Route 66
The geographic spine of One Small Crawl. The snail walks the full length of the historic US highway Route 66 from Chicago (eastern terminus) to Santa Monica, California (western terminus) - across decades, one film/video era per scene. It is both the literal road and the narrative/metaphoric “road through American media history.”
Narrative geography (per scene)
- sc01: Chicago - eastern terminus, Michigan Avenue at the Art Institute of Chicago beneath the lions (1926-window, silent)
- sc02: Midwest Dust Bowl era - Ariston Cafe, Litchfield IL (coords 39.1764,-89.6646 verified); MO-OK-TX newsreel
- sc03: U-Drop Inn, Shamrock TX - Kodachrome pivot, July 20 1969
- sc04: AZ-CA desert - consumer VHS mid-1980s; plus a lunar-orbit capsule sub-sequence (space tangent, see artemis-ii)
- sc05: Santa Monica - modern digital arrival, golden hour, ocean
PeriodO periods
- p-osc-narr-sc1 (Chicago origin, 1926-1927, deny 1927-1929)
- p-osc-narr-sc2 (Peak Route 66 Midwest, ~1935-1948, Ariston Cafe)
Research anchoring
- Real, named, still-operating places depicted as documented historical fact, with per-shot OMC sidecars recording location, source photo/archive, and date depicted.
- oscx:heroLocations: named real locations with NRHP IDs, bypass dates, archival provenance (LOC Highsmith call numbers, Villanova PDTP archive, Burton Frasher/Pomona).
- NRHP properties DB: Soulsby, Ariston, U-Drop, Blue Swallow.
- Route 66 sign evolution asset: five sign generations, fabrication cheat sheet, weathering logic, legal rulings.
Notes
- The route appears in several RAI archive records in the export (Kilimangiaro “Route 66 La strada madre”, “C’e una America che vuole salvare la Route 66”, TG2 “Viaggio lungo la Route 66”, “Dreams Roads - Street of America”).
- See snail, one-small-crawl, era-locked-look, show-ont-periodo-crosswalk, archive-footage-reuse.