When I bought this book in 2021, I said, “…a browser that would be right up Lileks’ alley.” And so it was, although with less depth than you get out of Lileks’ The American Motel site which Lileks has built over years from postcards.
This book, though, is a quick, inexpensive collection of photos featuring mostly motel signs but also some actual motel photos, including a few interiors and a couple of the fronts of motels or the grounds. A few are black and white for real retromania, but others are relatively contemporary. Ha! I mean contemporary to people of a certain age. Judging by the cars outside the motels, the photos only go up to the 1980s.
You know, I was kind of expecting to have visited a motel depicted within the book. Not because I’ve visited a lot of non-chain motels in my day–I think I’ve stayed at maybe three or four in my lifetime, and Budgetels, Hampton Inns, and whatnot. But given that the cover of the book has Route 66 right on it, I fully expected to see St. Louis’s Coral Courts in it somewhere because they had a distinct art deco look to them–and as I mentioned, I “urban explored” them before they made way for a subdivision. But no.
I suppose it counts to my good that my scores on checklists of churches exceeds the score of quizzes based on one-night cheap motels I’ve visited.
