Breezewood, PA
The Most Photographed Rest Stop In America
For a special Memorial Day Edition of Memeforum, we have a guest column by Isabel Berg. She made a pilgrimage of sorts to the site of one of the most shared places on the internet. Safe Travels and Happy Holidays Everyone.
-Kathryn Winn, Editor in Chief
This photo is shared on the Internet as an example of an everywhere kind of place, any given rest stop. I first saw it sometime in high school on Tumblr, but my brother thinks he saw it on Twitter. It’s shared often on urbanist meme pages as an example of the suburban sprawl destroying America, peak car. But it’s not “Anywhere” — it’s Breezewood, Pennsylvania, and this May I drove through it with my family on a trip to Ohio.
Breezewood has been a place people go through for hundreds of years. Supposedly it used to be a point of transit for Native Americans, then for colonists and British troops; covered wagons passed through on their way out of Philadelphia. In the early days of the automobile the Breezewood Hotel hosted JP Morgan, who attempted to build a railway through the area. It failed, and 26 people died in the process; Breezewood would only belong to cars. The first transcontinental paved roadway specifically for cars — the Lincoln Highway — was built in 1913, from New York City all the way to San Francisco, and passed through Breezewood on the way. The Pennsylvania Turnpike opened in 1940 as well, heralding the birth of modern Breezewood — a sign called it the “Travelers Oasis.”
Small roadside towns like this don’t really exist anymore, which is why, despite it’s classic look, Breezewood is actually fairly uncommon. The Interstates have bypassed most of these places, but in this part of Pennsylvania, I-70 connects with the Pennsylvania Turnpike through Breezewood. To qualify for federal funding, states couldn’t directly connect the interstate to toll roads — they needed to offer the option to choose a free route, which theoretically the Breezewood bypass does. Laws have relaxed since, but the Breezewood community is now a job creator in the region, and local lawmakers have no reason to make a direct bypass. So bureaucracy and legal loopholes combined to make a time suck and environmental sprawl.
On my way to Ohio, with my younger brother, I didn’t recognize Breezewood until we were in the middle of it and he tapped me on the shoulder. On the trip back, now with just my parents after dropping him off at college, I knew Breezewood was coming. We stopped for dinner there, getting Arby’s, a fast food chain I always forget exists and don’t really see fit to remember, but the service was good and they gave me more sauces than I expected. I got a milkshake, which was pretty good, and chicken tenders, which weren’t great. They had a large gift shop with souvenirs from Pittsburgh, DC, Philadelphia, and “the beach” — all the places someone might be going. They do not sell any merchandise specifically for Breezewood, since I guess it’s not considered a destination.
We then stopped at the “Crawford Museum,” which my research tells me used to have over 300 taxidermied animals hunted around the world by local residents, but is now a massive gift shop selling mainly Steelers memorabilia, as well as souvenirs from an even broader net — Ohio, Maryland, Virginia. They had a sign passive aggressively informing us that HIPAA bans them from asking about someone’s confidential medical reasons for not wearing a mask. My dad described it as strangely personal and intricate, and it was — someone’s bizarre passion project, for every conceivable form of Steelers merchandise, all crammed together. A modern day taxidermy, in some form. There is a weird specificity in Breezewood — despite the false sense of universality, it’s actually something that no longer exists almost anywhere else.
The photo itself is not just a stock image, either. It was taken by photographer Edward Burtynsky, and was part of an artistic series called “Oil”, documenting the life cycle of petroleum — here, in the unique geographic setting of Breezewood, is petrol’s last hurrah. Burtynsky’s image is hyperreal, compressed, everything crammed together in one depth. It’s a world of cars and capitalism with no people. It has no identifying characteristics. It’s a Disneyland of the open road, a Las Vegas of Sunoco and McDonald’s. It’s the platonic ideal of a kind of place, so average that it’s actually unique.
Talk about high-falutin! I loved this deep dive. Engaging with these distanced, pixel-y images in the real world is a revelation. There is life out there! Breezewood sounds beautiful, vital, and American. Thank you, Isabel!