The Mother Road and its ghost towns

When the U.S. numbered-highway system created U.S. Route 66 in 1926, it stitched together a 2,448-mile line from Chicago to Santa Monica and, with it, a whole roadside economy. Across the plains and deserts of the Southwest, tiny settlements reinvented themselves around the river of motorists: motor courts, diners, filling stations, curio shops, and neon signs built to be read at speed. For a few decades the traffic was the town.

The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 doomed much of it. The interstates were engineered to carry cars past small business districts rather than through them, and when a bypass opened, the through traffic a Route 66 town lived on could vanish in a season. Some places hung on; many emptied out. This collection gathers the archive’s Mother Road ghost towns — the ones that boomed on the highway and were quieted by the freeway — with their histories, what survives, and how to see them today.