Celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2026, Route 66 shows no sign of losing its hold on the American imagination. Established in 1926 as one of the original roads in the United States Numbered Highway System, it became far more than a way of getting from one place to another. From Chicago to Santa Monica, its 2,448 miles cut through eight states, crossing small towns, deserts, diners, motels, gas stations and myths.
Literature claimed it, photography and film immortalised it, music gave it a heartbeat, and now social media keeps its neon signs flickering in the public mind. The road has carried the desperate and the dreamers, those fleeing the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, the jubilant veterans of the 1940s and the restless rebels of the counterculture years. Today, designated as Historic Route 66 and recognised as a National Scenic Byway, it remains less a road than a memory held in motion.
Route 66 was not completely paved until 1938, but by the following year John Steinbeck had already fixed it in the national consciousness. In The Grapes of Wrath, he called it the “Mother Road”, the route of a people in flight from dust, drought and shrinking land. In the work of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, migration became one of the defining images of 20th-century America: treacherous, hopeful and rooted in the idea that California might still hold some version of salvation.
Left: Andreas Feininger, Route 66, Arizona, 1947. © Phillips Auctions.
Right: Dorothea Lange, Migrant agricultural worker in California, October 1935. © American Photo Archive.
By the late 1940s and 1950s, Route 66 had taken on a different charge. It came to stand for freedom, prosperity and the post-war belief that reinvention was possible, preferably with four wheels, a full tank and a glowing motel sign ahead. Andreas Feininger’s 1947 photographs for Life magazine helped build that legend, capturing the road’s apparent infinity and the rise of American roadside architecture.
The road also shaped popular culture. In 1946, Bobby Troup wrote “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66” after driving west to Los Angeles; the Nat King Cole Trio recorded it that same year, turning the highway into a song of pleasure and movement. Later, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road would draw on the same mythology of speed, jazz, self-discovery and escape.
At the start of the 1960s, photographer Joel Meyerowitz took to Route 66 to discover America on the road. He remembers it as “a fun road to travel on”, full of the tourist attractions that seem to appear from nowhere in the American landscape: giant Texas Rangers, famous chieftains, dinosaurs, huge milk bottles, ice-cream cones and bulls. For Meyerowitz, that scale was part of the country’s roadside hustle, a way of making travellers stop, look, spend and remember.
Joel Meyerowitz, Route 66, 1964 © Joel Meyerowitz. Courtesy of the artist for exclusive publication in I-M Magazine.
By the second half of the 20th century, however, progress had started to work against the old highway. As the Interstate Highway System developed, journeys that once took a week became a 30-hour sprint. The road was faster, but poorer in feeling. Small towns that had existed to welcome travellers were bypassed. Pixar’s Cars later captured that melancholy in a single idea: cars had not driven on the old road to make great time, but to have a great time.
For those looking for something outside the mainstream, Route 66 survived as a backwater of possibility. Hippies, dropouts and drifters could disappear into its dusty towns and re-emerge changed. Meyerowitz remembers places where Main Street was still Route 66, lined with traffic lights, old shops, diners, repair garages, saloons, Five and Dime stores and more dubious establishments. It was ordinary and strange at once, which may be why it photographed so well.
US 66 was officially removed from the United States Highway System in 1985, but its story did not end there. Local associations formed to protect it, and in 1999 President Bill Clinton signed a National Route 66 Preservation Bill to support the restoration of historic features along the road. Since then, the mythology has only grown. Vintage motels, diners and gas stations have become pilgrimage points. Peeling signs outside old filling stations are now “Instagrammable spots”.
Joel Meyerowitz, Route 66, 1964 © Joel Meyerowitz. Courtesy of the artist for exclusive publication in I-M Magazine.
Some places along the route still seem caught in another era: Seligman in Arizona, Tucumcari in New Mexico, Roy’s Motel & Café in Amboy, the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, Chain of Rocks Bridge in St Louis, Cadillac Ranch in Texas. Together, they keep the road’s mythology burning.
For anyone planning to “take the highway that’s the best”, give it time. Route 66 does not reward haste. Meyerowitz remembers riding west through dust storms, tornadoes, blinding rain and beautiful dusk hours, when the setting sun lit the road like a “magic ray gun” and carried him into the neon nights ahead.
By the time you reach Santa Monica Pier, California may no longer be the promised land, but Route 66 was never really about arrival. It was, and still is, about movement, reinvention and the old American promise that somewhere down the road, life might yet begin again.
Author: Andrew Hildreth
This is a shortened version of the fascinating feature running in the Summer issue of I-M Inquisitive Minds, “Traversing the American Dream”, including previously unpublished photographs by Joel Meyerowitz. Get your copy, HERE.
Lead image: Joel Meyerowitz, Route 66 (1964). Previously unpublished. Courtesy of the artist for exclusive publication in I-M Magazine.
If you are a fan of Joel Meyerowitz, you may like to read our interview with the master, Joel Meyerowitz: Six Decades Behind the Lens, learn about his time in Spain, commemorated in his exhibition, Europa, or why he is one of Leica’s most celebrated photographers in Immortalising a Century.
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