Tag Archives: midwest

Farm to marketing

This post is part of an ongoing series called 66 Fridays, which explores the wonders of old Route 66. Click on the preceding “66 Fridays” link to view all posts in the series, or visit the initial overview post here.

One of the most well-known—and most-hyped—tourist traps along Route 66 are the Meramec Caverns. Whether or not the caves actually live up to the hype is not something I can weigh in on, I’m afraid: by the time we got there, they’d closed for the evening. But that’s okay—while I’m always up for a good tourist trap (neon signs inside the caves!), and I’d love to see the place that was allegedly the hideout of Jesse James, what really interests me most is the hype itself. And on our trip I didn’t have to worry about missing out on that.

When it comes to advertising, Meramec Caverns seems to have taken a leaf from the playbook of Wall Drug, which opened just two years before the Caverns transitioned from local curiosity to tourist entertainment complex. Wall Drug had enormous success with advertising to travelers by way of hundreds of inexpensive, hand-painted wooden billboards placed in farm fields all over the northern Plains. Les Dill, the owner of the Caverns, offered farmers in 14 states a free paint job on their barns—as long as they were willing for the design to include a giant Meramec Caverns ad on whatever wall or roof panel faced the road. By the 1960s there were hundreds of Meramec barns in 40 different states, all beckoning travelers to the Ozarks.

Oh, and you might also be interested to know that Dill was also one of the earliest adopters of the humble bumper sticker, cottoning onto the idea of cars as mobile billboards. Now, I still don’t think there’s a more elegant bumper sticker than “Where the heck is Wall Drug?” but Meramec Caverns had the idea first.

There are still a handful of Meramec barns around today, and some of the best (and most lovingly maintained) are along the Mother Road. They vary in design, and some—like the one above—look a bit like some sort of cryptic code for those in the know.

Well, thanks to Dill’s ingenious marketing strategy, I am in the know now—and you can bet I’ll return one day, following the signs back to the Caverns, barn by barn.

Ted’s tasty freeze

Our first day on Route 66 was bookended with pit stops at iconic Mother Road road-food joints. We had our early-morning breakfast at Lou Mitchell’s just after sunrise, but by the time we reached St. Louis in the late afternoon, it was so hot and muggy that we were dying for a break to cool off. Enter Ted Drewes, to the rescue.

Ted’s recipe for frozen custard has been an icon since 1926, and the location on Chippewa Street has been a Route 66 fixture since it opened in 1941. There were plenty of treats to choose from, but we went with their classic mainstay, the Concrete. To anyone who has visited a Dairy Queen in the last thirty years, a Concrete will look just like ye olde familiar Blizzard. The Blizzard, too, was invented in St. Louis—but Dairy Queen will be the first to admit that the inspiration was Ted Drewes’s concoction, which predated the Blizzard by nearly thirty years.

I went with the fairly standard cookie dough flavor for mine, but the Tailor just about died of happiness when he saw they offered one made with pie cherries (his favorite, and an increasingly rare commodity—that’s a story for another day). We still had another eighty miles of road ahead of us that day, but we were refreshed and ready: nothing prepares you for pounding the pavement like a little scoop of Concrete.

Arch-etype

Well, there are natural arches, and there are the man-made variety. Somehow, they both seem to attract my attention equally. In any case, you can bet that any arch that dominates the skyline as completely as the Gateway Arch does is going to be a star player in my sketchbook, any day.

The first stop

If you’re going to start Route 66 in Chicago, start your trip right with a meal at Lou Mitchell’s diner. Nicknamed the “first stop on the Mother Road,” I can’t think of a better place to break your fast or mark the beginning of a journey. Also, since the place opens at 5:30 on weekday mornings, you don’t have to derail your whole day with a stop here. (Tangent! One of my few complaints about living on the West Coast is that nothing opens early. A huge thing I miss about Midwestern living is being able to run errands and go out to eat at the crack of dawn!)

And if you go, you best come hungry. Not only are the plates enormous (double-yolk eggs!), but even the simplest breakfasts turn out to be five-course meals there. Leave room for the doughnut holes, is all I’m saying.

Now, the food and history are reason enough to eat at Lou Mitchell’s. But the icing on the proverbial cake, for me, was the lettering. Hoo boy, there is more gorgeous, vintage, hand-painted sign lettering in there than can be found in some entire cities. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

All I can say is thank goodness this place is still here, still largely untouched. It seemed like a good omen for embarking on an Americana pilgrimage. Long live Route 66, long live Lou Mitchell’s.

Eastern terminus

To help you keep your bearings in this 66 Fridays series, and to provide an overview of the route, the first few posts will go in geographical order. So let’s start at the very beginning, at the eastern terminus of the route.

American highways, in general, are measured from south to north, and from west to east. So in general, the “start” of any highway is technically its southern- or westernmost point, and the milemarkers count from there. But for our Route 66 trip we went from east to west. That’s because for that highway, at least, most travelers (from Dust Bowl migrants to pleasure cruisers) seemed to head that direction. All the Route 66 lore, from songs to stories, seems to be oriented that way, too. And besides, America is steeped in the tradition of heading West—to me, the East still feels like a beginning, and the West a promise of what lies ahead.

So that put the beginning of our journey at the beginning of the route: in downtown Chicago.

Route 66’s path through Chicago has changed somewhat over the years, but that’s a longer story than necessary for this post. To make things simpler, most travelers and historians count Michigan Avenue, between Adams and Jackson, as the eastern terminus of the Mother Road. (Adams is a one-way heading west, and Jackson is the same eastbound, hence the two intersections.) And there are no better guardians of the route than the bronze lions prowling in front of the Art Institute.

It’s even more fitting when you consider that the Art Institute was originally part of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. A sort of World’s Fair, the Exposition marked 400 years since Christopher Columbus landed in the New World, and celebrated the rebirth of Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871. Most of the buildings erected for the Exposition were designed to be temporary, but the Art Institute was intended to occupy what was the World Congress Auxiliary Building at the fair, so that structure was made permanent.

Oh, and incidentally, the Art Institute of Chicago was originally called the Chicago Academy of Design, which was founded in 1866. Its address before the Great Chicago Fire? 66 West Adams Street.

Somehow, then, it seems pretty perfect that an old WCE building, originally designed to promote westward exploration and new beginnings at the fair, marks the beginning of America’s best-known westward highway.

Let ’em fly

A few summers ago the Tailor and I took a cross-Canada road trip. One of the best parts was seeing that beautiful maple-leaf flag flying for the holiday. So in that spirit, Happy Canada Day to all my friends and readers above the 49th Parallel!

Secret enclave

Revisiting Ladd’s Addition last week reminded me of another favorite neighborhood of mine. Well, not so much a neighborhood as two perfect blocks: Minneapolis’s Milwaukee Avenue.

Today Milwaukee Avenue is a two-block stretch of pedestrian-only street: originally named 22 1/2 Street, to the unwitting eye it just looks like an alley between 22nd and 23rd. It opens onto the busy Franklin Avenue to the north, but the entrance there is overgrown with shrubbery, so it’s easy to overlook and pass right by. In fact, like Salmon Beach in my own town, I’ve met locals who have lived in the Twin Cities for years and never knew it was there.

If you do know where to look, or you happen to stumble upon one of the entrances, finding Milwaukee Avenue is like stepping into a tiny, different world. To me, it always felt like walking onto the set of an old movie like To Kill a Mockingbird. (I always half expected to meet Boo Radley sitting on a porch somewhere.) And if the street has that movie-set feeling of being slightly artificial, well, that’s because it is.

Milwaukee Avenue started as a row of low-income immigrant housing in the 1880s. Like Ladd’s Addition, it was a planned neighborhood, but to keep them affordable the houses were nearly identical and constructed inexpensively (but well) with brick veneer over timber frames.

The neighborhood started falling into disrepair in the Great Depression, and by the late 1950s the houses were in shambles. Most had no indoor plumbing, and had been modified with ho-made repairs to the point that they bore almost no resemblance to what you see in the sketches above. In 1970 the City of Minneapolis made plans to demolish the whole enclave, but when the residents got wind of it, they took action on their own. In secret they applied to the National Register of Historic Places, and were approved as an historic district in 1974—suddenly the City couldn’t touch them.

Not every house survived the restoration (nine were so far gone they had to be razed), but the ones that did were outfitted with proper plumbing, new foundations and a host of repairs. The one-way street was turned into a tree-lined pedestrian mall. And best of all, the beautiful, original lathework porches, gone from pretty much every structure by then, were replicated and put back in place. So what you see now is a strange and lovely hybrid between historic relic and reimagined replica.

So if you ever find yourself in the Twin Cities, take a stroll down Milwaukee Avenue and transport yourself to a small, private universe. Just be warned that when you step back out onto Franklin Avenue, and the modern world assaults your senses once more, you’ll find yourself looking back over your shoulder with longing.

Living rubble

Visiting the ruins at Mission San Juan Capistrano reminded me that at least in this country, it’s not the sort of thing one can see every day. Living in Europe for a time gave me a taste for ruined architecture, but it’s not something you often find in the States.

One could argue our civilization isn’t old enough to have archeological sites around every corner, but I don’t think that’s it. For one thing, there has been human culture here for thousands of years, and in some places, like the Southwest, there is plenty of archeological evidence to tour and visit. For another, the Civil War, natural disasters, isolated acts of violence, and countless ordinary accidents have given us plenty of rubble of our own. No, here it’s more of a cultural mindset: when buildings are destroyed, we Americans have an instinct to rebuild, restore or replace them. It really goes against the grain to let architectural remains stay in their ruined state, and learn to appreciate them as they are.

That’s why I love the mill ruins of Minneapolis. Beyond being simply beautiful in their own right, the shells of destroyed buildings are also steeped in stories. Rather than putting up some plaque to commemorate the city’s past as a flour milling town, you can actually stand in a remnant of that past. Instead of repurposing every scrap of real estate for modern, practical use, this parcel of land has been preserved as a museum, just the way it is. And best of all, the ruins sit among specimens of both restored historic buildings and brand new ultra-modern architecture—and they fit in just fine, part of the fabric and story of the city as a whole.

Loch Hiawatha

I’m pretty sure no commentary is needed here. Wishing you a monster of a weekend!

Lakeshore light

Of course, it’s possible to get that edge-of-the-earth feeling even smack in the middle of the continent. It’s all just a matter of where you stand.