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By the time I recognized their gaudy beauty in 1995, the 1950s and ’60s motels along Van Buren Street had largely turned into rent-by-the-hour sex dens and the haunts of junkies and crack smokers. Those buildings that had ceased operation sat fenced and boarded up, colonized by squatters and pigeons, pending future demolition. In the thirty years since its heyday, Phoenix, Arizona’s “Motel Row” had degenerated from class to kitsch, and finally into one of my hometown’s most crime-ridden corridors, a parched vacation-land graveyard desiccating in the same desert sunlight that once drew its customers. I wanted to photograph the vernacular architecture before the ’dozers arrived: the funky fonts, Polynesian huts, upswept flying-to-the-moon roofs and signs that said “Coffee Shop” in baby blue. I’d already shot the fronts of maybe ten motels, both functioning and condemned, and had collected from local antique stores all the vintage postcards featuring their images. The time had come to venture inside. So I jumped the fence one morning at the condemned Newton’s Inn and Prime Rib.
I was cornered by the time I heard claws on the pool deck. I spun around from the boarded office window I was about to photograph, and there it was: a Dalmatian crouched seven feet in front of me, ready to pounce. The dog inched closer, barking and growling and showing its teeth. It trapped me by what used to be the door to the front desk. Weathered boards covered the windows behind me. A cyan and orange row of rooms stretched to my right. In front of me the kidney-shaped pool, black water stiffening in the bottom, palm fronds and pigeon parts floating atop its skin. To escape, I’d have to hustle past the pool toward the gap in the brick fence where I’d entered—some sixty feet away—then cross the forty feet of naked dirt between it and the two fences I’d jumped. This dog would overtake me in the open. I imagined its jaws clamping on my ankles, lashing its head from side-to-side like a feeding crocodile while gnawing them to a grizzly pâté of bloody socks and tendons. I shifted to the right to put the pool between us. It scrambled to meet me on the other side, snarling.
Garbage littered the pool deck: gravel, cinder blocks, roofing material, beer bottles. I picked up the long metal base of what might have once been a stop sign. Banging it against the ground I yelled, “Go! Get out of here!” The dog crouched, barking louder. The thought of hurting an animal nauseated me, but if this one charged, was there a choice? Head down and snout out, its arched back echoed the shape of the sweeping roof at the neighboring Sun Dancer Hotel, a Googie parabola poised for launch.
Brittle chips of gunite flew as I pounded the rod over and over. Puffs of dust drifted between us. People once vacationed here, I thought. Families en route to California swam, sunbathed, and digested big steak dinners while watching Ed Sullivan in their refrigerated rooms. Newton’s original yellow brochure said, “Modern as tomorrow . . . Yet based on a proven reputation for hospitality.”
When the dog made quick steps forward, I stomped my feet and stood my ground.
The forces that draw hobbyists to their favorite things are often inexplicable. Whether the hobby is golf, porcelain angels, or chopper bicycles, why these and not something else? Even when I was twenty my interests were eclectic. Throughout childhood and adolescence I’d gone through what my parents accurately called phases. “Aaron’s going through another phase,” they’d say without a hint of disapproval. As a kindergartener I’d fixated on trains. Mom and Dad took me to the Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks in Flagstaff to search for rusty ties. They hung reproduction oil lamps in my room back in Phoenix, bought me a model electric train set to play with, conductor’s overalls to wear. Then it was Star Wars. Everything had to be Star Wars: toys, t-shirts, sleeping bag, sheets, shampoo, birthday cakes, Pez dispensers, silverware. Then I went gaga for GI Joe toys, then comic books, then anime, skateboarding, southern California beach culture, Vintage Hang Ten shirts culled from thrift stores, European beer, surf instrumental music, antique A&W root beer mugs, loose leaf tea. One year I wanted to replace my brown bedroom carpet with beach sand and sleep in a hammock between two fake palm trees; the next year that bedroom was decorated with Depeche Mode posters and bootleg vinyl. The world was new and fascinating. Everything held potential interest, yet my attention focused intensely on one thing at a time. Obsessions were how I processed information.
Sometime in 1995 I discovered architect Alan Hess’ book Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture. I found the title in the index of another book, or maybe I spotted it on a bookstore shelf. I can’t recall, but the effect was profound. It wed my eyes to the pastel majesty of the fifties and early-sixties, catalyzing a reaction as mysterious as the chemistry of pheromones yet as binding as marriage, a love affair that outlasted all future phases.
Googie was a bold, innovative style of commercial architecture born in post-WWII Los Angeles. Often called Coffee Shop Modern, sometimes Populuxe, Jet Age, Space Age, and Doo-Wop, Googie can be traced to a coffee shop architect John Lautner designed in 1949. The shop was called Googie’s. It stood on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights, a dissenter in a sea of Art Deco and Streamline Moderne. When Yale Professor Douglas Haskell was driving north on Crescent Heights with an architectural photographer in 1952, they came upon Lautner’s creation. “Stop the car!” Haskell yelled. “This is Googie architecture.” While Haskell was uneasy about what seemed its flamboyance, he did recognize the design’s uniqueness and acknowledged experimentation’s role in birthing new architectural forms. To him, Lautner’s coffee shop epitomized a new style, which he called “Googie architecture” in an article in House and Home magazine. No longer referring simply to the coffee shop but to Lautner’s pioneering work, the term Googie spread though architectural circles nationwide. So-called serious architects dismissed it as garish, using Googie as a slur for design excess, sloppy workmanship and lack of discipline. But others soon refined and reinterpreted Lautner’s concept, most notably the LA firm of Louis Armét and Eldon Davis. During the fifties and mid-sixties, Googie spread throughout California and the US, not only in coffee shops but bowling alleys, diners, motels, car washes, and car dealerships.
While difficult to define, Googie was highly recognizable. Its landscapes were tropical and lush. Buildings frequently contained indoor gardens. Other architects later mixed in idealized Polynesian elements such as coconut palms, thatched huts and Tiki heads and torches. Buildings were composed of organic forms, highly abstracted, that seemed to defy gravity. Boomerang shapes infused every aspect of the design, from the roof to the corners, including Formica countertop decorations, steel beams and butterfly chairs. Amoebas were also popular motifs, found in logos, signage, pools’ shapes and menus, as were with the intertwined loops of the stylized atom. This was the Atomic Era, the Jet Age, later the Space Age. As scientists explored the inner space of the atom, astronauts explored outer space, and UFOs held America’s attention. Googie incorporated simplified visual elements from both space exploration and molecular science. Concrete dome-shaped buildings took the form of flying saucers. Others more subtly evoked the Martian cities and space stations then appearing in movies and on the covers of sci-fi books and magazines. Spiky starburst decorations resembled Sputnik. Twinkling asterisks looked like stars.
Another architectural signature was the parabolic, boomerang-shaped roof. These gave the impression of movement, suspended animation, a building preparing for takeoff. Sweeping roofs announced the building’s presence to approaching motorists from a great distance—a necessity since car travel had become a key component of commerce. The added room these roofs created accommodated large sheet glass windows in the front and sides of buildings. This broke down the barrier between inside and outside, allowed sunlight to pour into a bright, festive interior, and gave passing drivers a view of all the fun they could be having if they stopped in for a meal.
Part Jetson’s, part Disney Tomorrowland, Googie’s aim, as with most vernacular architecture, was to
