PHANTOM ARCHITECTURE OF THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST: ONLY THE SIGNS REMAIN

Now I know why they call Main Street a drag
– Jeremy Gluck, Sorrow Drive

CIVILISATIONS ARE JUDGED by what they leave behind. Sometime around the beginning of the automobile age – that period in the post-war years when car ownership became not merely affordable but essential – it was determined that there existed a proportional relationship between the speed of travel and the size a sign needed to be in order to convey its information to the traveller. Simply put, as roads grew wider and faster, the signs grew larger.

In the cities of the American Southwest, where the processes of urban development were tied explicitly to the rise of the automobile, the signs became something of an art form, using majestic concoctions of lightbulbs and neon, arrows and swooshes to vie for the attention of the driver. Ernst Haas’ photograph of Albuquerque’s Central Avenue, which appeared in Life Magazine in 1969, captured the precise moment when the culture of signage reached its apogee.

The El Vado Motel was a motor court style motel at the Western end of Albuquerque’s Central Avenue. An old motor court in the southwest style, it is now boarded up and surrounded by barbed wire.

But no golden age lasts forever. The intervening half-century has witnessed oil crises, economic recessions, beautification ordinances, a rise in global corporate branding, and subtle but measurable changes in the very patterns of urban life. Local restaurants have been replaced by chains on the highway strip; city-centre motels have been forced out of business by clean anonymous structures with easy access to the interstate. Countless outdated buildings have been removed to attract future investors, leaving unsightly tracts of empty space. But some of the signs have survived.

The images that follow feature signs divorced from the buildings they once accompanied; they are part of a larger collection taken from journeys along the main streets of New Mexico over the past decade. In some cases the building has been shuttered for years; in others, the sign stands alone on a vacant lot where something else, a motel or a restaurant, once stood. The cities and towns of the American Southwest have changed immeasurably and are, in many ways, unrecognisable from what they once were … but the signs remain as a monument to the now-distant civilisation that built them.

Estella’s Cafe in Las Vegas, NM is located on the main street leading to the plaza. The building is still there, but there hasn’t been a cafe for some time.

The Zia Motor Lodge in Albuquerque was demolished several years ago, but the sign survived. Look closely behind the letters and you will see that a different sign in the same frame once belonged to a Del Webb’s Hiway House Motel.

This photo, from Albuquerque, was taken almost a decade ago, but the Lucky Boy had served its final malt many years earlier.

The Arrow Motel, in Española, NM, was still standing as of late 2016, but the doors to the rooms were replaced with plywood long ago.

The closing of Package Liquors, this one from Central Avenue in Albuquerque, is a sure sign of hard times.

A small, boarded-up shack accompanies this large and rather attractive sign at the corner of two US highways in Española.

Even ladies night and happy hour couldn’t save the Caravan, in Albuquerque.

This sign makes the Inn of Las Vegas look like it must have been the awesomest place on earth. Sadly we’ll never know.

Phantom Architecture is a series focusing on vanished and vanishing buildings, both in Berlin and further afield.

Jesse Simon is a writer, editor, cartographer and opera critic based in Berlin. In addition to writing about urbanism and classical music, he is currently co-editing a book on typography in Berlin (follow @Berlin_Type on Twitter for updates).

All photographs by the author unless otherwise noted.