Murals kick up interest in Route 66 towns
As we idle at a quiet intersection, waiting for the light to change, a man crossing the street stops in his tracks, pulls his headphones down and approaches us with a look of childish delight. It’s impossible to exchange more than a few words, but that does not seem to bother him, nor the many other Parisians who suddenly drop their usual cool reserve to smile and chat as we ride through the city. My guide, Simon Burke, is used to it. Cruising in a beautiful sidecar does that to people.
I’m sitting low in a Watsonian basket, bolted securely to the side of Burke’s burnished-red Royal Enfield Interceptor 650 motorcycle. We’re zigzagging through streets beside the Seine River, and despite the fact that I’ve lived in Paris for the best part of a decade, I feel as if I’m seeing it all anew.
After years of on-and-off lockdowns, tourism has returned to Paris. And looking at the volume of visitors now, you would scarcely believe they were ever gone. The city is buzzing, and as we cruise, I
Edwardsville has a historic theater, Collinsville a giant catsup bottle and East St. Louis its jazz, all Americana from the glory days of Route 66.
Now a series of 12 outdoor murals will link some Southern Illinois towns along the Mother Road. Tapping into history, kitsch and modern points of pride, the public artwork is being called the Route 66 Mural Art Trail.
The templates for the murals are similar, but “they are all unique to the think of the trilling flute solo and persistent beat of the 1968 hit song “Il est cinq heures, Paris s’éveille” (“It’s 5 a.m., Paris is waking up”) by singer Jacques Dutronc. The city seems to indeed be waking up after a long slumber, city they are representing,” said artist Daniel Ricketts, owner of St. Louis Sign & Mural.
In July, he and two others painted Edwardsville’s colorful mural at the corner of Vandalia and Main streets, a couple of doors down from the popular Stagger Inn and not too far from Wildey Theatre, built in 1909, and a life-size fiberglass steer at Goshen Butcher Shop.
Ricketts, who lives in St. Louis, was enjoying hearing from residents about the town and their interest in the mural.
“We’re excited to be working on it,” he said. yet the pandemic hit the industry here just as hard as anywhere else. Burke would not be sitting on the bike beside me if it were not for COVID. The difficulties faced by the large tourism company he had worked with for years
He’s confident visitors will want to take selfies in front of the mural and share pictures on social media: “I think it’s good for businesses, the town and people having fun taking pictures in front of the murals with their friends.”
Organizers hope the murals – coming four years before the centenary celebration of Route 66 – will draw visitors to Illinois’ last 100 miles of the route.
“Traveling along Route 66 is a huge draw for international travelers,” gave him the boost he needed to strike out on his own, and he decided to combine his longtime passion for motorcycles into Txango Tours, a private business that could be as agile and independent as his beloved bikes.
said Stephanie Tate, marketing and communications director for Great Rivers & Routes Tourism Bureau.
Visitors will come to the U.S. for a month to make the roughly 2,400-mile road trip from Chicago to Los Angeles, she said. She hopes to draw more domestic fans to Southern Illinois’ portion of Route 66, which morphed over the years, adding and subtracting local and state roads.
In May, the tourism bureau received a state grant for $919,000 to pay for the murals and a series of other projects. Towns expecting murals are Hamel, Granite City, Livingston, Staunton, Carlinville, Girard, Gillespie, Virden, Litchfield and East St. Louis. Their artwork will also be personalized, with nods to Granite City steel,
Litchfield’s 1924 Ariston Café and Staunton’s Henry’s Rabbit Ranch (which includes both Volkswagen Rabbits and furry hoppers). One East St. Louis symbol will be a trumpet.
The tourism bureau also plans to use the grant over the next few years for six monuments, restoration of the “Cannonball Jail” in Macoupin County and transformation of the
West End Service Station, 620 St. Louis St. in Edwardsville, as a new interpretative and educational museum and Route 66 visitor center. Formerly a gas station for Route 66 travelers, the building became a dental office in 1965, after Route 66 bypassed Edwardsville. The Illinois Department of Transportation purchased the site in 2021, the bureau said.
Alderwoman Elizabeth Grant of Edwardsville said in a news release about the mural that “we take pride in some of our additions (to the art template) that make Edwardsville unique, including the Leclaire water tower, our Tiger paw and trees for our Tree City distinction.” She also said, “This will be a tourist attraction for all ages, and especially our Instagram friends.”
According to the National Park Service, more than 250 buildings, bridges, road alignments and other sites along
Route 66 are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. (One is the old Chain of Rocks Bridge.)
As the country’s automobile culture grew in the 1920s, some of the roads designated as part of Route 66 in 1926 still had not been paved. But the highway soon became a symbol of freedom and adventure.
“While not the first long-distance highway, or the most traveled, Route 66 gained fame beyond almost any other road,” says the National Museum of American History. “Dubbed the ‘Mother Road’ by John Steinbeck in ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ Route 66 carried hundreds of thousands of Depression-era migrants from the Midwest who went to California hoping for jobs and a better life.”
During World War II, the route was used for military transportation. In the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower supported construction of new high-speed interstates, and in 1985, Route 66 was officially decommissioned. But support for the highway remained, and Congress passed an act in 1999 to create the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program. Nostalgia has never waned.
“We want to reignite that love affair with the road again,” Tate said.