Photos: Take A Trip Through Illinois' Glorious History Of Roadside Kitsch
By Stephen Gossett in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 6, 2017 4:55PM
The late photographer John Margolies was the visual laureate of American roadside kitsch, and few states offered up a canvas quite so rich as Illinois.
Margolies spent decades traversing the nation's roadways, beginning in the 1970s, documenting all the oddball sculptures, neon-lit pharmacy and liquor store signs, midcentury roadside hotels, bright-and-bold Main Street architecture—anything and everything that screamed yesteryear's glorious, uniquely American "vulgarity."
The Library of Congress made available thousands of Margolies' photographs in a massive online archive. So we naturally had to root through the Illinois filter in search of local color, and we weren't disappointed.
Margolies' Illinois catalog is a delightful mix of iconic (the Berywn Spindle, the Brooks Catsup Tower in Collinsville) and the more obscure (Stan The Tire Man statue), long-gone bizarro monuments and their—hopefully—eternal brethren.
Check out the gallery above for some for some of our favorites, and find more shots of fantastic Illinois camp architecture here.
[H/T Ashley Bowen-Murphy]