In defense of architectural kitsch or Why we should preserve giant sized Americana

As a child my family spent many an hour on the highways between Nebraska, where we lived, and Minnesota where my grandfather resided. I remember the miles of cornfields, an endless yellow and green blur, sometimes punctuated by a silo in red and white. Every so often in this landscape of anonymous uniformity a startling, one might say shocking, vision would appear—the roadside tourist trap.

Giant sized Indians, cowboys, corn…and the greatest of them all, Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox towering above the landscape. Actually there were and still are two giant Paul Bunyans in Minnesota, one that talked, in Brainerd and the other, which stood mute, in Bemidji. These roadside attractions represent a quickly disappearing art form that is a link to the best and worst of pre-interstate America—an unbounded desire for the new and weird melded with crass commercialism.

This uniquely American art form that combines art, artifice and advertising on a grand scale can be broken down further into two sub-categories. The first is mimetic architecture, buildings meant to resemble a person animal or object, as in the Brown Derby Restaurant—a building in the shape of, yes you guessed it, a brown derby hat—in Los Angeles. The other category consists of giant sculptures with no utilitarian purpose as in the above-mentioned Paul Bunyans. The common trait of all these works are a sense of the naive that can be compared to the paintings of Grandma Moses, that is, the proportions may not be correct, but the work has undeniable vitality and truthfulness.

I’ve found that the most exotic of man-made wonders have been built in places with a dearth of natural ones. Middle America could perhaps be considered the roadside attraction epicenter for this reason. Miles of corn, wheat or barren moonscape seems a natural setting for a giant bull, T-Rex, or an aqua-blue whale. But in the America of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, anywhere people passed through or vacationed was fair game and competition often pushed the boundaries of the imagination.

Henry Ford, by mass-producing his Model T and thereby lowering the cost of the automobile, helped usher in the era of roadside tourist traps. The entrepreneurial of spirit could now fleece the passing motorist in a way that P.T. Barnum never has the opportunity to do. If you weren’t lucky enough to own the rights to some natural wonder like a cave or scenic vista you could always build something big enough or strange enough to pique the interest of a passing motorist.

Route 66 was once lined with both categories of giant sized Americana. A few examples survive today, including the Wigwam Motel in Hollbrook, AZ., and an over-sized space man known as the Gemini Giant in Wilmington, IL., but much has been lost.

When President Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 into law, he helped sound the death knell of roadside attractions in America. The law instituted the federal interstate system, connecting the country in a new way, but bypassing most of the tourist traps near smaller highways that no longer saw a large amount of traffic.

All across the country these irreplaceable pieces of America are in danger or are already gone forever. In California, Las Vegas and the Jersey Shore a number of examples of Googie architecture of the 1940s and 50s, which often used mimetic devices, have been torn down and in most cases replaced with designs of modern and post-modern simplicity or ubiquitous boxes lacking any semblance of style.