CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Professor John Jakle continues to be a fearless Roads Scholar.
Over the past decade the cultural geographer has cruised the nation's highways and byways, exploring, dissecting and writing about its unique roadside landscape and culture.
First he pumped America's gas stations for their rich properties, then he frequented fast-food restaurants, and later, checked into motels. Jakle, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote books on all three subjects with Keith Sculle, the head of research and education at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency.
Now the peripatetic pair has written two more books that continue their deconstruction of the country's roadside.
Road warriors of all kinds would benefit from reading "Signs in America's Auto Age: Signatures of Landscape and Place" (University of Iowa Press) and "Lots of Parking: Land Use in a Car Culture" (University of Virginia Press). The books underscore what people know - or think they know - about signs and parking lots, but also add visual cues and access ramps to what they may have never even considered.
According to the authors, signs - as a form of communication - are critical: They "suggest what is and what is not normative. They help set expectations. They validate. They invalidate. In no way can full understanding of American society be achieved without comprehending how it is that signs in America work."
In "Signs" the professors explore the ways in which people "read" the landscape of the sign - wherever it may be: on a two-lane rural road, the interstate, on Main Street or plastered on cars as bumper stickers.
The authors point out, for example:
• Hobos in the Depression made their own roadside signs by drawing "ephemeral symbols in coal or gypsum on utility poles to tell their 'brothers of the road' of pleasing or troublesome places ahead."
• Of all the corporate logos to influence the American scene early in the 20th century, none became so widespread so quickly as that of Coca-Cola, first painted on walls, then hung over entrances. Later, in the early 1930s, the "Drink Coca-Cola" signs with the "Fountain Service" added in yellow lettering on green were introduced and became the "single most important cue to soda fountain location in the country."
• In the early stages of the Depression, when it was mistaken for a temporary downturn in the market, the new Outdoor Advertising Association of America posted 50,000 panels in 17,500 cities with the "Forward America" campaign.
In their epilogue, Jakle and Sculle explore future signs in America, including "SmartPaper," a display system developed by a subsidiary of the Xerox Corp. The authors explain that SmartPaper is "a thin, flexible polyester substrate embedded with millions of magnetic microspheres ... that can spin to new positions as electronic charges are applied." Capable of displaying two-color text and graphics, SmartPaper may "drive a revival of display window advertising" in department stores and mass transit.
"Parking Lots" is in some ways an homage to the heretofore-neglected entity.
"It is not just the motor vehicle in motion that underpins life in America today. It is, as well, the motor vehicle at rest. The country would not function without parking lots and parking garages." The book is dedicated to "The Frustrated Motorist, the Harried Meter Maid and the Dutiful Parking Lot Attendant."
The authors explain that in 1900, automobiles numbered in the thousands - and were "little more than machines for the amusement of the well-to-do." By 1920, some 8 million cars were registered in the United States, and by 1930, there were about 23 million.
Car ownership "soared in the Midwest, with commercial farmers, as a class, among the very early adopters of the new automobiles," but Midwestern urban dwellers were nearly as smitten. In 1927, for example, some 850,000 Chicagoans drove an average of 4.5 miles to the Loop, a business district less than one-mile square. In addition:
• Automobile congestion "built to critical levels" in the nation's largest cities in the years before World War I, and everywhere else "immediately thereafter."
• Converted livery stables, carriage shops and other structures involved with horse-drawn transport were the first car storage sites, followed by theaters, warehouses and small factories.
• Max Goldberg, an emigrant from Odessa, Ukraine, may have opened the first commercial parking lot in America. He began renting out parking space adjacent to his seat-cover and car-top upholstery business in Detroit in 1917, and by 1936, had 36 lots.
• Parking lots are "ideal laboratories" for psychologists. One finding related to territorial behavior: The average driver takes 32 seconds to leave a parking place, but 39 seconds if someone is waiting for the space.
In their conclusion the authors discuss some of the planning strategies that they believe have been less successful: turning downtown streets into pedestrian malls, for example, and closing college and university campus centers to car traffic. Such choices have, for the most part, "produced boring lifeless places where people go only during rush hours." At night, these areas can be "outright dangerous for lack of human surveillance."
"The idealized middle ground, we suggest, would involve parking everywhere, but parking in limited amounts," the authors wrote. "No destination would be totally denied, but then again, no destination would be fully supplied, dominated by parking and its infrastructure. Parking integrated imaginatively into the making and remaking of urban place is the pragmatic choice. It may, indeed, be the only choice."