Breezewood, Pennsylvania

Breezewood calls itself the Town of Motels, and from the highway it looks exactly like that: a half-mile strip of fast food, fuel stops, and lodges jammed between an interstate and a turnpike. The quirk that made it is the Federal Aid Highway Act of nineteen fifty-six, which tied federal money for a direct interchange to ending turnpike tolls, a deal Pennsylvania would not make. When Interstate Seventy was built in nineteen sixty and tied to the Pennsylvania Turnpike, engineers routed it through Breezewood's commercial strip rather than building a direct connection, forcing every driver to slow down through town.

The village had been a Lincoln Highway stop since nineteen thirteen and already had a motel by nineteen forty-one. But the interchange made it famous. By nineteen sixty-nine there were nineteen motels and ten gas stations in a community of fewer than two hundred people.

Road photographers have been shooting it ever since.