American Motels

This fun site has a simple mission: To show off as many postcards as possible of 1950s and '60s American motels. Organized by state, the vintage postcards James Lileks has collected frequently show mundane, cinder-block structures fronted by enormous, exuberant neon signs. Lileks has fun remarking on these and other contrasts and clues offered by the cards he’s collected, sometimes making up little stories about what it must have been like to spend the night in some of these dives.