
The Internet Loves a Rest Stop in Breezewood, Pennsylvania - clairevtran
https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/07/breezewood-meme-pennsylvania-turnpike-i-70-rest-stop-photos/594559/
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habosa
Whenever I do a long highway trip I can't help but notice how often I pass
"one of everything". By that I mean when I'm hungry I don't have to wonder
where I will eat, I know that within 10 miles I will find some exit with a few
fast food chains, a fast casual restaurant, 2 gas stations, an a motel. You
don't have to ask "Where is the McDonalds" you ask "Where is the NEXT
McDonalds" because you know you probably are between two.

I find this tiny bit of Americana comforting. I don't know if there is another
country so large that is so consistently developed. There are so few places in
America where you might end up out of range of these basic comforts, despite
our fairly massive landmass.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Try doing that on a north to south trip from walla walla to Las Vegas. There
are still places in the USA where “next services, 150 miles” is common. I love
those drives.

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tristor
Me too. These are the best sort of road trips, where you still need to plan
things out and when you do finally stop it's a dusty service station with a
local diner next door, not another McDonalds.

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pkilgore
It definitely takes longer, but this is why I avoid interstate highways if I
have the time. I also find pathfinding and turning more fun than passing.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
You wouldn’t have much choice for most of the route unless you decided to
detour onto I15, adding an extra hour to the trip with worse scenery.

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rconti
I suppose it literally "could be only be one place", but it looks almost
identical to thousands of small towns across the US. My entire childhood
roadtrip experience was up and down the west coast on I-5, and you could
absolutely convince me this was somewhere like Grant's Pass, OR, if not for
the signs with PA route information on them. You'd have to convince me a chain
or two (Perkins, Sunoco) expanded westward in the past few years, but that
wouldn't take much doing.

I still don't quite follow this line:

> "highway planners designed a looping interchange that lets drivers avoid the
> turnpike if they (hypothetically) want to"

That seems no different from any other exit (you could hypothetically avoid
any toll road by exiting and stopping and just staying wherever you are), but
I guess the actual 'bypass' function of this road in the real world is less
important than what it's come to be.

~~~
013a
Yeah I can't agree with the author in saying that its "uniquely" Breezewood;
this could be a picture of pretty much any "exit directly off the interstate"
in especially the midwest, though likely around most of America. Towns like
this pop up around interstates; it seems like interstates are planned to go
near smaller towns, but not through them, so the town "creeps" over to the
interstate and you end up with all the new developments happening over there,
like big chain restaurants. And, of course, gas stations, because that just
makes sense. I could point to three dozen towns between Illinois, Indiana,
Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee that are like this.

~~~
munificent
I can confirm that this also looks like many places in Texas, Louisiana,
Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Less so, but also in Washington
and Oregon.

The photo (mainly due to use of the telephoto lens) provides a sort of dense
charicature, but the overall look can be found in lots of places. Not the most
beautiful aspect of the US, but a reasonable one. We're a huge, sparsely
populated country where many people still get around by way of long driving
trips. If you've been on the road for eight hours and you and the kids are
hangry, often you want some gas and a reliable, safe, familiar meal. Gas
stations and fast food chains provide that.

Criticizing these photos is a bit like criticizing a landfill or sewage
treatment plant as reflecting on the beauty of an entire area. It's
essentially utilitarian infrastructure. It's ugly, sure, but you can't have
everything be ivy-covered brick and artisanal bakeries.

~~~
logfromblammo
It's Highwayland.

Highwayland is the America that connects the other Americas together. It spans
the entire continent by itself, but everywhere else is only a short drive from
it. No one lives there, but everybody passes through. The interstate highway
system didn't create Highwayland, but homogenized and unified it.

Everyone is a little bit comfortable in Highwayland, but also a little bit
bored. It has McDonald's, Subway, Taco Bell, a Cracker Barrel, a 4-story
1-corridor hotel with indoor pool and fitness center that offers free copies
of USA today in the lobby, a 2-story discount motel where the room doors open
to the parking lot, the dine-in restaurant open from 6 to 10, two gas stations
or truck stops across the road from each other, each with their own bustling
convenience stores that sell sausages, egg rolls, and round tacos that cook on
the hot dog roller, with 128-oz fountain drinks, all for $4.

If it were too interesting, people wouldn't want to leave, and the transit
dimension would clog up with loiterers and squatters.

You can take a photo of Highwayland from anywhere in Highwayland, and see all
the same features, but you can also strike out in a random direction from
Highwayland, travel 15 minutes, and find a place unlike anywhere else on
Earth, with its own local character that is instantly identifiable to anyone
that has ever been there.

Sometimes the local character is strong enough to overwhelm Highwayland, just
for a few miles (Highwayland abhors kilometers), and the uniqueness seeps in.
Maybe you can see the city skyline, or a university campus, or a hospital. It
doesn't happen often, though. Highwayland craves sameness. Mostly, it is the
realm of the consistent, the predictable, and the reliable.

~~~
thebrainkid
Thanks for your comment! It was a very enjoyable read, and in its style is
reminiscent of some older mystery novel authors.

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asark
Pennsylvania Highway Interchange Popular Among Web Users as Symbol of American
Homogeneity

Due to a quirk of a now-defuct law causing an abundance of low speed traffic,
an unusually dense set of typical off-interstate chain stores and restaurants
sprung up around a Breezewood, PA interstate exit. This location has become
popular among Web users for creating photos embodying the homogeneity and
cultural sterility of such places.

There, headline and first couple sentences of a non-clickbait article for you.

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Eiriksmal
If you read the article, you'd discover that it's _not_ unusually dense. The
photographer in question, Edward Burtynsky, spent three days finding the right
location. He rented a scissor lift and shot from several stories up, with a
zoom lens, giving an impression of density you can't see from the ground.

~~~
o_nate
That's a good example of how the lies of art can create a greater truth. It's
rare to see all the big corporate logos superimposed on different parts of the
field of view, rather like the sponsorship patches on the jacket of a NASCAR
driver, but it speaks to a real experience of one gas station, diner or fast
food place after another that is encountered across interstate America.

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ixtli
I love this photo because to me it represents a sort of "American Gothic".
I've spent most of my life in America and I can confirm that, as many of the
linked tweets say, it does look like that "most of the time." The Breezewood
rest stop is exceptional in that it is the platonic ideal: it looks far more
like everywhere than anywhere. You don't have to have been there to have been
there.

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CPLX
As a person who grew up in Washington DC with most of my family in Chicago, I
have many, many, many memories of sitting in awful traffic going through
Breezewood.

With that said I think the central premise of this article is mostly false.
There are a _lot_ of places in the US, typically at major interstate highway
junctions, that look exactly like this.

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jcranmer
For people who haven't dealt with Breezewood traffic, it can mean sitting in
the right lane of the Pennsylvania Turnpike for a mile of stop-and-go traffic
(while the left lane is going 60mph!) and spending an hour to actually make it
the short gap to get back onto I-70. Trying to cross US-30 to hit your
favorite establishment is not worth it--if it's not on the right side of the
road, don't bother.

What doesn't help is that the PA Turnpike is pretty stingy with its rest
stops, especially in the western half of the state. Most states have rest
stops at about a 30mi cadence, but you've got ~70mi from the last rest stop in
PA to the OH border and closer to ~50mi cadence--assuming the rest stops
aren't closed for reconstruction. So even those rest stops are pretty crowded,
to the point where you can have the driver get in line for gas and everyone
else go to the bathroom, wait in a line that stretches out the door, and still
get back to the car before it reaches the pump.

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CPLX
You're also leaving out the fact that the turnpike has the surface consistency
of a cheese grater and often no shoulders at all.

~~~
jcranmer
Still better than I-70 between Washington, PA and the turnpike though.

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Isamu
The meme is definitely oversized - Breezewood is pretty small. If you feel
this is somehow representative of America then you must have been asleep
through the vast miles of farmland and wooded hills leading up to it and
stretching forever beyond it.

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mindslight
It makes sense if one focuses on human constructed attractions, especially if
one is confined to major travel routes with the goal of getting to a
destination.

I think part of what makes this photo look unique to many is that Pennsylvania
sits between the extremes of the Northeast's planned rest stops, and the
Midwest's natural four-corners ones - so it's exceptional from both. It's
larger than one standard concrete building with pluggable vendors, and it's
denser than fuel stops with truck scales, overnight parking, etc. Pennsylvania
also has this hilly thing going on that tends to concentrate, hide, and focus
business gatherings.

Travelling across the country, the real depressing pattern is McDonalds ahead
10 miles, ... 5 miles, ... 2 miles, ... 1 mile, .... half mile, "turn around
you missed McDonalds!", next McDonalds 36 miles, repeat. I believe the bigger
rest stops actually break the homogeneity by offering more variety. But on
longer distances, one actually comes to see the value in chains -
predictability. And I say this as someone who goes out of my way to avoid
chains.

Of course that's all still focused on the commercial infrastructure that
supports travelers. If you're roadtripping, especially west of Pennsylvania
(ie clear of the Megalopolis), and not basking in the novel landscape, you're
doing it wrong.

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Isamu
I think we agree.

In Pennsylvania ("Penn's Woods") the under-developed landscape still towers so
gigantically above the developed landscape that I wonder what people think
they are seeing during travel. Of course, things pop up to serve the travelers
along the highway, so the from-the-highway view is not truly typical, but
still. The developed landscape seems all that is considered.

But I see a Pennsylvania that is vast and filled with forest.

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eschneider
Huh...I stop at that exact spot. A lot. Mostly because it's a good spot to
fuel up before (as I do) one disappears for 50 miles onto PA back roads (and
50 miles back...) with no more gas stations. I never realized it was 'a
thing', but it _is_ a decent place to stop.

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technofiend
If the internet loves this they need to go to Houston. This is every
intersection.

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tbomb
It's same with a lot of the rural south too. Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas.
I grew up driving past these types of towns all the time.

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4ntonius8lock
To me this seems like taking a photo of a sausage factory and saying: This is
what Italian food is like.

Err... yes. It's the worst part of the food creation process. Ugly and brutal.

This is a big part of America. The highway systems and the towns and
businesses that support it.

Like sausage making is to Italian food. But I feel that seeing this and saying
'this is it', is unfairly failing to see the larger whole. This is the method
that allows American's to travel anywhere within their country in a super
efficient way that other countries can only dream of. Where I'm originally
from, if you can plot a 100 mile line from where I was to some destination I
wanted to go, it was a 200 mile road trip that would take 7-8 hours. Here in
America, most destinations within a 100 mile radius take a 120~ mile drive
which will take under 2 hours. I have explored a ton of places in this country
because of the ease of moving around. The sausage factory sucks, but I do love
sausage.

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DavidAdams
I randomly ran into an old high school friend at a gas station in Breezewood.
We were living 2000 miles apart at the time and were traveling in separate
directions and just happened to meet. A few years later, in his late 30s, he
contracted skin cancer and died, and that chance meeting in Breezewood was the
last time I saw him.

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jinushaun
The internet is so big... I have never seen this meme before.

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crispyambulance
I've been through Breezewood hundreds of times. The tagline on old postcards
used to be: "Breezewood, The Town of Motels". Though, there seems to be fewer
now than I remember.

It's effectively a supersized rest-stop consisting of a drag of fast-food
chains, motels and gas stations. The article is right, and it's pretty
unmistakable if you've been there before. Yeah, depending on your point of
view it's a hyperreal mash-up of everything that's wrong in the American urban
landscape.

There really is nothing to do there other than pee or get gas.

If you _are_ up that way and want to stop somewhere interesting that's
nearby...

Bedford PA
([http://www.downtownbedford.com/](http://www.downtownbedford.com/)) -- has a
charming historic "mainstreet" with interesting shops, restaurants and
festivals.

Bedford Springs Resort (not far from Bedford), is posh old hotel with superb
spa with natural spring water and access to some really good hiking. Sort of
like that hotel in "The Shining", except without horror.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omni_Bedford_Springs_Resort](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omni_Bedford_Springs_Resort))

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rmason
If you want the almost exact opposite of Breezewood visit Michigan's Upper
Peninsula. I tell people it's like time travelling back to the fifties. I can
remember when there wasn't a single fast food restaurant up there.

Even today it's been voted the most McUnderEndowed area in the United States.

[http://www.datapointed.net/2009/10/distance-to-nearest-
mcdon...](http://www.datapointed.net/2009/10/distance-to-nearest-mcdonalds-
midwest/)

It does have some pretty cool taverns and in fact a father-son duo wrote a
book just on the U.P.'s bars.

[https://www.amazon.com/Yooper-Finest-Michigans-Peninsula-
Sep...](https://www.amazon.com/Yooper-Finest-Michigans-Peninsula-
September/dp/B015X49GTS)

If you go have a pastie and if you're brave go out at night hunting YooperLite
rocks that glow in the dark.

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afpx
I’ve probably traveled through Breezewood a few hundred times over the
decades. What’s strange to me is that it never seems to change. The photo from
2008 looks pretty much the same as now. And, it looked pretty much the same in
1990. With all that traffic, why isn’t there more there?

~~~
snarf21
Well, a lot of the restaurants are closed too. I think it can only handle so
many truck stops and restaurants. It is also largely in the middle of nowhere
so I don't the traffic is increasing in any material way.

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piffey
Reminds me of Stephen Shore's 1975 photograph of La Brea and Beverly
([https://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/12...](https://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/12/stephen-shore-beverly-boulevard-and-la-brea-avenue-
los-angeles-california-june-21-1975-800x633.jpg)). Lots of photographers have
done commentary on this American landscape. Some of my favorites include
Anthony Hernandez, Robert Adams, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessel. Robert Adams'
"Summer Nights Walking" feels like strolling through any of these small
American towns late at night.

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impostir
I stopped at this exit a dozen times at least. I am genuinely surprised that I
have as many distinct memories as I do about a meme about banal American
suburbia. I, wildly unsuccessful, tried to flirt with a college crush in that
gateway. I got a shitty sub from that quiznos. I was grumpy when I got woken
up from a car nap here.

I hate suburbia more than most, but I have alot of memories from this meme of
plastic America.

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weeksie
Interstate highway America is exactly like that. If you have the time, drive
the state roads. Might be a bit slower but the scenery actually changes.

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imroot
The Sheets in Breezewood is one of the few Sheets in the north that have
Cheerwine in the soda fountain.

That's why I always stop at Breezewood.

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stirfrykitty
The picture in the article shows they still have the very old school Taco Bell
sign from way back. I guess if it still works...

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ricardobeat
Is this landscape really as unique as the article wants to portray?

I’ve been to the US for short trips, Norwalk - CT, Miami, NYC, nothing special
about these places but from what I recall you could easily take a similar
picture: Chipotle, Macdonalds, Walmart, Subway, Gas stations all lined up in a
short stretch of road.

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rnadd89
I grew up a few hours from Breezewood and we frequently stopped there for food
and restrooms on school field trips. Probably looks the same now as it did
then

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anthonybsd
It seems to me this entire piece is solely based around the idea that because
something a picture of sold for a lot of money can't be ordinary and mundane.
I'm sorry, but it is. It's a cookie cutter of which there are thousands. The
whole piece left me with somewhat of a condescending "holier than thou" vibe
which simply looks like a lot of demagogy. How dare we, ignorant peons make
something into a meme that was supposed to be a deep exploratory art narrative
on the subject of contemporary culture? Eh, thanks but no thanks.

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Bluecobra
Man, after reading this article I have a sudden urge for some curly fries from
an Arby's off the interstate.

