During childhood road trips, he would beg his parents to stop at roadside attractions, but they refused, believing it to be "the ugliest stuff in the world.
In the early part of his career, Margolies promoted Warhol's work, which included an essay in Art in America to support Underground Sundae (1968).
By that time, Margolies had left New York for Santa Monica, where he, Billy Adler, and Ilene Segalove set up the collective Telethon to document what they called "the television environment";[3]: 66–68 Margolies took a parting shot at New York in 1971, describing it as "that black hole of Calcutta" in a review of Reyner Banham's Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies for Architectural Forum.
[1] Margolies exhibited his photographs at the Hudson River Museum in 1981, a show described by critic Paul Goldberger as "pure joy" and "an articulate plea against the homogenization of the American landscape.
"[8] That year, Margolies also published his first book of photographs, entitled The End of the Road, referring to the vanishing roadside architecture of the United States.