Tag Archives: New Mexico

Tucumcari tonite

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.

Most of the must-see treasures of Route 66 are individual landmarks or legends: Meramec Caverns, the Oatman burros, the Gemini Giant. But one of the most important stops along the way is an entire town. Welcome to Tucumcari: Googie oasis of yore, midcentury Cibola of 2000 motel rooms.

Today’s Tucumcari is somewhere halfway between worlds, simultaneously a time machine and a crumbling architectural ruin. To me it felt the way it would to visit Pompeii, only to find the city still inhabited. This is the place where, much like the stretch of 66 through Albuquerque, you can find rusted neon masterpieces everywhere you look—

—except here, the neon is equally likely to mark a still-operating motel as a defunct one.

Yet while the town’s pulse still keeps a beat, that mythical number of motel rooms has diminished somewhat.

I’m sure the motels aren’t the only ones—for every business still standing, I had to wonder how many had disappeared.

Still, Tucumcari seems to take pride in its place along Route 66. Take the famous Tee Pee Curios (no, I didn’t misspell my sketch; the building uses both spellings at once!), which remains one of the most documented attractions of the Mother Road.

Sadly, I didn’t get inside, as we rolled in to town too late the night before, and we had to leave before it opened for the day. Still, it was good to see the place in such fine fettle, new coat of paint and all.

But that’s okay: the real gem of Tucumcari, and perhaps the crown jewel of all of Route 66, was where I got to devote my time. The Blue Swallow is the perfect symbol of Tucumcari: still alive, still authentic, still beautiful.

The night we spent at the Blue Swallow was the one we’d been looking forward to the most on that trip, because we just needed proof that there were still places like this left on the planet. As soon as we crossed the threshold to our room, we knew the place was in good hands.

It was like stepping into 1939. The place was meticulously authentic (not to mention spotlessly clean and bright). Whatever wasn’t actually original to the room (and almost all of it was) was carefully restored to the correct period—right down to the 1939 Bell rotary-dial phones. Heck, even the price of the room was a total throwback.

For me, at least, the Blue Swallow was incredibly comfortable. Maybe it’s because I live in an old house with old furnishings and old fixtures, but I just felt right at home. Anyway, this is the sort of thing I want on a road trip like this. I would have been incredibly sad if we’d opened that door to find the plaster replaced with drywall or a huge flat-screen TV taking up one wall. As it was, I nearly cried from relief to find things just as they were from the beginning.

Places like the Blue Swallow and towns like Tucumcari are an endangered species. American culture, in general, prefers the new and novel to the historic—the freeway to the meandering path. That’s why it’s such a miracle that there’s any Route 66 left to enjoy at all. For every vintage motel that manages to keep thriving with each passing year, another closes its doors. And that’s why it’s going to take all of us to keep these places alive.

Still, whatever the future might hold, I’m glad to see there’s still a beating heart in Tucumcari tonite.

Save

Lumberjacks of 66

Since Route 66 passes through the Great Plains and the Desert Southwest, and not at all through the North Woods, it’s not a highway that brings thoughts of Paul Bunyan to mind. Yet there are a handful of Pauls along the Mother Road, if you know where to look.

The most well-known can be found in Flagstaff (where logging actually does happen): a trio (including a set of identical-twin Muffler Men) of big brothers in matching outfits. The guy on the left of the above sketch is hand-hewn out of wood, fittingly, but to me the most interesting specimen is the one on the right half of that spread. That Muffler Man happens to be, rumor has it, the very first one ever rolled off the assembly line. Today the aforementioned wooden statue stands in his place on Route 66, and the Muffler Man now stands near his twin on the Northern Arizona University campus.

The other Paul Bunyan is an oddity, indeed. He stands high above Central Avenue (the more modern alignment of 66) in Albuquerque, keeping watch beside what is now a Vietnamese Cafe. Sadly, this Paul has recently been rendered limbless…but it’s not like he needed to do a lot of logging in Albuquerque anyway.

Save

Running the Googie gauntlet

If you want to see a good concentration of neon signage you can visit the Miracle Mile in California, or you might try 11th Street in Tulsa. Or you just can head straight for the Googie Mecca. I gave you just a taste of it in last week’s installment, but I figured it was worth elaborating a bit.

There are actually two Route Sixty-Sixes in Albuquerque, as the Mother Road’s path changed from a north-south route to an east-west one. (That’s a story in and of itself, which I’ll tell in a future post.) And both alignments of the old highway are absolutely crammed with vintage neon.

Central Avenue is the more recent incarnation of 66, cutting roughly a fifteen-mile neon swath through the heart of the city.

Googie beacons point the way from the eastern boundary…

…to the far western edge of town. At the peak of Route 66’s heyday in the mid-1950s, there were apparently 98 motels along Central Avenue—yet even in 2015 I lost count of how many old signs we passed.

The Mother Road signage isn’t limited to lodging, either.

Many of the signs were in fine fettle, either newly restored or lovingly maintained. Still, we passed business after business that had very recently been shuttered for good—a reminder that the Route 66 Mom-n-Pop is an endangered species.

About fifteen or twenty years ago, stretches of Central Avenue and its motel relics were plagued with the hallmarks of hard times: drugs, violent crime, human trafficking. Yet in recent years the remaining business owners have made an effort to clean up the thoroughfare and their properties, particularly from Nob Hill inward.

The contemporary result is example after gleaming example of gorgeous storefronts and restored midcentury typography.

I just couldn’t believe our luck—we’d hit the Googie jackpot.

There wasn’t time to finish even a single sketch that day—it was all I could do to keep up by jotting down messy, temporary pencil scrawls. The “To Finish in the Studio Later” debt I incurred that day was enormous, and I’m still paying it off. I haven’t even showed you everything here—just my favorites (oh, that canary Cleaners storefront! A sketch will never do that beautiful, pristine façade the justice it deserves).

So, yeah. I loved Albuquerque already, for other reasons, but Route 66’s mark on the city pushed it into the stratosphere for me. The only downside is that now the bar has been raised a goodly height—and at least where old neon is concerned, it’ll be hard to find anywhere else that can hold a candle to the Q.

The tail wagging the dog

Those of you who are fans of the show Breaking Bad will recognize Fido here, but you might not know that this beauty has graced Route 66 for over half a century. But while the place is notable both for its television fame and the fact that you can get red or green New Mexico chili sauce on your dog, I was there purely for the neon.

For almost all of our Route 66 trip, I had to content myself with seeing most of the Mother Road’s neon during daylight hours only. But luckily for me, we stayed with friends in Albuquerque that night. I told them I was dying to see the Dog House at night, so after dinner we all made the trek back down to Central Avenue together.

I couldn’t decide which stage of the neon motion to sketch, so I drew them all. And that led me to an idea I’d never tried before…

…just a wee bit of sketchbook animation. I think I might have stumbled upon something I’ll keep doing again and again. After all, there’s an awful lot of animated neon out there!

Cave paintings

Well, I might not have had the chance to tour Meramec Caverns, but I got to tour the everloving snot out of Carlsbad Caverns—and I have the bursting sketchbook to prove it.

We were there in the “wrong” season—that is, not the time of year for bat-watching. But it didn’t matter: I figured the cave itself would be plenty enough to keep my pen busy.

Boy howdy, was that an understatement. I forgot all about the steep hike as soon as we got underground, because my brain immediately broke. At least, the part of my brain used to drawing recognizable things broke. The under-used bit that loves abstraction came roaring to life. It was like a Seussian paradise down there.

I think anyone wanting to teach design should send their students to Carlsbad Caverns. Around every curve waits a lesson in composition, or silhouette, or texture, or complex linework, or negative space.

Of course, it’s far too dark in the cave to break out the old watercolors, so I had to do that part later, but I had no problem making drawing after quick drawing on the spot, while the friendly park ranger told us interesting stories (have I mentioned that I love park rangers?)

And the limestone formations lent themselves so well to drawing! The way water carved each stalactite into linear shapes, or formed ripples in the surface of rock—it was like reinterpreting a line drawing that already existed in three dimensions.

Of course, none of this drawing (nor any of the dramatic photographs you see of the place) would be possible without the work the National Park Service did to show the caverns in their best light—quite literally! Almost as much as the rock formations themselves, what really struck me was how incredible the lighting work is in there, and how the mechanics of it all are nearly invisible. Without such brilliant lighting design, each spectacular formation would be lost in a sea of overwhelming texture. The park goes way beyond any museum, and ventures into the realm of art: if nature is already perfect on its own here, it takes a masterpiece of illumination to make humans appreciate it all.

Save

Red and green

If you find yourself in a New Mexico restaurant, your server will ask you if you want red or green chili sauce with your entrée. If you happen to want both, you can answer “Christmas,” and they’ll know what you mean.

Well, I didn’t happen to have a sketch of “Christmas” on a plate, but I figured this was the next best thing. Whether you’re in New Mexico or somewhere else this year, I wish you a very merry Christmas, indeed.

On the threshold

Whenever I travel, I know I’m only seeing a small fraction of wherever I am—usually streets and exteriors. I’m always wondering what lies on the inside of the buildings I pass, and when I’m lucky enough to happen upon an open courtyard, I feel like I’m getting a glimpse of a city’s hidden, inner life. So naturally I’m attracted to doorways and porticoes (seriously, I could dedicate a whole website just to sketches of doors)—even if they remain closed to me. Each time I draw a door, it’s like my hands are asking the question: what’s on the other side?

Sometimes I’m frustrated by my lack of an answer, by the reminder that I’ll never have enough time or access to see everything I want to see. Sometimes, though—like on this day—just admiring the door itself was enough.

The final tally

If you happen to follow along on Instagram or Facebook, you’ll know I’ve just returned from a 4000+ mile road trip across the south and west of the county. One of the things I like to do at the end of a trip (and the end of my sketchbook) is a map and recap of the journey. Of course, there are lots and lots of sketches of the details along the way (I expect you’ll see lots of those in the coming weeks), but sometimes it’s nice to step back and look at the big picture.

Cue the Ennio Morricone

There are lots of ways to get me to pull over and make an impromptu detour to a town I know nothing about. The best one I can think of?

Name the place something that sounds like a Spaghetti Western. I’ll be there before you can yell “Draw!“

Colorful courtyard

Today is one of those rare sunny fall days in my town—as sunny as it was the day I was in Albuquerque a couple of years ago. But in the Northwest, bright weather at this time of year means a wicked cold front—which has me missing the warmth of sun-baked adobe today.