor Dietrich Neumann calls “a watershed building in Neutra’s career.”

The stated intention of the clients was to create a home that would be “economical to build and operate,” although the Windshield House, at a cost of $218,000, turned out to be “the most expensive modern house in the country,” writes Sarah Williams Goldhagen, a contributor to the book. Indeed, we discover that both the architect and his clients regarded the project as an experiment in the use of high technology for the mass production of housing--the bathrooms, for example, were prefabricated one-piece units designed by Buckminster Fuller.

“Windshield represented indeed the sounds, smells, and images,” writes Neumann about the spare and yet stately structure, “of a lived-in machine.”