In exploring this collection of roadside ephemera, the elements of commercial architecture and design and recreational travel and tourism in America are essential windows into the study of social history and popular culture in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The growing popularity of the automobile in the early twentieth century helped to conquer distance and changed everything; where we live; how and where we travel; and where we shop and spend money.

Before the Interstate Highway system was authorized in 1965, road travel took place on old local highways. The many options for gas, food, and lodging provided an atmosphere where creative entrepreneurs competed for customers with over the top features to entice travelers to stop and spend a little money before heading back on the road.

Starting in the 1970s, Margolies took to the road, scouring back roads in the largest car that he could afford to rent, usually a Cadillac, in pursuit of those vanishing emblems of midcentury enterprise. In combination with photographing these American icons, he collected the ephemera that advertised the alluring qualities of these attractions.

John Margolies (1940-2016) was an active photographer and architecture critic with a fondness for novelty architecture. Margolies was born in 1940 in New Canaan, Connecticut. When he was young, his interest in tourism and roadside architecture began with taking family trips through Connecticut, and he began exploring on his own when he was sixteen. He earned a Bachelor's degree in journalism and art history and a master's in communications from the University of Pennsylvania. Margolies was particularly fond of photographing novelty architecture, and was staunchly opposed to the so-called homogenization of the landscape across the United States. Throughout his career Margolies curated several exhibits of his photographic work, and wrote many books about travel and the roadside including: Ticket to Paradise : American Movie Theaters and How We Had Fun (1991), Signs of Our Time (1993), Pump and Circumstance : Glory Days of the Gas Station (1993), Home Away From Home : Motels in America (1996), Hitting the Road : the Art of the American Road Map (1996), Fun Along the Road : American Tourist Attractions (1998) and See the USA: the Art of the American Travel Brochure (2000).