Tucumcari Tonight: The Neon Motel Town

The billboards for Tucumcari start about a hundred miles west and do not stop. Tucumcari Tonight, the signs say, and have said for the better part of a century. The town was a Route Sixty-Six service stop, the place you aimed for when the Llano Estacado and the New Mexico high plains were behind you and you needed to be somewhere for the night.

At its peak, Tucumcari's billboards advertised two thousand motel rooms, an extraordinary density for a town of five thousand people that existed specifically to shelter people passing through. The motels have signs that are the attraction now. Blue Swallow, Palomino, Lasso, Safari: the neon was built in the nineteen fifties and sixties, designed by sign painters who were competing for the attention of people moving past at fifty miles per hour.

The signs had to work from distance. They used big primary colors and simple shapes and the kind of font that looks like it is going somewhere. When Interstate Forty bypassed Tucumcari in nineteen eighty-one, the through traffic that fed the motels disappeared.

Many rooms went dark. Some owners kept them going anyway, for the nostalgists and the Route Sixty-Six drivers who still came deliberately. The Blue Swallow Motel has been operating since nineteen thirty-nine and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

There is nothing ironic about Tucumcari. The people who run the motels and diners here are not trading in retro aesthetics. They are running the businesses that their parents built on a road that the federal highway system decided it no longer needed.

The signs are still lit. The rooms are still available.