MIAMI, OKLA. — The Riviera Courts motel is crumbling away and nobody seems to care.
Once a stop along Route 66, the 2,400-mile neon carnival that connected hundreds of communities from Chicago to Los Angeles, this late-1930s Mission Revival is just a weather-worn building on the side of a country road in far northeast Oklahoma.
Next door, soybean farmers Richard and Rosemary Woolard watch the place deteriorate from their front porch.
"Been a lot of changes in this old county," 77-year-old Richard Woolard says.
The Riviera Courts is among hundreds of mom-and-pop motels that met their demise along the ribbon of Route 66 as America's interstate system siphoned traffic off the Mother Road onto a four-lane, divided highway called progress.
In Oklahoma, with more Route 66 miles than any of the other seven states it flows through, many motels are derelict or abandoned, used as junkyards, makeshift car lots and flophouses.
Owners who inherited these historical footnotes have no use for them, and would rather sell the properties to developers if the price is right.
Today, many structures that made the road what it was -- the diners, family-owned service stations, barbecue joints -- have fallen apart.
The nonprofit National Historic Route 66 Federation in Lake Arrowhead, Calif., estimates that at least 3,000 motels along the route are in various states of repair or disrepair.
Route 66, immortalized in John Steinbeck's 1939 novel "The Grapes of Wrath" and crooner Nat King Cole's catchy tune, debuted in 1926. The road meant steady work for scores of unemployed men who built it in the 1930s; an avenue for thousands who migrated west to escape the Dust Bowl; and a post-World War II playground for millions of Americans looking to roam.
With the interstate came the Holiday Inns, chain gas stations and drive-thrus. Neon and quirky were outs; pre-fab and fast were in.
The business model for the motels became outdated too. How was a place built in the 1920s for 11 to 20 patrons going to compete with a motel that could cram in 10 times more guests?
By 1984, the interstate had bypassed the last bit of 66 in Arizona, ending America's romance with the iconic highway.
The handful of motels that survived fight a stigma.
"Motels are such a part of our recent history that it's often hard for people to view them as historically significant," says Kaisa Barthuli, with the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program in Santa Fe, N.M.
