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Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I can't agree with the author in saying that its "uniquely" Breezewood; this could be a picture of pretty much any "exit directly off the interstate" in especially the midwest, though likely around most of America. Towns like this pop up around interstates; it seems like interstates are planned to go near smaller towns, but not through them, so the town "creeps" over to the interstate and you end up with all the new developments happening over there, like big chain restaurants. And, of course, gas stations, because that just makes sense. I could point to three dozen towns between Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee that are like this.

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I can confirm that this also looks like many places in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Less so, but also in Washington and Oregon.

The photo (mainly due to use of the telephoto lens) provides a sort of dense charicature, but the overall look can be found in lots of places. Not the most beautiful aspect of the US, but a reasonable one. We're a huge, sparsely populated country where many people still get around by way of long driving trips. If you've been on the road for eight hours and you and the kids are hangry, often you want some gas and a reliable, safe, familiar meal. Gas stations and fast food chains provide that.

Criticizing these photos is a bit like criticizing a landfill or sewage treatment plant as reflecting on the beauty of an entire area. It's essentially utilitarian infrastructure. It's ugly, sure, but you can't have everything be ivy-covered brick and artisanal bakeries.

For the record, here's the spot on streetmap (the exxon is now gone) https://goo.gl/maps/wFx9ESH6vyBKk9mYA

Looks a lot less...interesting than the photo.

> Criticizing these photos is a bit like criticizing a landfill or sewage treatment plant as reflecting on the beauty of an entire area. It's essentially utilitarian infrastructure. It's ugly, sure, but you can't have everything be ivy-covered brick and artisanal bakeries.

Does it really have to be so ugly to be functional? This isn't some out of the way piece of infrastructure, these are areas of high traffic density and it is not unreasonable to ask why aesthetic considerations are so universally ignored in these types of areas in this country.

I asked the same thing about the engineering offices where I worked, and found that the reason why was because the offices didn't matter much for the people in them- we move around a lot, and the only time you're in an office is when you're figuring something out in CAD or the like. The people who work all day long in offices understandably have better furniture- we just don't need all that much.

People- interactions- matter more than places do- the happiest family I've ever met lived in a poorer neighborhood and their house was obviously not doing well.

What point are you trying to make? That there is no point to aesthetics because the only thing that matters is interactions with people?

It's Highwayland.

Highwayland is the America that connects the other Americas together. It spans the entire continent by itself, but everywhere else is only a short drive from it. No one lives there, but everybody passes through. The interstate highway system didn't create Highwayland, but homogenized and unified it.

Everyone is a little bit comfortable in Highwayland, but also a little bit bored. It has McDonald's, Subway, Taco Bell, a Cracker Barrel, a 4-story 1-corridor hotel with indoor pool and fitness center that offers free copies of USA today in the lobby, a 2-story discount motel where the room doors open to the parking lot, the dine-in restaurant open from 6 to 10, two gas stations or truck stops across the road from each other, each with their own bustling convenience stores that sell sausages, egg rolls, and round tacos that cook on the hot dog roller, with 128-oz fountain drinks, all for $4.

If it were too interesting, people wouldn't want to leave, and the transit dimension would clog up with loiterers and squatters.

You can take a photo of Highwayland from anywhere in Highwayland, and see all the same features, but you can also strike out in a random direction from Highwayland, travel 15 minutes, and find a place unlike anywhere else on Earth, with its own local character that is instantly identifiable to anyone that has ever been there.

Sometimes the local character is strong enough to overwhelm Highwayland, just for a few miles (Highwayland abhors kilometers), and the uniqueness seeps in. Maybe you can see the city skyline, or a university campus, or a hospital. It doesn't happen often, though. Highwayland craves sameness. Mostly, it is the realm of the consistent, the predictable, and the reliable.

Thanks for your comment! It was a very enjoyable read, and in its style is reminiscent of some older mystery novel authors.

It's a shame that photography doesn't get the respect it deserves as a visual art.

Ernst Haas took basically the same picture in New Mexico in the 60's.

https://www.mbphoto.com/artists/167-ernst-haas/series/other-...

One of the major design objectives of the Eisenhower freeway system was to eliminate the need for freeway drivers to slow down and stop due to towns - it created freeways as "protected" roads. In cities, this often meant expanding or cutting new rights of way for the freeway, often by demolishing homes, a process that was expensive and politically unpopular (and, as we understand much more now than back then, extremely destructive to those areas). In smaller towns, though, it was often easier to just curve the freeway right around the outside of the town, putting it through undeveloped land.

This had its own consequences, which you can see rather clearly in many smaller Western towns that formerly sat on a US Highway. The road through town which served as the highway spawned a great number of restaurants, gas stations, and especially motels. When a freeway was built along the same route as the US highway, it departed the old highway route before and after the town in a curving 'bypass.'

The result was that the businesses in town lost their large pool of customers passing through, and often relocated or went out of business. This manifests throughout the west as a blight of abandoned and run-down motels doomed by the freeway system. You can often see this pattern in cities as well as smaller towns (e.g. Central Ave/historic US 66 in Albuquerque, Powell Blvd/US 26 in Portland). The bypassed highway sections were often, but not always, later signed a "business loops" of the freeway (fwy number on 'transparent' or green freeway shield), a designation which promised that following the road straight on would put you back onto the freeway reasonably promptly, but this did little to help the problem.

And so, new businesses formed along the immediate exit of the freeway, which was at the outskirts of the town since the freeway was placed far enough out to obtain an unimpeded right of way. This has contributed significantly to the loss of the historic cores of towns and even cities, as well as reduced the economic vitality of many of these "truck stop towns."

To a large extent, the freeway system created the modern American roadside stop. But, at the same time, it destroyed a different version of the roadside stop that had thrived before it. Just like the US highways had before it, and the railroads before that, right back to Puebloan trade routes in these parts.

I looked at the photo and said to myself, "Is that West Lebanon in New Hampshire right before you get to White River Junction in Vermont?"

And the answer is no, but it's pretty similar.

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