Motel

As large highway systems began to be developed in the 1920s, long-distance road journeys became more common, and the need for inexpensive, easily accessible overnight accommodation sites close to the main routes led to the growth of the motel concept.

[1] Motels peaked in popularity in the 1960s with rising car travel, only to decline in response to competition from the newer chain hotels that became commonplace at highway interchanges as traffic was bypassed onto newly constructed freeways.

The post-war motels, especially in the early 1950s to late 1960s, sought more visual distinction, often featuring eye-catching colorful neon signs which employed themes from popular culture, ranging from Western imagery of cowboys and Indians to contemporary images of spaceships and atomic era iconography.

[7] In the southwestern United States, a handful of tourist homes were opened by African Americans as early as the Great Depression due to the lack of food or lodging for travelers of color in the Jim Crow conditions of the era.

You couldn't find a place to answer the call of nature even with a pocketful of money...if you were a person of color traveling on Route 66 in the 1940s and '50s.The Negro Motorist Green Book (1936–64) listed lodgings, restaurants, fuel stations, liquor stores, and barber and beauty salons without racial restrictions; the smaller Directory of Negro Hotels and Guest Houses in the United States (1939, U.S. Travel Bureau) specialized in accommodations.

As older mom-and-pop motor hotels began adding newer amenities such as swimming pools or color TV (a luxury in the 1960s), motels were built in wild and impressive designs.

In-room gimmicks such as the coin-operated Magic Fingers vibrating bed were briefly popular; introduced in 1958, these were largely removed in the 1970s due to vandalism of the coin boxes.

The main roads into major towns therefore became a sea of orange or red neon proclaiming VACANCY (and later COLOR TV, air conditioning, or a swimming pool) as competing operators vied for precious visibility on crowded highways.

Every new Holiday Inn would have TV, air conditioning, a restaurant, and a pool; all would meet a long list of standards in order to have a guest in Memphis to have the same experience as someone in Daytona Beach, Florida or Akron, Ohio.

For individual motel owners, a franchise chain provided an automated central reservation system and a nationally recognized brand which assured consumers that rooms and amenities met a consistent minimum standard.

[30] Journey's End Corporation (founded 1978 in Belleville, Ontario) built two-story hotel buildings with no on-site amenities to compete directly in price with existing motels.

Many were left stranded on former two-lane main highways which had been bypassed by motorways or declined as original owners retired and subsequent proprietors neglected the maintenance of buildings and rooms.

[Note 1] In declining urban areas (like Kingston Road in Toronto, or some of the districts along Van Buren Street in Phoenix, largely bypassed as a through route to California by Interstate 10), the remaining low-end motels from the two-lane highway era are often seen as seedy places for the homeless, prostitution, and drugs[34] as vacant rooms in now-bypassed areas are often rented (and in some cases acquired outright) by social-service agencies to house refugees, abuse victims, and families awaiting social housing.

One 1941 property on U.S. Route 190 in Baton Rouge remains open with its Alamo Plaza Restaurant now gone, its pool filled in, its original color scheme painted over, its front desk behind bulletproof glass, and its rooms infested with roaches and other vermin.

[51] The plight of Route 66, whose removal from the United States Highway System in 1985 turned places like Glenrio, Texas and Amboy, California into overnight ghost towns, has captured public attention.

The road popularized through John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Bobby Troup's "(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66" was marketed not as transportation infrastructure but as a tourism destination in its own right.

Many vintage motels, some dating to the cabin court era of the 1930s, have been renovated, restored, and added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places or to local and state listings.

[60] While most of these provided access to the most basic of amenities (like picnic tables, playgrounds, toilet facilities and supplies), fewer than a quarter offered cottages in the pre-Depression era, and the vast majority required travelers bring their own tents.

Because cabins and camps were ill-suited to a Canadian winter, the number and variety of motels grew dramatically after World War II, peaking just before freeways such as Ontario Highway 401 opened in the 1960s.

While the Windsor-Québec corridor was bypassed by motorways relatively early, in more sparsely populated regions (including much of Northern Ontario) thousands of kilometers of mostly two-lane Trans-Canada Highway remain undisturbed as the road makes its lengthy journey westward through tiny, distant and isolated communities.

[Note 3] (The Portuguese-language term "rotel" had brief usage in 1970s Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for a similar concept, ro- for rooms through which clients rotate in a matter of hours instead of overnight.)

A similar association of "motel" to short-stay hotels with reserved parking and luxury rooms which can be rented by couples for a few hours has begun to appear in Italy, where the market segment has shown significant growth since the 1990s and become highly competitive.

In the Dominican Republic, "cabins" (named for their cabin-like shape) have all these amenities (such as a whirlpool bath, oversize bed and HDTV) but generally do not have windows, and have private parking for each room individually.

Many auto camps were used as havens and hide-outs for criminals of the 1920s; Bonnie and Clyde had a shootout in the infamous Red Crown Tourist Court near Kansas City on July 20, 1933.

While conventional apartments are more cost-effective with better amenities, tenants unable to pay first and last month's rent or undesirable due to unemployment, criminal records or credit problems do seek low-end residential motels because of a lack of viable short-term options.

According to the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, In the 1930s and 1940s, individually owned and operated motels offered travelers an eclectic, economical array of relatively safe lodging options.

In the 1950s, corporations such as Holiday Inn and Howard Johnson's sought to capitalize on the growing national travel market by offering consumers brand-name, standardized lodging.

[70]The annual number of calls for service to police departments per room ("CFS/room") as a metric has been used to identify motels with poor surveillance of visitors, inadequate staff or management unwilling to pro-actively exclude known or likely problem tenants.

Regardless of size, motels with unimpeded pedestrian and vehicle access to rooms can be difficult to manage, and may have a relatively high number of service calls if they serve a risky clientele.

[70]As severe unlawful conduct issues impact the neighborhood as a whole,[71] some municipalities have adopted a nuisance abatement strategy of using public health and fire safety violations or taxation laws as pretexts to shut down bad motels.