ABSTRACT
To entrepreneurs, real-estate developers, city boosters, nature enthusiasts, and even urban and regional planners, cars and highways were opening up the countryside as a new location for all kinds of businesses, industries, residences, and leisure pursuits. While in the previous century the lines put down by railroad and streetcar companies defined commercial and residential development, it was the areas between and beyond these old delineated routes that began to look gilded when seen through the eyes of the twentieth-century
prospector. The whole countryside seemed ripe for development. Indeed, over the course of the twentieth century, the American landscape would bear virtually untrammeled commercial decentralization. It began in the 1920s at the fringes of cities and towns, and grew farther still with the aid of 1930s highway developments, until the decentralization tendency reached a frenzy in the 1950s and 1960s when the interstate highway system extended its broad asphalt fingers across all of America, linking countryside to cities and clogging all with automobile congestion.
