Issue Seven

Niagara Falls Boulevard and Main Street form a sort of X,Y axis in the geometry of my mind. These lines intersect and form an almost exact 90-degree angle in front of the University of Buffalo Medical School down the street from my home. If you travel east towards Batavia or north towards Niagara Falls you will pass small, roadside motels that dot both streets. The numbered rooms form mathematical coordinates plotted at irregular distances. When I tell friends and acquaintances that I’m thinking of writing about these vestiges of Americana, they get excited for the wrong reasons. They think that these motels exist as anonymous spaces for the short, heavy exercise of lust–on prom nights, on lunch hours, after last call. They think that these are the places people visit on their way home to civilization. Since these motels are spots “on the way” that belong to nowhere, they are perceived as islands of perversion for the exercise of baser instincts. They think that roadside motels allow the unconscious to run unfettered, free from consequence, like a gymnasium for the id. And, once exhausted and freshly showered, the self can gather itself up again and return to its appointed rounds, exorcised.

Situated horizontally on the side of the road, motels are both private and ultimately public. Where else can you find a bedroom door that opens out onto the world? Motels are designed like an open book, spine splayed open, pages flipping back and forth by the breeze of the traffic. Motel rooms are chapters awaiting our interpretations. Gawking motorists are their readers; like all readers, they are in essence voyeuristic. Novels (at least those that interest us) allow us to peek in on that which has been closed to us; we are given permission, by the author and by the societally sanctioned act of reading, to peep into the private realm of the characters and watch them and listen to their innermost secrets. Denizens of motels give us no such permission, and yet the layout of the motel invites the same type of imaginative inquisition. Motorists and motel guests identify with each other, for each is displaced, each is in transition. A red and blue neon vacancy sign invites us to that empty space open for us to dream into.

The architecture, texture, history, and sociology of motels are more interesting than the interior decoration of other people’s minds. What is the case about motel life, as Wittgenstein might say, is all that is the case. The motels on Route 5 and Niagara Falls Boulevard in Buffalo, New York are neither gothic nor exotic; they are mundane places for people on the way to or from somewhere else. All of them human; all of them ordinary; all of them, therefore, particularly fascinating.

These motels spark the question: What if? What if, instead of speeding home towards that which is settled, I pull out of my own narrative and turn sharply into the motel parking lot? What if I become someone else, gaining the anonymity of the actor in his dressing room awaiting the garb of his new identity? What if I occupy the position of being nowhere on the side of the road, waiting to go somewhere? Our cars and our bodies zoom past, but the motel, open and closed at the same time, invites reveries on the possible and the impossible.

Alain de Botton, in his wonderfully entertaining book The Art of Travel, points out that Edward Hopper, the painter of loneliness, empty buildings, and the middle of the night, loved to depict hotels and motels.

In 1925 Hopper bought his first car, a secondhand Dodge, and drove from his home in New York to New Mexico. From that point on he spent several months on the road every year, sketching and painting along the way, in motel rooms, in the backs of cars, outdoors and in diners. Between 1941 and 1955 he crossed America five times. He stayed in Best Western motels, Del Haven cabins, Alamo Plaza courts and Blue Top lodges. He was drawn to the sorts of places whose neon signs blink ‘Vacancy, TV, Bath’ from the side of the road, offering beds with thin mattresses and crisp sheets, large windows overlooking car parks or small patches of manicured lawn; the mystery of guests who arrive late and set off at dawn, brochures for local attractions in the reception area and laden housekeeping trolleys parked in silent corridors. For meals Hopper would stop at diners, at Hot Shoppes Mighty Mo Drive-Ins, Steak ‘N Shakes or Dog ‘N Suds, and he would fill up his car at petrol stations displaying the logos of Mobil, Standard Oil, Gulf and Blue Sunoco.

And in these ignored, often derided landscapes, Hopper found poetry . . .

Hopper found the American poetry of solitude. He populates his motels with single people, outsiders, who seem to just miss connection. Through art, we transcend this distance and commingle with Hopper’s people, but only for as long as it takes for us to gaze at the painting and move on. How long is this? As long as it takes for us to whiz by a motel in our car or spend the night, checking in, as de Botton notes, late and leaving early. Hopper’s paintings explore the poetry of transience, which is the melody of America.

This is why these places perplex me and haunt me, because I like change. The motels on Route Five and Niagara Falls Boulevard are vestiges of a time when these two roads were vibrant truck routes and arteries of commerce and hospitality. These motels remind us of a time when Buffalo and Niagara Falls were viable commercial centers. Tired and empty, in need of paint or a few new light bulbs in their vacancy signs, they may depress us now as they form yet another sign of Western New York’s lost horizon quality. And yet, there is still life, new life, and always poetry and beauty.

 Tom, the manager and owner of the Country Cottage Motel and Campground on Route Five in Akron towards Batavia, exemplifies, I think, the heroic imagination that runs through the history of motels in the United States. Clad in paint spattered blue workpants and a sweatshirt, Tom’s eyes light up when he talks about the history of his motel and how he renovated it with his father. When the new McDonald’s came to town, he bought the downtrodden motel, figuring that the McDonald’s would attract hungry travelers from the interstate who were on their way to an amusement park or the antique stores or to the local annual summer Christian revival that attracts 30,000 worshippers each year. Tom built a business for people seeking salvation, amusements and antiques.

It was cold and windy when we met him, and the snow on the ground frequently whipped into whirling dervishes that raced across the cornfields. Tom was already planning for the summer, though. We joked that his mind never seemed to stop, and I marveled that here, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, in the dead of those endless Western New York winters, in an economically depressed environment, the entrepreneurial spirit was alive and growing things in the frozen earth. Tom proudly toured us through the rooms, which he and his father had restored. They were damp but snug and functional, and in the summer months, they are filled.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger refers to the state of finding yourself as a being in this world as “geworfenheit,” which literally means the state of being thrown. It’s like that Talking Heads song that talks about waking up and finding yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife and asking “How did I get here?” We are, if you think about it, thrown into this world, this country, this town, and this family without being consulted and then asked to perform roles and functions that may be totally foreign to us. To become truly authentic, that is to be truly ourselves, in a situation we never asked to be in, is the hallmark of everyday, existential, human heroism.

Motels are places of geworfenheit; they force you to notice your situation in the world. Their doors open out onto the misery and the magic of the human being, thrown into the rush of the highway. Motel owners and their guests, clad in Gap chinos, drinking Starbucks coffee, eating McDonald’s burgers, and drifting to sleep by the glow of cable television, will always be unique no matter how much they seek to escape from themselves–in the middle of the night, on Route 5, and on Niagara Falls Boulevard, lit up for the world to witness.