Made In America - Bill Bryson [116]
High-speed roads had already been around for some time by 1956. The first freeway (of sorts) was the fifteen-mile-long Bronx River Parkway, opened in the 1920s, with a speed limit of a then breakneck 35 m.p.h. The name parkway was significant. These roads were designed for leisure driving for the middle classes. Commercial vehicles were prohibited (and anyway bridge clearances were kept intentionally low to keep trucks and buses from sneaking on to them). They were lavishly landscaped and endowed with graceful curves and wooded medians to enhance their aesthetics. Billboards, gas stations and other roadside detritus were ruthlessly excluded. They weren’t so much highways as sylvan glades where you could exercise your car.
The great builder of parkways was Robert Moses, the New York City parks commissioner, who ironically never learned to drive a car. He presided over the construction of such roads as the Meadowbrook Parkway to Long Island, the Henry Hudson Parkway, and the Taconic Parkway through the Taconic River Valley. Built between 1940 and 1950, the Taconic was possibly the most beautiful American highway ever built, but already it was an anachronism. By 1950 Americans had stopped thinking of driving as something you did for fun. It was something you did to get to where you could have fun. For this new style of driving something new was needed: the superhighway.
One of the enduring myths of American travel is that the nation’s superhighways were modelled on Germany’s Autobahnen. In fact, it was the other way round. Dr Fritz Todt, Hitler’s superintendent of roads, came to the United States in the 1930s, studied America’s sparkling new parkways and went back to Germany with a great deal of enthusiasm and a suitcase full of notes. Most people’s first contact with superhighways were the models of Norman Bel Geddes’s hugely popular Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Designed to show the world as it would be – or as General Motors would like it to be – twenty-five years hence in 1964, the exhibit comprised a large layout of model towns, cities, and countryside, all linked by sleek multilane highways along which tiny cars glided with ceaseless speed and ease. It was remarkably prescient. (Futurama also had a linguistic impact. Before long American roadsides were graced with Shop-o-ramas, Fisheramas, a Kosherama or two, and at least one Striperama.)
Within a year, Bel Geddes’s vision was made reality with the opening of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, running 160 miles from just west of Harrisburg to just east of Pittsburgh. Designed primarily to provide work for the unemployed during the Depression, it opened on 1 October 1940. For the first six months it had no speed limits. Motorists could drive the entire length in two and a half hours – half the time it had taken on the old Lincoln Highway – for a toll of $1.50. Features that would soon become familiar all over America – clover-leaf interchanges, long entrance and exit lanes, service areas – astounded and gratified the 2.4 million motorists who came to experience this marvel of the age in its first year.
Two months after the Pennsylvania Turnpike opened, and two thousand miles away, American motoring passed another milestone with the opening of the first true freeway in – it all but goes without saying – Los Angeles when