The American Motel

[The Wiser Hatter]

The American Motel

 

[CONELRAD]

There are a bunch of old motels from the 1950s or early 1960s in central Arlington, TX. They're neat looking, but I wouldn't want to actually stay in any of them.

 

[3fingers]

Thank you for posting this site.
This one breaks my heart. I loved this place. Stayed there many times in the 80's. Apparently the passing years have not been kind.

 

[tonyb]

You've hit on a topic close to my heart. There are truly very few things I would rather do than take a looong road trip. Among my fondest childhood memories are of traveling to places I'd never been, and taking in those novel sights through a car window. Motels are central to all of that.

I'm of sufficient seniority to remember the "motor court" type of motels -- the strings of individual cabins, or units separated by covered parking stalls, although those were clearly on their way out by the time I came on the scene. (Some family members actually bought a fairly derelict example of such a place in 1980; by that late date few such places remained.) But for the most part my memories are of the 1950s- and '60s-vintage motels, with their architecture and signage evoking Las Vegas or Southern California cool, even if they were alongside the highway on the outskirts of some anonymous three-stoplight town in Kansas. My folks, like countless millions of other parents of post-war brats, knew that a swimming pool was all that was needed for them to have at least a few minutes respite.

Gotta love James Lileks's take on a topic apparently close to his heart as well. "Nostalgia for old motels, like most forms of nostalgia, is selective and dishonest," he writes. I take absolutely no exception with that, but acknowledging it doesn't make it any less magical.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

I remember taking a trip with my Father from Indiana through the Smoky Mnts to Savanah,Georgia circa 1954(I was 7 yrs old).
We stayed overnight in Gatlinburg,Tenn downtown on the river. Painted wood siding motel. Twin beds..nice carpeting and bath. Outside rear porch overhanging the water. I listened to the rippling river through the screen door while drifting to sleep. (Don't remember any TV). I do recall the price on the motel sign..for some reason. $9.95 per night..!
Now in it's place is a multiple floor monument going for around $175 per night with weekly package(I think more with the hot tub)....
HD

 

[Chasseur]

Great thread!

If you are curious about learning about much of the social and economic history of motels this book is quite useful:
http://www.amazon.com/Motel-America-Road-American-Culture/dp/B008SLGO30/ref=pd_sim_b_2

A couple of years ago we stayed at this neat one in Winnemucca, Nevada:

 

[LizzieMaine]

We still have a fairly intact prewar "tourist camp" a few towns down Route 1 from here -- I stayed there once in the late '80s, and conditions were spartan to say the least. A bed, a bureau, a sink, and a toilet. There was a black-and-white TV set with an antenna with tinfoil on the ends that could sort of get the Portland channels, but that was it for amenities. Nothing even close to a swimming pool, unless you count the swamp out back, and all the cabins had mosquito netting over the windows like in a kids' summer camp. From such roots did the motel industry grow.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Alpine Motel (now Alpine Inn), Anaheim, CA

 

[3fingers]

I stayed there once in the late '80s, and conditions were spartan to say the least. A bed, a bureau, a sink, and a toilet. There was a black-and-white TV set with an antenna with tinfoil on the ends that could sort of get the Portland channels, but that was it for amenities.

This reminds me of a motel where a buddy and I stayed in the mid 80's in a little wide spot called Bliss, Idaho. We stopped for gas in a place where there wasn't any place to stay, but the attendant told us that there was a real nice place in Bliss. We got to the town and found the only motel in sight. We got our room and wondered what the gas station attendant was thinking when he said that this was a nice place. It had TV, but it was hooked to a VCR in the office, so you watched whatever the old lady or her granddaughter put in for you. TV went "off the air" at about 9pm. The beds and everything else were very well worn. It probably had been a nice place 40 years before we were there. The crowd that showed up to loiter in the parking lot late at night was definitely not conducive to a good nights sleep. The funny part was the next morning when we were leaving town, we saw that there was a fairly new nice looking motel a short distance out of town.:eusa_doh:

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

How much do you want to bet that the gas station attendant was related to the owners of the motel?

 

[3fingers]

How much do you want to bet that the gas station attendant was related to the owners of the motel?

Yes, that thought did occur to us. Oh well, it's just another good story from the days of road trips taken just because we could. Wish I could still do that.

 

[Touchofevil]

There was a little place in Santa Cruz across from the Boardwalk that we would stay in every summer in the early seventies. We loved it because of its location, the swimming pool, and the owners. After we became regulars, they give us presents (wrapped with bows) evey year upon our arrival. Great thread and link.

 

[dhermann1]

When my family went on a college scouting trip for me in 1963, we visited Troy, NY (RPI, where I wound up going . . . and flunking out of. But that's another story).
Anyhow we stayed in the nearby small Hudson River town of Waterford, NY, in a place called Friendy Farmer Cottages. My mom got a big charge out of the name. It was definitely a throw back to the 1930s. Individual cottages with a single central bathroom facility, just like the one in It Happened One Night. God help you if you had to go, and it was raining. It backed right up on the Hudson River. And during the Revolution, George Washington had slept right across the street. Anyhow, it was Spartan to say the least, but clean and comfortable, and we were there on a perfect June day. The whole experience was idyllic.

 

[dhermann1]

Actually, these pre war cottage motels are a far cry from the post war motels, but still part of Americana.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There were a few of the postwar-style integral-unit motels in operation before the war -- they were a natural evolution of the tourist camp idea, taking the individual cabins and fusing them into a single building laid out as a row of individual cabin-like rooms. Harland Sanders -- the Colonel himself -- ran one of these in Corbin, Kentucky in the late thirties, consisting of a big building housing his combination restaurant/gas station attached to a row of tourist accomodations.

It didn't have the garish decor or signage of the typical postwar motel, but it was clearly of the same basic architectural idea. Sanders' place didn't have a swimming pool, but who wants to go swimming after eating fried chicken?

 

[tonyb]

The etymology is perhaps too obvious to mention, but it says here that the term dates from 1925 ...

motel (n.)
1925, coined from motor- + hotel. Originally a hotel for automobile travelers.
The Milestone Interstate Corporation ... proposes to build and operate a chain of motor hotels between San Diego and Seattle, the hotels to have the name 'Motel.' ["Hotel Monthly," March 1925]


and this ...


Etymology: (blend, motor, hotel), from the original Motel Inn of San Luis Obispo, established in 1925 by Arthur Heinman


and a bit on the original "mo-tel" and its founder ...


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motel_Inn_of_San_Luis_Obispo

 

[TomS]

Great stuff...