New Haven Museum Hits The Road

In 1970s Rhode Island, and in a picture on the wall of the New Haven Museum, there’s a building shaped like an enormous milk can — a shape many adults now may not recognize immediately. In other photos, it’s hard to not notice the graceful, Art Deco-like curves on a gas station in Scranton, Pa., or the way the cupola on another gas station in Malden, Mass., makes it look like a temple to travel, and not just a place to buy beef jerky.

These and other photographs by architectural historian Richard Longstreth are at the heart of the New Haven Museum’s exhibit ​“Road Trip!,” which helps celebrate the 50th anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act. The exhibit runs through spring 2017.

In 1966, the National Historic Preservation Act sought to protect places of historical or archeological value in the United States. It created the National Register of Historic Places, the list of National Historic Landmarks, and the State Historic Preservation Offices. In the 1970s, with the interstate highway system almost finished, Longstreth traveled across the United States documenting local roadside architecture he thought was in danger of disappearing.

The result — somewhat in Longstreth’s photos, and definitely in the context of the exhibit itself — is that ​“Road Trip!” on its surface is dripping in nostalgia, an overall mood that can be anathema for those of us who don’t necessarily think the past was better. But there’s substance below, starting with one of Longstreth’s shots of ​“colored cabins,” an abandoned relic of segregation-era accommodations, which Longstreth photographed south of Baltimore in 1971. From Jim Crow to polio, the past certainly had its problems.

Getting past the nostalgia invites fruitful questions about how things have changed and how they’ve stayed the same. Road Trip! excels at showing how the aesthetics of another era can come to the fore — and be highly valued — as more time passes. Split-level ranch houses and kitchy sideboards can become examples of mid-century modern architecture and furniture; cars can go from being surburban workhorses to collectors’ items.

What’s stayed the same, though, is that even with the dominance of the interstate system and the resulting economic destruction it wrought upon countless local businesses that relied on through traffic for customers, the road trip remains perhaps the best way to see the United States, and a thing people think of as fun to do on vacation. How else do you get to the impossibly flat landscape in the middle of Kansas, or into the green hills of West Virginia, but by driving? Curator Mary Donohue has placed Longstreth’s photographs with those of New Haveners who have taken road trips of their own. The similarities jump out at you more than the differences do.

She also includes photographs of businesses in Connecticut — like Blackie’s in Cheshire, or Sea Swirl in Mystic — that may well have caught Longstreth’s eye when he made his cross-country trips.

Donohue couches these photographs in the terms of the missions of both Longstreth and the National Historical Preservation Act, arguing that they’re landmarks of a kind, worth saving and protecting from development. For those of us who like local variety — and I’m one of them — it’s easy to agree.

But there’s a subtle point about road trips buried in those photographs, too. We think of road trips as lasting days, weeks, even longer. We think of the ways traveling opens our eyes, makes us more attentive to detail, more appreciative of things we take for granted at home, like the lettering in a sign for a hardware store, or the stonework on the side of an apartment building, just because it’s different from what we’re used to seeing. But we don’t have to travel far in this state for that to happen. And maybe, just maybe, we don’t have to leave the city.

New Haven, after all, isn’t just a point of departure for people who live here; it’s also a destination, a stop on a trip for people heading north to Maine, or driving much farther south, or west. For them, we’re the local variety. Road Trip mentions Tandoori Kitchen, built inside a classic railroad-car diner. But the sign hanging at Sally’s Apizza could have been as much a part of the exhibit as anything that’s in it — or, for that matter, any of the signs in town that advertise ​“apizza” instead of ​“pizza.” So could Louis’ Lunch. Or, for the visitor who just happened to be able to dig a little deeper on their stop, the New Haven People’s Center. Which suggests that, in the right frame of mind, maybe you could go away and come back just a day later, or even drive once around the block, and see the Elm City with fresh eyes. Maybe no matter how far you go, the trip that matters is the one you take in your head.