Spot Cleaners, Madison Street, Seattle, Washington by John Margolies

Margolies’s photograph perfectly positions the sign-plastered building center-frame, as if he was photographing a work of fine art, not making one. Like a lot of his documentary photography of surfaces featuring exterior text, Spot Cleaners, Madison Street, Seattle, Washington evokes the work of Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and even at times Jenny Holzer, blurring the line between what is and is not fine art, commercial art, pop art, advertising, propaganda, public work, or something that is part of the art market at all.

Anyone who has lived in Seattle knows that the city’s history is rich with hand-painted signs…but that only a few token examples still exist. Knowing intuitively that novelty architecture, roadside attraction structures and hand painted signage were all forms of art that might not forever be part of the American landscape, canonized photographer and documentarian John Margolies captured scenes that would indeed end up fading into history. An architectural critic, he saw stark, uniform modernism encroaching on all manner of wacky, personality-rich buildings as early as the 1970s. Spot Cleaners, Madison Street, Seattle, Washington was taken in 1980, and is a visually raucous example of exactly what Margolies loved: something you can’t help but look at because it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Seattleites past and present ALSO know that, although this photo was snapped on a rare sunny (likely summertime) day, most are gray. On those cloudy, drizzly, dimly lit regular days, something very special happens in regards to color. Just as painters often use grey palettes because they visually offset and highlight the vibrancy of the colors being mixed, Pacific Northwestern skies and waters foil and highlight the greens of trees, the yellows of raincoats, and the reds in each berry, galosh, and umbrella. Anything that is not grey takes on an almost animated vibrancy. This is part of why so much colorful signage has been part of the day to day lives of folks living in that part of the country–imagine how shriekingly loud this Spot Cleaners location would appear were everything around it grey, wet, and relatively leafless! There’s no way you would drive past it without thinking to yourself “I actually DO need to get my coat spot cleaned, come to think of it”.

When buildings like this are razed, does it not make us all feel like something more than a structure is being lost? Does it not give us a similar feeling to seeing a work of art ripped up and thrown away? Margolies not only created a massive body of over 11,000 photographs during his lifetime, he made sure that the essence of these American treasures were preserved; that the art itself, at least, persevered.

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Margolies was drawn to mid-century roadside architecture from a young age. On family car trips, these commercial structures designed to seduce weary travelers called to him even as his parents repeatedly refused to stop. Margolies took this boyhood unrequited love and turned it into a 30+ year photography career that took him all across America.

In his travels, Margolies took more than 11,000 photographs of vernacular buildings across America’s criss-crossing network of highways, main streets, and back roads. Though many of his images involved the architecture that defined car travel—motels, diners, gas stations, and the like—he also photographed the purely American quirk that lined the roads: buildings shaped like dinosaurs, a giant pair of dice on the mini-golf course, a gator-mouth entrance to a Florida theme park.

This eccentric style came about as suburban living boomed post-World War II, necessitating the creation of more paved roads, and more ways to bring travelers into roadside businesses. New building materials and techniques had emerged, allowing for playfully eccentric free-form structures to pop up. Signs, artifacts, and buildings ranged from whimsical to psychedelic, their main purpose an elaborate enticement. As the style spread, critics derided it as “tacky”, “florid”, and “ugly”. Margolies strongly disagreed: in his mind, these ephemeral pieces better expressed the story of 20th century America than canonical works that didn’t reflect the everyday experience of the people who used them.

It was this mindset that inspired Margolies to drive over 100,000 miles capturing a unique slice of American architecture and history, even as it faded. Much of what he photographed is now gone. A few times, he found out that he’d photographed a building mere days before it was demolished.

His treasure trove of images has been turned into quite a few books, most notably Roadside America, featuring a curated set of around 400 photographs. It was published in 2010, six years before Margolies passed away of pneumonia at 76.

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Spot Cleaners, Madison Street, Seattle, Washington

John Margolies

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