The garage—whether used for automobile storage, parking, repair, or sales—has been an American commonplace for so long that it is surprising how little attention it has drawn from scholars tracing the country’s architectural and cultural heritage. In this compellingly written and profusely illustrated book, John Jakle and Keith Sculle—two of the nation’s foremost experts on “Roadside America”—bring their analytical acumen and meticulous research skills to bear on the remarkably rich history of this overlooked feature of the U.S. landscape.
            Beginning with the days when only the wealthy could afford cars (and their chauffeurs doubled as mechanics), the authors show how blacksmiths and carriage repairmen quickly adapted to the increasing ubiquity of the automobile. Noting differences from region to region as well as between large cities and smaller population centers, they look at the growth of car dealerships, with their separation of service and sales floors, and the parallel rise of small, independent repair shops—businesses that have steadily disappeared from the national scene, though some of the buildings that once housed them have survived, refitted for other purposes. The domestic garage—first conceived as a detached structure, then integrated with the house itself—gets its own chapter. And throughout, the authors explore the various ways in which concerns with practicality, commerce, and aesthetics have dictated how garages were laid out and constructed and what services they offered.
            A worthy complement to the authors’ earlier collaborative studies of the gas station and the parking lot, The Garage will engage an eclectic audience of architectural and material-culture specialists, historic preservationists, antique car enthusiasts, local historians, and others fascinated by the impact of the automobile on early America and its legacy in the built environment of modern communities.

The use of cars and trucks over the past century has remade American geography—pushing big cities ever outward toward suburbanization, spurring the growth of some small towns while hastening the decline of others, and spawning a new kind of commercial landscape marked by gas stations, drive-in restaurants, motels, tourist attractions, and countless other retail entities that express our national love affair with the open road. By its very nature, this landscape is ever changing, indeed ephemeral. What is new quickly becomes old and is soon forgotten.
            In this absorbing book, John Jakle and Keith Sculle ponder how “Roadside America” might be remembered, especially since so little physical evidence of its earliest years survives. In straightforward and lively prose, supplemented by copious illustrations—historic and modern photographs, advertising postcards, cartoons, roadmaps—they survey the ways in which automobility has transformed life in the United States. Asking how we might best commemorate and preserve this part of our past—which has been so vital economically and politically, so significant to the cultural aspirations of ordinary Americans, yet so often ignored by scholars who dismiss it as kitsch—they propose the development of an actual outdoor museum that would treat seriously the themes of our roadside history.
            Certainly, museums have been created for frontier pioneering, the rise of commercial agriculture, and the coming of water- and steam-powered industrialization and transportation, especially the railroad. Is now not the time, the authors ask, for a museum forcefully exploring the automobile’s emergence and the changes it has brought to place and landscape? Such a museum need not deny the nostalgic appeal of roadsides past, but if done properly, it could also tell us much about what the authors describe as “the most important kind of place yet devised in the American experience.”