another neon sign! currently not working, and i thought ready to be demolished.... i saw it for the first time early september, last year. only the sign was left, behind it a bare piece of land. i tried to take some pictures then, but all turned out bad. on sunday we went there again, and now some building is being constructed! i presume it is a new motel, and maybe they will restore the sign? unfortunately there is a fency around it, so taking pictures was again not easy. actually the only one that was ok-ish i took from the car, while we drove by, haha...
yes, i also like those neon signs! they are sooo american! nowhere else i saw so many of them, and such enormous ones! this one that i posted earlier is impressive too, its along the same highway, and we sometimes go there for dinner (the restaurant is very, very american too. really like you see in the movies. i would love to be invisible one night and picture everything and everyone there.... as for me, i think it would show the true heart of america.... :) ). from reading i gather that most of these signs and motels were built in the 1950s and 60s, and really made the usa so different and more modern than europe, at that time... i would like to be able to go back to that time and see how it all looked, with all the fancy cars and people...
perhaps back then this really was the country side... but now its certainly not. this is the crazy route 1 around Saugus, close to our apartment, completely bombarded with many different shops and restaurants, some more crazy than others. theres a huge chinese palace called "kowloon" (with absolutely horrible food, we tried it once and never again), there is a restaurant in the form of an enormous ship and some italian place with the tower of pisa next to it. another restaurant has a huge neon sign that just says "EAT" (still to be photographed), and then there are ofcourse the usual suspects; mc donalds, taco bell, burger king, hooters, and many stores and supermarkets, a minigolf and a skating rink. this stretch of highway is always very busy, and as it has very short entrance and exit ramps it is nerve wracking at times to get on or off.... this part of highway is sooo full, crowded and overloaded with crazy things making it so ugly that i think its some kind of beautiful... and guess what! this route 1 is the same route 1 that eventually leads you to the keys in florida! i think thats so funny. it is 2377 miles long, starting at the canadian border in fort kent, maine, all the way to key west..... route 1 even has its own wikipedia page....
3 comments:
A country side it is certainly not anymore. I agree that in the fiftees it was the american dream with the Elvis cars.
I was a little girl in the 50s and saw some of these neon corridors. Lit up it was bright and colorful but often overwhelming. And during the daytime it all just looked cluttered and kind of junky -- sort of like it does now, but not quite as jam packed. I've never gotten the appeal of all that stuff demanding your attention. Modern, maybe, compared to Europe, but there were still crumbling old places, too, and funky cars. The movies clean everything up when they portray that era.
@bieb, yes... elviscars.. :) tim is obsessed with elvis right now, quite funny...
@kay; i really enjoy getting a real insight in how it is/was in the usa... i ofcourse indeed only see it as an outsider. we started to watch that famous movie "american graffiti", there it indeed all looks perfect (but the movie was so boring, we did not finish it).
but those huge sings, although ugly sometimes, show that really everything was/is possible here. just build that sign if that is what you want... you will never see that in the netherlands..
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