Route Sixty-Six, The Road That Passed Through Here First
Near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Before there was an interstate highway system, there was United States Route Sixty-Six, and before there was Route Sixty-Six, there was a dirt track across central Oklahoma that people drove because it was the way through. Route Sixty-Six was designated in November nineteen twenty-six, one of the original United States Numbered Highways. Its western terminus was in Los Angeles, California, extended to Santa Monica a decade later.
Its eastern terminus was in Chicago. Between those two points, roughly two thousand and four hundred miles, it passed through eight states, and through the middle of Oklahoma City, along what is now Northwest Twenty-Third Street and through the heart of what would become Automobile Alley. Oklahoma City was Route Sixty-Six's largest city between Tulsa and Amarillo, which made it a crossroads of the road's culture during the highway's peak years.
The motels, gas stations, diners, and roadside attractions that defined mid-century American travel lined the corridor through the city. During the Dust Bowl migrations of the nineteen thirties, when an estimated three hundred thousand Oklahomans drove west toward California on Route Sixty-Six, the highway became something closer to a river of desperation. John Steinbeck called it the mother road in The Grapes of Wrath, published in nineteen thirty-nine.
The interstate highways of the nineteen fifties and sixties bypassed most of Route Sixty-Six's alignment in Oklahoma. Interstate Forty roughly paralleled the old road from east to west, pulling traffic away from the small towns and motel strips that had depended on it. By the time Route Sixty-Six was officially decommissioned in nineteen eighty-five, much of its physical infrastructure had already been abandoned.
What survives in Oklahoma City and along the Oklahoma corridor has become the subject of preservation and nostalgia in roughly equal measure. The Oklahoma Route Sixty-Six Museum in Elk City, the preserved neon signs along Northwest Twenty-Third, and the annual Route Sixty-Six corridor events speak to a road that the state has chosen to remember as central to its identity. The road itself is still driveable end to end, its pavement aging, its motels mostly gone, but its route still marked by the black and white shield that has not changed since nineteen twenty-six.
