Roadside Attractions

Roadside attractions reached their height in America when people traveled the across the country on the old US highway system and other back roads – that is before the interstate highways. They represent the world of local culture, where each little community has its own distinction, including its own tourist attraction. This is a world that is definitely fading away, but, luckily, is still not dead.

Listen Up

• The Enchanted Highway (26:46, in three parts) profiles Gary Greff's dream to save his dying hometown of Regent, ND (population 200), by turning it into a tourist attraction as the "Metal Art Capital of the World.” His work includes “a giant tin family (where the tin father’s hat is the size of a small car), a flock of pheasants that weighs over 30,000 pounds, and, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world’s largest metal sculpture, ‘Geese in Flight.’”
  
  
• Unraveling the Story Behind a Big Ball of Twine (3:31) tells the story of another roadside attraction, the world’s largest ball of twine.
  
  
• Storyteller and NPR commentator Baily White specializes in finding rural eccentrics, or what might be called "human roadside attractions." Listen to the piece, Bill's Flag about a neighbor who erects a huge U.S. flag and swears it will fly until Osama bin Laden is dead.

Write Now

• A local attraction has to have a one-of-a-kind quality about it: describe such an attraction in your hometown or neighborhood.
• What males someone an artist? Is Gary Greff an artist, or just an eccentric? What do you see as theconnection between artistry and eccentricity?

Read On

• More from Wikipedia on roadside attractions
• Mount Rushmore might be seen as America’s most famous roadside attraction; its guiding spirit was Gutzon Borglum.