Route Sixty Six on Sixth Street

When Route Sixty Six was commissioned in nineteen twenty-six, it connected Chicago to Los Angeles across about twenty-four hundred miles of American highway, and it ran straight through the middle of Amarillo. The city was already a regional hub, sitting at the intersection of rail lines and cattle shipping routes, and the highway deepened that role. Sixth Street became the main Route Sixty Six alignment through Amarillo, a wide commercial corridor lined with filling stations, motor courts, diners, and the small businesses that grew up to serve drivers making the long crossing of the Texas Panhandle.

The buildings along Sixth Street accumulated over the following decades in a compressed survey of mid-century American commercial architecture. Spanish Revival facades sit next to Art Deco storefronts and Art Moderne service station canopies. A historic fire hall stands among them. A natatorium built in the nineteen twenties, an indoor swimming pool and community center, anchored the district in an era when such facilities were civic ambitions. The district runs through what is called the San Jacinto Heights neighborhood, one of Amarillo's older residential areas.

The U.S. Route Sixty Six to Sixth Street Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places on August twenty-third, nineteen ninety-four, recognizing it as the most intact surviving Route Sixty Six commercial corridor in Texas. Amarillo is the only major city on the Texas segment of the original road.

What Route Sixty Six meant to the Panhandle in the nineteen thirties was specific. The Dust Bowl was stripping the land. Families were leaving. The highway was the direction they left in, westward toward California. John Steinbeck called it the Mother Road. For tens of thousands of Dust Bowl migrants who crossed Amarillo in the nineteen thirties, Sixth Street was one of the last Texas places they ever saw.