The man at the top of the ladder was carefully repairing a worn wooden sign, demonstrating how people prefer to work on things they truly care about over things they are paid to fix. Photographer and multitasker Matt Parker was repairing the signage at the Bagdad Cafe in Newberry Springs, California, a serene, sandy section of Route 66 where the Mojave Desert absorbs rather than surrounds you. He stated, “The patina on this building is for real,” without lowering his gaze. “You deserve it. It’s not covered in paint. It’s real. I thought it was a line that could be applied to the entire road. This year marked Route 66’s 100th anniversary, and it is unquestionably real, whether it is a tourist destination, a cultural relic, or an economic case study.
Route 66, which runs 2,448 miles from Chicago to the pier at Santa Monica and was established on November 11, 1926, has always served as more than just a road. After witnessing impoverished Dust Bowl families drive west along it in the 1930s with everything they owned strapped to the roof, John Steinbeck dubbed it the Mother Road in The Grapes of Wrath.
U.S. Route 66 — Centennial Overview (1926–2026)
| Official Designation | U.S. Route 66 (U.S. Highway 66) — established November 11, 1926 |
| Total Length | 2,448 miles (3,940 km) across 8 states |
| States Crossed | Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California |
| Founding Champions | Cyrus Avery (Tulsa, OK) & John T. Woodruff (Springfield, MO) |
| Nicknames | “The Mother Road” (Steinbeck), “Will Rogers Highway,” “Main Street of America” |
| Decommissioned | June 26, 1985 — replaced by the Interstate Highway System |
| Estimated Total Vehicles (1926–1985) | ~200 million vehicles |
| Cultural Milestones | Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939); “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” (1946); Pixar’s Cars (2006) |
| First Drive-Through Restaurant | Red’s Giant Hamburg, Springfield, Missouri — also birthplace of first McDonald’s (San Bernardino, CA) |
| Official Reference | https://www.marketplace.org/ |
In San Bernardino, it constructed the first McDonald’s. It brought America the drive-through restaurant, the roadside motel, and the idea that you could simply hop in a car and travel to a completely different place, where perhaps your life would be better. That concept, which is mobile, upbeat, and a little disoriented, is as uniquely American as anything we have created.
However, driving it in 2026 means simultaneously harboring two opposing emotions. The trip may begin, rather improbably, in a Waymo autonomous taxi speeding down Santa Monica Boulevard, past the nearby entertainment companies, such as Activision Blizzard and Skydance, which recently acquired Paramount, all of which are now dealing with the uncertain math of what artificial intelligence will do to the creative workforce.
In San Bernardino, two hours east, the atmosphere is entirely different. trendy T-shirt stores. nostalgic hotels. Travelers seeking a place to sleep with a backstory occupy the concrete teepees of the former Wigwam Motel, which is still standing on the main drag. The cutting edge and the meticulously preserved past are all found on the same road, which runs parallel for miles before diverging once more.
One detail provided by Parker, the man on the ladder in Newberry Springs, is difficult to forget. He claimed that he never inquires about a person’s occupation when he offers them a ride home from church. The question would feel almost cruel because there aren’t many jobs along this stretch, not because it’s impolite. Because a German movie that was set here in the late 1980s became a cult classic in Europe, the Bagdad Cafe survives on French tourists.
The economy is that. While the sand gradually reclaims the former water park down the road, an abandoned American roadside café is preserved by foreign tourists pursuing celluloid nostalgia. That one picture may be the best representation of the peculiarities of rural American economic geography.
Nearer the Arizona border, at Roy’s Motel and Café in Amboy, Nicole serves a variety of sodas, including pumpkin, to the hundreds of people who come every day to stand in the middle of a town where the church, the school, and the motel are all deserted. To put it mildly, she says there’s a corporate jet parked out back for added atmosphere. When the interstate opened in 1972 and completely avoided the town, the café lost 98% of its business overnight. Roy has never fully recovered. Due to the frequent stops by busloads of Italian tourists, the recycling bin in front now has an Italian warning not to leave trash. European curiosity was piqued by American desertion. Anyone who takes the time to consider it understands the irony.
Nevertheless, despite their complexity, there are real indications of forward motion along the corridor. With the promise of thousands of direct jobs, BNSF Railway is constructing what is said to be the nation’s largest railway-to-truck freight facility east of Newberry Springs. To be honest, it’s unclear if that promise will endure in the current era of trade disruption caused by tariffs and reverse globalization. The facility was built for an increasingly globalized world. When the project was first conceived, that world appeared somewhat different.
Driving this road in its centennial year gives me the impression that Route 66 has always been more helpful as a measuring tool than as a destination. It gauges the difference between what a place was intended to be and what economic forces ultimately made possible, as well as optimism and contraction, momentum and stagnation. Despite being separated by almost a century of time, the Dust Bowl families rattling west in crammed Fords in 1936 and the Rivian SUV humming silently through the desert in 2026 are reading the same road. The questions it poses about employment, belonging, and what the nation owes the places it travels through have not evolved nearly as much as the cars.