Mission 66 at Glacier: Building Parks for the Car Age

In nineteen fifty-six, the National Park Service launched one of the largest infrastructure programs in its history. The program was called Mission Sixty-Six, and its goal was simple to state and staggering to accomplish: completely modernize the facilities of every national park in the United States by nineteen sixty-six, the fiftieth anniversary of the agency's founding. The rationale was postwar America arriving by car in unprecedented numbers. The parks had been built for a different era. The roads, the visitor centers, the employee housing, the campground utilities, the interpretive facilities, all of it needed to be rebuilt for the automobile age.

At Glacier, Mission Sixty-Six produced a cluster of structures at Apgar Village and at Logan Pass that represent the program's architectural philosophy with unusual clarity. The Logan Pass Visitor Center, completed in nineteen sixty-six at the summit of Going-to-the-Sun Road, is the largest and most visible example: a low-slung, flat-roofed concrete structure designed to sit in the landscape rather than compete with it, its interior oriented toward the alpine meadows and the peaks rather than toward the parking lot. The Apgar Village commercial buildings from the same era, including the café and camp store, use the same vocabulary: modest scale, clean geometry, materials that don't try to look like something they aren't.

Architectural historians have reconsidered the Mission Sixty-Six buildings over the past several decades. At the time of their completion, they were often dismissed as utilitarian intrusions into parks whose older Great Northern Railway lodges had set a different aesthetic standard. More recently, the modernist restraint of the Mission Sixty-Six structures has come to look better than it did in nineteen sixty-six. The Logan Pass Visitor Center and the Apgar buildings are now on the National Register of Historic Places.

The program's underlying premise turned out to be correct. By the mid-nineteen sixties, more than seventy million people per year were visiting the national parks. Mission Sixty-Six built the infrastructure that made that visitation possible. The café at Apgar where you can get coffee on a cold morning is part of that infrastructure, a direct product of the decision, made in Washington in nineteen fifty-six, that the parks needed to be rebuilt for how Americans actually traveled.