Central Avenue: The Neon Mile

In nineteen twenty-six, the federal government numbered and mapped the first national highway system. Route Sixty-Six ran from Chicago to Los Angeles, and it passed through Albuquerque. Then in nineteen thirty-seven, the route was realigned along Central Avenue, the straight east-west corridor that ran from the Rio Grande through Old Town, through downtown, through Nob Hill, and out toward the Sandia foothills. The city's main street became America's main street.

What followed was a landscape of neon. Motor courts, diners, filling stations, and souvenir shops competed for the attention of travelers with money in their pockets. The Aztec Motel, the De Anza Motor Lodge, the Modern Auto Court, built in nineteen thirty-seven with its original vintage sign still standing decades later. By the nineteen forties, Central Avenue was a corridor of flashing colored lights visible for blocks in every direction.

Nob Hill, the stretch of Central between roughly Girard and Washington, became the social heart of this strip. It still has a dense run of surviving vintage neon along Route Sixty-Six.

For African American travelers in the mid-twentieth century, this road was navigated differently. The Green Book, Victor Green's annual guide for Black motorists, listed Albuquerque accommodations that were safe and welcoming. Some Central Avenue establishments were not. The divide ran along racial lines that the highway itself did not acknowledge.

Route Sixty-Six was decommissioned in nineteen eighty-five. Interstate Forty bypassed it. But Central Avenue never fully surrendered. The neon stayed. The motor courts that survived became boutique hotels. And the road that made Albuquerque visible to the whole country is still, on a clear desert night, the brightest street in town.