Description
This color-illustrated study has visual appeal for general readers, especially the many photos of historical road signs, but it is also detailed enough for students and scholars. Landscape architecture expert Jack Williams (author of East 40 Degrees; An Interpretive Atlas) describes how the American Interstate Highway System decimated the economic, cultural, and political vitality of small towns across the country. While he emphasizes the destructive consequences of the highways, he also celebrates an aesthetic of urban form in small towns and advocates for the preservation of small towns. Early chapters introduce key ideas of studying cultural landscapes, review the history of the Interstate Highway System, and examine impact of the automobile on American life and culture. Later chapters visit distinctive landscapes and town designs of five regions across the country: mill towns of southern New England, courthouse squares of southern Georgia, farm villages of the Great Plains, mining towns of the American Southwest (Arizona Sonora Desert), and Chinese settlements of California’s Central Valley. These landscapes and their histories are used to explain shifts in rural settlement patterns from regionally distinctive small towns to car-dependent commercial centers. The book closes with detailed notes on sources used and research processes. The book contains about 150 color and b&w historical and contemporary photos, maps, illustrations, plans, and art. Annotation ©2017 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
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Life outside our nation’s big cities comprises a remarkably rich aspect of America—culturally, historically, and physically. Because of the way we move through the country, however—on roads built for maximum expediency—most of us are rarely if ever exposed to these small communities, a trend that is moving these towns dangerously far off the maps of commerce and public consciousness. In Easy On, Easy Off, Jack Williams takes to the roads of the interstate highway system to explore America’s small towns, bringing back diverse examples of both beautiful and neglected places that illustrate how shifts in modern transportation have influenced urban form. Most of these communities are little known beyond their discrete regions, yet their struggles to prosper are universal. Mill towns, county-seat court squares, villages of the Great Plains, mining towns, and California's forgotten Chinese settlements all share similar fates—overshadowed by interstate off-ramp towns and bypassed by high-speed traffic. Employing more than 150 historic maps and images, unique drawings, and contemporary photographs, Williams convincingly argues that irreversible changes have overtaken the landscapes of small-town America, with each community’s economic and social vitality slowly shifting away to other commercial places that attach to our highway interchanges and extrude into strip malls. A tale of success perhaps for the highway system, the more urgent story relayed in Easy On, Easy Off is of the loss of the complex fabric of thousands of small towns that once defined this nation.Preparation of this volume has been supported by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund
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