On the roof of the Dog House Drive In, a neon dachshund has been wagging its tail and scarfing sausage links for decades.
The classic animated sign — instantly recognizable to fans of the TV series “Breaking Bad” — is a fixture on Central Avenue in Albuquerque, part of old Route 66.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of Route 66, which ran for roughly 2,400 miles, from Chicago to Los Angeles (and, later, Santa Monica), and helped define the American road trip along the way.
In honor of the big birthday, many museums along Route 66 have created exhibitions exploring the role of the iconic automotive corridor in American history and culture. While some celebrate the quirky signs, tail-finned cars and oddball attractions the road is famous for, others acknowledge some of the grimmer realities of the highway. Along with dedicated Route 66 museums and centennial events, these shows unspool, and sometimes complicate, the highway’s legacy.
Although Route 66 is no longer an official U.S. highway — it was eventually left in the dust by the interstate system — the road has gained traction in the popular imagination and has become a draw for national and international tourism.
An event billed as the national kickoff celebration will take place in Springfield, Mo., from April 29 to May 3, but all along Route 66, cities and towns have been gearing up for the centennial this year.
In Albuquerque, the city provided grants to refurbish more than a dozen neon signs on its 18-mile stretch of the road. These included a second sign at the Dog House, a place where carhops still take foot-long hot dogs out to customers in their cars, and others that advertise vintage motels.
Another project called Route 66 Remixed: An Art-Fueled Road Trip has introduced new murals, sculptures and other public art to the cityscape.
The local artists participating ranged in age from their early 20s to around 70 and included Native Americans and newly arrived immigrants, according to Shelle Sánchez, director of the Albuquerque Department of Arts and Culture, which led the project.
Sánchez said in a recent interview that, through the selection of artists, “we show how many stories are reflected on Route 66.”
The road originally took a roundabout path through New Mexico, but was realigned in 1937 to cut straight across the state, through Albuquerque, its largest city. The metro area now has more than 900,000 people.
“Route 66 traverses our entire city, from east to west, and we grew from there,” Sánchez said. Today, she noted, it goes through walkable areas with upscale restaurants, and places where homeless people live.
“It’s like this kind of mashed-up microcosm of what big cities can be, what they are and what struggles they’re having,” she said.
In June, the Albuquerque Museum will open “The Other Route 66: 100 Years of People, Identity, and Place in Albuquerque” (through Jan. 3), an exhibition that will examine the road and its history largely through a local lens.
Alicia Romero, the museum’s head curator and curator of history, said that one question she had set out to answer with the show was, “Who owns Route 66?”
Yes, it is a place for tourists on road trips, she said, but it also belongs to the people for whom it is Central Avenue, those who use it to drive to work every day or who take to it when they decide to march in protest.
“It is history,” she said, “but it’s our present.”
The Lure of the Road
U.S. Highway 66, as it was officially called, was never a “superhighway.” It was largely cobbled together from a network of existing roads and trails, some barely passable, and was not fully paved until 1938.
Early promoters nicknamed it the “Main Street of America.” In his 1939 novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck famously called it “the mother road, the road of flight,” as he described the desperate Dust Bowl migrants heading out on 66 to the promised land of California.
During World War II, the highway carried westbound military troops and equipment, and in the postwar years it beckoned to a newly prosperous traveling public.
Route 66 inspired a catchy song by Bobby Troup, “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” and starred in TV shows and movies.
With its drive-ins, motels and tourist traps, Route 66 got Americans to hit the road — then bombarded them with marketing gimmicks to get them to pull over, such as giant concrete wigwams or fiberglass dinosaurs.
Snakes were a recurring theme. An exhibit now at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, “Roadside Attractions” (through Oct. 4), includes a black-and-white photo by Steve Fitch showing a tall, skinny man holding a snake in front of a large sign for the Regal Reptile Ranch & Menagerie, on Highway 66 in Sayre, Okla.
While not all the 20-plus photos in the show are from Route 66 in particular, they evoke the feeling of it — “the extraordinary experience of driving and being on the road and encountering these oddities,” said Katherine Ware, the museum’s former curator of photography, who put together the exhibition.
In their 2025 book “Route 66: The First 100 Years,” Jim Ross and Shellee Graham called the highway itself “a linear museum stretched across eight states.”
Westward Bound
The road’s westward route started in downtown Chicago, dropped down through Illinois and Missouri and cut through a corner of Kansas before crossing Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California.
But geographic details of the route have evolved. In fact, in February, Chicago declared that the route’s symbolic starting point would now be at Navy Pier. (The route’s longtime official starting point is across the street from the Art Institute of Chicago.)
Springfield, Mo., touts itself as the birthplace of Route 66 because a telegram sent from there on April 30, 1926, settled a protracted bureaucratic dispute over the road’s designation, establishing that it would carry the number 66.
The actual anniversary of the highway is Nov. 11, the date when the American Association of State Highway Officials formally adopted the U.S. numbered highway system as a whole.
The upcoming kickoff in Springfield will include an opening concert and a parade of classic vehicles. Visitors can drop in to the local History Museum on the Square, which has a dedicated Route 66 gallery. From June to September, the museum will also have a separate exhibit, “The Route 66 Series: 1926-2026,” examining the ways the road shaped aspects of local culture, including through cars, music, fashion and the economy.
A local project is also in the works to tell a more somber side of the Route 66 story, with an exhibit tentatively titled “The mOTHER Road: The Stories of African Americans along Historic Route 66,” expected to open by June at the Benton Avenue A.M.E. Church in Springfield.
Lyle Q. Foster, an associate professor of sociology at Missouri State University who is leading the effort, said that because of racial segregation, African Americans relied on the Green Book, a travel guide that listed safe places where they could eat, sleep or fill their gas tanks. In some “sundown towns,” he said, people of color were not even supposed to show their presence after dark.
“It certainly was a very challenging road to travel,” Dr. Foster said. “It wasn’t always getting your kicks and fix on Route 66 for people who were not white.”Councilwoman Monica Horton of Springfield, who represents the historically Black part of the city and is helping put together the exhibit, said it was important for the community to honor the legacy and resilience of the Green Book businesses and “to see ourselves in these stories.”
Multiple Events
The kickoff is one of dozens of events approved by the Route 66 Centennial Commission, established by statute in 2020 to identify appropriate activities to honor “the Mother Road of the United States.”
The commissioners, who are unpaid presidential appointees, have focused on larger-scale celebrations, but “virtually all of the small communities along the route will have some type of an event,” Rod Reid, the commission chair, said.
Then there are the small museums devoted to the lore of Route 66, or the cars that traveled along it.
In McLean, Texas, the Devil’s Rope Museum mainly focuses on barbed wire, but its Route 66 room is what usually draws people in from the freeway, said the museum’s president, Michael Oldham. There’s a connection between the two subjects, he said: Without the use of barbed wire along Route 66, “all you’d do is dodge cattle.”
In Illinois, the Joliet Area Historical Museum welcomes about 50,000 people annually to its Route 66 Visitors Center, about a quarter of them from outside the United States, according to Greg Peerbolte, the museum’s chief executive.
Many of the international visitors, he said, expressed the same sentiment about the highway: “This is the real America.”
Americans, Peerbolte added, tend to be drawn by nostalgia for their own experiences on the road.
The Illinois State Museum created a Route 66 Oral History Project, interviewing 100 people who either knew the highway in its heyday or have worked to preserve it since. On Memorial Day weekend the museum plans to open a companion exhibition of physical objects, “Miles of Memories: Stories of Route 66.”
Even today, people who travel the road have a different experience than they would if they stuck to interstates and hotel and restaurant chains, said Bill Thomas, the chair of the Route 66 Road Ahead Partnership, which works to promote and revitalize the road.
“The interstate highway system cannot deliver memories the way Route 66 can,” he said.
Myth and Nostalgia
David Davis, chief curatorial officer at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, said the appeal of Route 66 was rooted partly in nostalgia for the 1950s, but also in the mystique of the American West, which he described as “so interconnected to American identity itself.”
“It is just a part and piece of that American cultural puzzle,” he said in an interview. The museum’s exhibition “Route 66: From Trails to Truck Stops” (through May 3) includes a large neon sign with a cowboy on horseback, advertising the now-defunct Western Trail Motel, as well as a 1948 blue Chrysler Windsor.
Route 66 is part of the museum’s own heritage, Davis said. He explained that, in the 1950s, when cities were competing to host the museum, Oklahoma City won out partly because of its proposed site on Persimmon Hill, overlooking the famed highway.
At the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, the exhibition “Wagon Road to Mother Road” (through Jan. 31) challenges some of the nostalgia associated with Route 66 by examining some of the objects that were discarded along the way.
David E. Purcell, the museum’s supervisory archaeologist and historian, curated the exhibition, drawing in part on an archaeological survey he worked on in collaboration with the Petrified Forest National Park. Along a six-mile stretch of the old highway, the team designated sample areas and documented more than 11,000 artifacts, which Purcell estimated probably amounted to just 10 to 15 percent of what was there.
About one-third of the cans and bottles they found had once contained alcoholic beverages, he said. They also found part of a cocktail shaker, “church keys” for opening cans of beer and evidence of car accidents.
Flagstaff benefits from Route 66 tourism today, but people forget that the old road was narrow, nerve-racking and dangerous, Purcell said.
“By the time it disappeared, there was no nostalgia for it,” he said. “It wasn’t until literally they were pulling down the signs that some of that nostalgia began.”
NEW YORK TIMES
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