Standin' on the Corner: Winslow and the Song That Saved a Town

Jackson Browne wrote "Take It Easy" in the early nineteen seventies and Glenn Frey of the Eagles finished it. They released it in nineteen seventy-two as the debut single off the Eagles' first album. The second verse contains a precise geographic reference: standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, watching a girl in a flatbed Ford slow down to get a look. Three seconds of lyric. One town named.

Winslow in nineteen seventy-two was already a Route Sixty-Six bypassed town, in the middle of the slow economic decline that the interstate system had visited on nearly every community along the original highway alignment. The La Posada Hotel, Mary Colter's masterwork for the Fred Harvey Company, had closed in nineteen fifty-seven and was being used as a Santa Fe Railway office building. The town's population was shrinking. The lyric made no difference to any of this for about twenty years.

In nineteen ninety-nine, the city of Winslow opened Standin' on the Corner Park at Second Street and Kinsley Avenue. A bronze statue. An Eagles mural on the brick building behind it. The park cost very little and generates a significant portion of Winslow's annual visitor traffic. People come from every continent. They stand in the specific spot, take a photograph of themselves in a spot named in a song, and post it to various platforms.

What this tells you about Route Sixty-Six economics in the twenty-first century is something John Steinbeck could not have predicted in nineteen thirty-nine: a three-second lyric proved more durable infrastructure than the highway itself.