Made In America - Bill Bryson [117]
Conventional wisdom has it that Los Angeles’s sprawl is a consequence of its extensive post-war freeway system. In fact, it was because the city was sprawling already that freeways were thought a practical way of connecting its far-flung parts. It sprawled because it had the finest public transportation network in America, if not the world, with over a thousand miles of rail and trolley lines.
Freeways in fact evolved slowly on the west coast, at least at first. As late as 1947, the whole of California had just nineteen miles of them. Then along came State Senator Randolph Collier, from the remote town of Yreka, as far from Los Angeles as you can get in California. For forty years he dominated the California highway programme, not just promoting the construction of freeways, but repeatedly blocking the funding of rail systems (which he called ‘rabbit transport’). By the mid-1950s most Californians had no choice but to take to the freeways. Today one-third of all the land in Los Angeles is given over to the automobile, and the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission has a larger budget ($4.5 billion in 1991) than the city it serves.44
Soon every city had to have a freeway of its own, even if it meant scything through old neighbourhoods, as with Boston’s destructive Downtown Artery, or slicing into a beauty spot like Fairmont Park with the Schuylkill (popularly known as the ‘Sure-Kill’) Expressway in Philadelphia. At one time there was even a plan to drive a freeway through New Orleans’s French Quarter.
As the freeways remodelled cities, so the new interstates dealt a blow to the old two-lane highways that stretched between them. Had it not been for the distraction of World War II, America almost certainly would have had a network of superhighways much earlier. The idea was really the brainchild of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who saw the construction of a national high-speed highway system as the ultimate public works project. By the 1950s, Eisenhower saw in it the additional virtue of enhancing America’s defence capabilities. Bridge and tunnel clearances were designed not for trucks but for the movement of intercontinental ballistic missiles. During the quarter-century beginning in 1956, America spent $118 billion on interstate highways. It was, as Phil Patton has put it, the ‘last programme of the New Deal and the first space programme’.45
In less than two decades, America’s modern interstate highways drained the life from thousands of towns. No longer was it necessary – and before long often not even possible – to partake of the traditional offerings of two-lane America: motels with cherishably inane names like the Nite-E-Nite Motor Court and the Dew Drop Inn, roadside diners with blinking neon signs and a mysterious fondness for meat loaf and mashed potatoes, two-pump gas stations built in the cosy style of a rustic cottage. Today in western Nebraska the old Lincoln Highway, or Route 30, is so little used that grass grows in its cracks. At the state border with Wyoming, it disappears altogether, abruptly and unceremoniously buried beneath the white concrete of Interstate 80. Like Route 66, the Dixie Highway and other once great roads, it has become a fading memory, and what a sad loss that is.
11
What’s Cooking?: Eating in America
I
To the first Pilgrims, the gustatory possibilities