Roy's Motel and Café: The Last Stop in the Mojave

In the middle of the Mojave Desert, sixty-five miles from Barstow and miles from anywhere else, there is a building with a neon sign that somehow still says it's open.

Roy's Motel and Café sits in Amboy, California, a town so small and so remote that it appears on maps almost as an act of charity. The café opened around nineteen thirty-eight, named for Roy Crowl, who sold it to his son-in-law Buster Burris. In the nineteen forties and fifties, Amboy wasn't just a waypoint, it was a lifeline. The Mojave in summer could kill you, and Roy's was the fuel, the food, and the cold water that kept people moving.

At its peak Amboy had a school, a church, a gas station with the highest fuel prices in California because drivers had no choice but to pay them, and an airport. The town sat on one of the most traveled stretches of Route Sixty-Six, and Roy's was the center of everything. Travelers stopped not because it was charming, but because the alternative was a breakdown in one hundred twenty degree heat.

Interstate Forty arrived in nineteen seventy-three and took the traffic away almost overnight. Amboy shrank to almost nothing. Roy's closed. For decades the sign's promise seemed like a cruel joke made by a building that refused to fall down.

In two thousand and five, the entire town of Amboy, all of it, the café, the motel, the church, the school, the land, bought for four hundred twenty-five thousand dollars by Albert Okura, the founder of the Juan Pollo chicken chain and a Route Sixty-Six preservationist. Okura reopened the gas station in two thousand eight, largely to keep the legend alive. Roy's neon sign, a swooping atomic-age confection from the nineteen fifties, was restored and still blazes above the desert floor at night.

Photographers come from around the world to shoot it. The image appears in car commercials, music videos, and coffee-table books about the American road. The town has maybe one permanent resident. But Roy's sign keeps burning in the dark.