John A. Jakle

The Evolution of a Commercial Strip

This case study investigates the evolution of an arterial commercial strip along a previously residential street in a medium-sized American city. The hypothesis that gasoline stations and other automobile-oriented businesses first colonized the street on a block by block basis is supported. However, equally meaningful relationships between commercial land uses and shifts to multiple - family, absentee-owned housing are also examined as are the relationships between the streets changing social makeup and commercial reorientation. A five stage model of strip development is proposed.

Touring by automobile in 1932 The American West as stereotype

Abstract The diary and associated photographs descriptive of an automobile trip in 1932 from St. Paul, Minnesota to San Francisco, California are analyzed for topical and place emphasis. The purpose of this article is to suggest how automobile travel colored the tourists impressions of the West as a region. High speed travel along established routes, scenery contrived through automobile accessibility (especially in Yellowstone National Park), and a sense of history derived from the popular media made the West a distinctive, albeit highly stereotyped place. The scenic curiousities of mountain, canyon, and desert topography dominated Joseph Washburns concern with the West as a region. To him the West was a place of vast scale and natural beauty. Much attention was given to the logistics of travel. Travel inconvenience was seen as a form of adventure in what was necessarily a region of adventure.

Motel by the Roadside: America's Room for the Night

The origins of the American motel are rooted in the travelers use of the automobile. After 1910 the need for inexpensive overnight facilities convenient to the roadside led to the establishment of auto camps in the United States, especially in the West. In the East, the tourist home served a similar function. The highway travelers rejection of the hotel (most hotels were located in congested downtowns and lacked adequate parking facilities) prompted the rapid evolution of cabin camps, cottage courts, motor courts, motor inns, and, eventually, highway hotels. Standardizing influences were exerted first through trade associations and then through chain and franchise corporations. Changing motel morphology was characterized by evolution rather than revolution until the revised tax code of 1954 and the Highway Act of 1956 vastly accelerated motel construction attracting corporate investors. Hotels and todays larger motels are very similar with increased emphasis on public as opposed to private space and in...

Signs in motion: a dynamic agent in landscape and place

Only recently have scholars begun to study how signs structure and enable use of the humanized landscape. This paper proposes to advance this new subject further in taking up the category of signs that move. An historical review discloses wide application in public transit, private automobiles, commercial trucks, railroad rolling stock, state license plates, bumper stickers, marine transportation, clothing and tattoos. Most of the sources for this history are drawn from advertising and sign trade publications. A gallery of photographic images illustrates the moving signs pervasiveness throughout the United States, Western Europe and the Caribbean. Why moving signs have heretofore been generally ‘unseen’ in the scholarly agenda points out the difficulty of fixing on the moving sign and the absence of a liaison with museums, which themselves little attend to signs of any type. The result is further understanding the excitement of lived-in space, the life-affirming nature of movement, and the viewers self-construction of satisfying landscape and place.

Roadside Restaurants and Place-Product-Packaging

With roots in the cafe, diner and tea room, various kinds of roadside restaurants evolved after 1920: roadside stands, highway coffee shops, drive-ins, outdoor walk-ups and indoor walk-ups. Together they came to represent a distinctive kind of place along the American roadside. Large corporations came to dominate highway-oriented restaurants after 1960 through “place-product-packaging”: the coordination of building design, decor, menu, service and pricing under distinctive logos. This total design in merchandising has contributed to the standardization of roadside landscapes and travel in the United States. Roadside eateries are safe, predictable oases for strangers away from home.

The Prejudical Use of Space: School Assignment Strategies in the United States

Abstract Various social and geographical strategies that have been used to assign children to schools in the United States are examined in order to: 1) support the contention that social space and geographic space are rarely considered in concert in the context of community problem solving, 2) point out the need for the consideration of various socio-spatial concepts such as action space, territoriality, and neighborhood in social scientific research addressing itself to the understanding of social issues, and 3) urge consideration of the fundamental changes overtaking American society, particularly the processes of time-space convergence which underlie the socio-geographical reorganization of earth space.

Tourism in the mountain south: a double-edged sword

from secondary sources by and about Dodger players, owners, and administrators. He also exhaustively researched the city’s local newspaper, the Press Journal, as well as the private archives at Dodgertown, which contained excellent unpublished material. The book would have benefited though from more attention to primary sources. Johnson largely neglects the national sporting press, like The Sporting News, as well as influential African-American newspapers, like the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier, all of which would have complemented the local perspective. Historians of tourism may be disappointed with this work. Johnson expertly tells the history of the spring training complex and of the interactions between the team and the city of Vero Beach, but he provides much less analysis of Dodgertown as a tourist destination aside from a few anecdotes about Dodger fans visiting Vero Beach. The reader is left wondering, for instance, if the steady rise in attendance at Holman Stadium from the 1950s to the 1990s resulted from the growing population of Indian River County or from an increase in visits from out-of-towners. Similarly, this book would have benefited from greater attention to the growing historiography about spring training, which would have allowed Johnson to compare the experiences of Vero Beach to those of other major league spring training sites. The rise and fall of Dodgertown is pitched more to a popular than an academic audience, but its lively prose, amusing stories, interesting images, and compelling narrative will appeal to any student of baseball, spring training, or Florida history. It also provides an interesting look at the history and development of a small Southern city, which otherwise would not receive much attention from historians.

Modernizing Main Street: Architecture and Consumer Culture in the New Deal (review)

mobilization of their Mexico-descended communities. The Wagner Act, the US federal courts, the GI Bill, and the Great Society were each fundamental to migrant social mobility, yet Schmidt’s Marxian approach makes a more ambiguous role for the state impossible. In Mexico, meanwhile, the federal government channeled resources to a wide range of regional communities that created worker support for the postrevolutionary state. In view of these important weaknesses, Schmidt’s book is better seen as the latest installment in the radical critique of capital rather than as a history of migrant subjectivity. There is no reason in principle why those two cannot converge, but more empirical investigation is needed here to sustain the theoretical argument that Schmidt has constructed. University of Kansas Ruben Flores

Historical Geography: Focus On The ‘Geographic Past’ and ‘Historical Place’

What is historical geography? Until the recent concern with environment in America, few scholars took academic geography seriously, let alone historical geography. Even today the environment, its spatial structuring, and the manner in which people locate themselves and their activities in geographical space are issues easily subordinated to other disciplines. Geography is easily viewed as a mere dimension of some other aspect of human life. Historical geography is not something historians generally study as an end in itself. They use geography to help define political, economic, or social issues. Geography of the past (and often only the physical aspect) is viewed as an explaining variable, and rarely as a variable to be explained. Certainly, geography can influence human behavior. Opportunities for human life are distributed spatially in various ways. Human history evolves as individuals, communities, and other social groups pick and choose among these opportunities. It concerns the development of new ways of life, and the continual reorganization of new and old in an ever changing geographical mosaic. Geographers believe that this mosaic deserves explenation in its own right. The concept of place is central to geographical analysis. Places are discrete. They have specific locations. They have boundries which contain selected kinds of people, activities, and artifacts. Places exist in time. They open and close, and their activities can be periodized. They also vary in scale. A geographer might study the American South or the Middle West as a region. He might also study the manner in which people define personal spaces, distribute themselves in spaces as small as rooms, and how their spatial distributions change in time. Historical geographers focus on place and place change in the past. The study of place can be approached in at least two ways. Emphasis can be given to the structuring of geographical space which results when places are created and used by people. This is the dominant theme in human geography today. It has led to an emphasis on mapping spatial distributions, and comparing these distributions using quantitative techniques in hypotheses testing frameworks. This form of geographical analysis uses the scientific method. Its purpose is to identify causal relationships betweeen spatial patterns so that generalizations with high predictive capabilities can be derived. This study of distributions in space necessarily emphasizes groups of people. The individual is subsumed in the quest for central tendencies or measures of deviation from recognized norms across large populations. Focus on the individual, both as a decision maker and as an actor in geographical space, represents another approach. In studying human spatial behavior, emphasis is on how people view place. How do beliefs and attitudes about places influence human behavior? What kinds of satisfactions (or dissatisfactions) do people expect from different kinds of places and how do these anticipations influence locational and other choices? Emphasis on human spatial behavior involves both the study of population and the study of individuals, the latter inviting a clear humanistic orientation. Scientific method, especially the use of deductive models, has proved limited in the study of human experience. A broader epistemology is evolving. 2