John Margolies

John Margolies (born May 16, 1940, New Canaan, Connecticut, U.S.—died May 26, 2016, Manhattan, New York) was an American architectural critic, author, and photographer who, from 1969 to 2008, traveled more than 100,000 miles across American towns and cities, capturing thousands of images of roadside diners, motels, gas stations, neon signs, drive-in movie theaters, and oddball roadside attractions with the aim of documenting these structures before they vanished from the landscape.

Early life and education

Margolies was born in New Canaan, Connecticut, the son of Ethel Polacheck Margolies, a painter and art administrator, and Asher Margolies, a department store executive. In his book The End of the Road: Vanishing Highway Architecture in America (1981), Margolies recalled his earliest roadside memories, marveling at drive-in theaters and miniature golf courses along a strip of the Berlin Turnpike, south of Hartford, Connecticut, during family vacations:

I can remember the agony of the family vacation, driving out in the family car as a kid and never stopping at places you thought were terrific. Taking a car trip was a tremendous adventure, a series of discoveries; it was an extension of your view of the world. The road was the new frontier. It had castles where you could get hot dogs and hamburgers, and places with believe-it-or-not things to see.

However, his parents responded with distaste, as he remembered in a 2015 interview with The Washington Post: “My parents’ generation thought it was the ugliest stuff in the world. I liked places where everything was screaming for attention: ‘Look at me. Look at me.’ ”

He obtained his driver’s license at age 16 and began exploring roadside businesses on his own. After graduating from high school, he attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history and journalism in 1962 and a Master of Arts degree in communications in 1964.

Career in photography

After earning a master’s degree, Margolies became an assistant editor at Architectural Record magazine and a program director with the Architectural League of New York. In 1970 he organized an exhibit called “The Architecture of Joy,” focused on the work of Art Deco architect Morris Lapidus, who designed the flamboyant Eden Roc hotel resort in Miami Beach, Florida. The exhibit appalled the Modernist architects and architectural critics of the time, who frowned upon excessive ornament and did not consider Lapidus to be a noteworthy architect.

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In 1972 Margolies began taking extended road trips to document novelty architecture across the United States. In his book Roadside America: Architectural Relics from a Vanishing Past (2010), he noted that he would “rent the biggest, most comfortable and foam-padded American car,” preferably a Cadillac, and listen to Top 40 radio stations as he explored the American roadside. He preferred traveling in late spring or early fall, especially after Labor Day when the roads were not clogged with tourists. A meticulous planner, Margolies devised systems to work efficiently on the road for long periods of time, such as storing film in a cooler to prevent color fading. His photographs celebrated mom-and-pop businesses and eccentric, oddball structures, such as the Big Fish Supper Club in Bena, Minnesota, which was punctuated by a 65-foot- (20-meter-) long reproduction of a muskie fish, and the Big Duck poultry market, a building in Long Island, New York, that was constructed in the likeness of a giant Pekin duck.

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His work was funded through fellowships and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Howard Gilman Foundation, among others. In 1980 the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York City mounted Margolies’s solo exhibit “Resorts of the Catskills,” featuring more than 60 photographs of family resorts and hotels in New York’s Catskill Mountains. In 1981 the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York, presented the “The End of the Road: 20th Century Commercial Architecture in the U.S.,” a traveling exhibit that featured more than 120 photographs of motels, gas stations, neon signs, diners, and other attractions that Margolies had captured on his treks across the United States.

In 1987 he collaborated with authors Nina Garfinkel and Maria Reidelbach on the book John Margolies’s Miniature Golf, which offered a history of the pastime and collected images from more than 100 miniature golf courses that Margolies had photographed. Margolies also collected his photographs and writing in the books Ticket to Paradise: American Movie Theaters and How We Had Fun (1991, with author Emily Gwathmey), Pump and Circumstance: Glory Days of the Gas Station (1993), Signs of Our Time (1993, also with Gwathmey), Home Away from Home: Motels in America (1995), Fun Along the Road: American Tourist Attractions (1998), and Roadside America: Architectural Relics from a Vanishing Past, among others.

Characteristic style

Margolies preferred photographing in the morning, when the light was soft and diffused, noting in Roadside America: “I love the light at that time of day; it’s like golden syrup. Everything is fresh and no one is there to bother you.” He used a Canon FT 35-mm camera and Kodachrome 25 ASA color film, which requires slightly longer exposure times but yields rich saturated colors. He aimed to produce straightforward images that emphasized a structure’s form and limited visual distractions, and he intentionally excluded people and parked cars from his photographs. In a 2011 interview with Forbes magazine, he explained: “I insisted there would be no cars, no people, and no litter and that the sun had to be out. I was interested in…[every photo] having the same visual characteristics.”

Death and legacy

At the end of his road trips, Margolies would return to his apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which was decorated with vintage signs, photographs, postcards, pennants, and souvenirs that he had collected while on the road. Some of these items would later serve as supplemental material for his books and photo exhibits. The Library of Congress began acquiring both his photographs and his collected roadside ephemera in 2007. In 2016, the same year Margolies died of pneumonia, the library launched the John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive, a vast collection comprising more than 11,000 color images that celebrate American novelty architecture and roadside culture. Although all 48 states in the continental U.S. are represented in the archive, a majority of the images were photographed in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, and California.

Margolies inspired a generation of photographers and roadside culture preservationists to follow in his tracks. In a 2003 interview with the Chicago Tribune, he mused: “I do have a goal in life: to go everywhere, to see everything. Nearly nothing I shot 25 years ago still exists. I’m the architectural undertaker. The bulldozer comes through just after I’m here.”