John Margolies' Roadside America Archive Goes Public Domain

For nearly four decades, photographer and architectural critic John Margolies (1940–2016) crisscrossed the United States, documenting the quirky, hand-built structures that lined America's highways: motels shaped like wigwams, car washes shaped like whales, coffee shops shaped like coffeepots, and billboards with groan-inducing puns. His work captured a vanishing vernacular—the roadside architecture that predated the homogenizing spread of franchise chains and interstate highways.

Now, the Library of Congress, which acquired Margolies' archive, has lifted all copyright restrictions on the collection. The full set of 11,710 color slides is available in high-resolution scans on the Library's website, with a more browsable selection of 1,555 images on Flickr's The Commons.

Margolies was not the first to lament the rise of the automobile and the interstate system. Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti famously described drivers as 'strung-out citizens' plagued by 'false windmills and demented roosters' on 'freeways fifty lanes wide.' But where Ferlinghetti saw a concrete continent of bland billboards, Margolies found home-made beauty—structures that mimicked their own function, like a donut shop shaped like a giant donut, or a gas station with a hat-and-boots facade.

His first book, published in 1981, was titled The End of the Road: Vanishing Highway Architecture in America, signaling his elegiac mission. He knew that franchising, changing fashions, and the shift to high-speed superhighways were dooming these roadside wonders. Today, many of the structures he photographed are gone, but his images preserve them for posterity.

The collection is a treasure trove for engineers and technologists interested in the intersection of infrastructure, design, and culture. It offers a unique dataset for computer vision projects, historical GIS mapping, or even generative AI training—all free from copyright restrictions.

Browse the full archive at the Library of Congress.