Ryann Ford’s Midcentury Pit Stop Preservation

Inspired by a move from Southern California to Austin, Texas, much of it along Route 66, photographer Ryann Ford started documenting a once-ubiquitous animal now nearing extinction: the midcentury rest stop, built as the U.S. was ramping up its infrastructure capacity with President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System. After a few years, Ford had shot more than 150 stops around the country and crowdfunded the idea into a book, The Last Stop: Vanishing Rest Stops of the American Roadside (Powerhouse Books, 2016). The stops, she wrote in her pitch, gave drivers a way to “reconnect people to the places they were traveling through.”