Seligman

Seligman calls itself the Birthplace of Historic Route 66, and for once the town-sign boast is the literal truth. When Interstate 40 opened around the town in 1978, Seligman went from a highway stop to a bypass overnight — the through traffic vanished, and the motels and diners that lived on it began to die. The man who would not accept that was Angel Delgadillo, the town barber, who had cut hair on the main street since 1950. In 1987 he gathered the surviving business owners, founded the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona, and lobbied the state to sign the old road from Seligman to Kingman as Historic Route 66 — the first such designation anywhere. The tourists came back for exactly the thing the interstate had made obsolete: the slow road.

Everything in Seligman leans into that. Angel's barbershop still stands, now half museum. His brother Juan built the Snow Cap Drive-In in 1953 out of scrap lumber, and its deadpan gags are still run by the family. The Roadkill Café trades on its own name; the motels wear neon; the street is lined with old cars that were never anywhere else. It is kitsch, and it is also the real thing, because the people performing the nostalgia are the same families who lived the history.

The wider debt is a Hollywood one. When Pixar's animators were building the town of Radiator Springs for Cars, they drove Route 66 and talked with Delgadillo, and the film's story — a town left to wither when the interstate rerouted around it, saved by travelers willing to slow down — is Seligman's own, lightly fictionalized. The nearby town of Peach Springs lent Radiator Springs its name.

Seligman sits at 5,240 feet on the high Colorado Plateau, the eastern gateway to the longest unbroken stretch of the Mother Road left in America — the run west through Grand Canyon Caverns and Peach Springs to Kingman. It is a small place, an hour or two's stop. But it is the town that decided Route 66 was worth saving, and it is the reason the rest of this drive still exists to be driven.