A Quest to Capture America’s Greatest Roadside Attractions

I want to tell you about a place that is both good and bad at the exact same time. It is truly crummy and totally lovable. It is 100 percent a tourist trap, and honestly, it’s a slightly cancelable tourist trap. It is also kind of a delight. It’s a place called South of the Border.

South of the Border is a roadside attraction and well-known landmark on Interstate I-95 running up and down the East Coast. You’ll know you’re getting near it like 300 miles before you are anywhere close because it has these ridiculous signs running for hundreds of miles letting you know you’re approaching it. And at some point, as you pass the North to South Carolina border, a 200-foot-tall sombrero pokes up over the horizon.

Recently, I met somebody for whom South of the Border is a lot more than a roadside attraction, or just another tourist trap. For him, it is where it all began. His name is Rolando Pujol.

This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

Rolando Pujol: For me, my relationship with South of the Border, or as my parents call it, Pedro, began in July of 1977. I was just four years old. We were taking a road trip from the New York area, where I grew up, to Miami Beach. Because if you’re Cuban, you have to go down to Miami at least once a year to check in and maintain your bona fides as a Cuban-American. So we were on that trip. It was the inaugural road trip for me. I remember even as a four-year-old looking out the window and beginning to see all those billboards for South of the Border, those punning billboards that would—back then, it seemed like they started in Delaware or—I mean, they may have.

Dylan Thuras: Over 100 miles away at least. Oh, easy.

Rolando: Yeah, yeah. Really far away. I mean, I’ve even heard—I don’t know whether this is true even as north as Philly. I don’t know. But certainly, they began right away. So slowly, you would see these billboards, and they all had puns. You know, “Pedro’s Weather Report: Chili Today, Hot Tamale,” “I’ve Never Sausage a Place,” and it’d be a big sausage, a 3D sausage on the side of the billboard—which I finally photographed and almost died in the process doing because I-95 is not designed for still photography.

I mean, I’m lucky I’m even here to talk about it. So that was my first sort of exposure to South of the Border. And as a four-year-old kid bringing a sense of wide-eyed curiosity, it was just a magical place.

Dylan: I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous roadside attractions. I am talking to Rolando Pujol. For his day job, he’s an executive producer at ABC. But Rolando’s real passion is for roadside Americana. You know, chrome diners, Paul Bunyan statues, 1950s, 1960s motels with their incredible neon signs. The landscape of America.

And so for more than a decade, Rolando has been cataloging these places of roadside ephemera, sometimes places that disappear kind of easily, these little pieces of American history. And he puts them in his substack and Instagram under the name “The Retrologist.” And he has got a new amazing book out—I have a blurb on the back so you can tell that I like it—called The Great American Retro Road Trip. And it’s just a chronicle of all of these great, amazing places. In a way, for me, it’s a chronicle of American history and aesthetics, like, just a chronicle of a certain period of American existence.

So I want to start by talking about one of the things that’s thematic through your book, which is mimetic architecture. These are buildings that are shaped like the things that they are selling. So an example of this is the Long Island Big Duck. It is a building shaped like a duck that once sold ducks. No longer. But it is still there. So I think it would be fun if I could just talk about three of my favorite examples of mimetic architecture, because you are one of the few people I can just riff on this with, because you are going to know exactly what the hell I’m talking about. My three favorites—some of my favorite mimetic architecture pieces. One: I was just out in LA and I went to Randy’s Donuts.

Rolando: They are fabulous. What I love about Randy’s is, of course, its iconography, but also that it’s right by the airport, right? Yes. So you can arrive, and one of the first things you do—like, the trifecta, if you really want to get your cholesterol numbers, you know, soaring pretty quickly once you hit—you arrive in Los Angeles, is to go to the nearest In-N-Out, because you’ve got to get your In-N-Out fix, you know? Of course. And then you can go to Pann’s, the gooky coffee shop from 1958, and then you can go to Randy’s for dessert, and you’ve done an awful lot of damage to your cardiovascular system, but your heart, your metaphysical heart—your soul is full. Your soul is full, and it’s never been better.

Dylan: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so that’s one I love. One that I’ve never been to, but I like the ingenuity here, is there’s a place in Kentucky called Bondurant’s Pharmacy that was a giant mortar and pestle when it was made. So, you know, it’s got this kind of—almost kind of hourglass-type shape with a big thing coming out of it that would have been the mortar. But then it’s since been sold—it’s since changed hands multiple times, so now it was a liquor store and then became a cocktail glass, I believe. And I’m pretty sure that currently it is now a huge margarita with a swizzle stick in it. So I kind of love people coming into this business and being like, well, damn, what do we—okay, what is it? Now we have this building shaped like this, what are we going to do with this, right?

Rolando: And I love the fact that they, rather than just tear it down and start fresh, they’re like, no, we’re going to lean into this.

Dylan: Thank God, yes.

Rolando: We’re going to figure this out and add another layer to its history, which makes it that much more interesting. And that’s one that I wanted to get to and didn’t make it. It’s not in the book.

Dylan: I haven’t been to that one either. Okay, I’ll do one more and then we can move on. It’s a little bit dangerous to build a building in the shape of your business because then if you go out of business, you’ve just got this building. And so the Longaberger Basket Building, I think in Newark, Ohio.

Rolando: Ohio, yeah.

Dylan: It’s huge. I mean, it’s like an enormous corporate headquarters for this company that made baskets. And it looks like it’s like a six-story tall giant basket with huge handles on top of it. It’s not like a small flourish. Like, it’s a giant basket. But of course this company did go out of business or changed ownership and then no longer works out of this building. And there’s been talk of turning it into a hotel and doing this other stuff. But as of right now, listening audience, if you are in the market for a six-story tall basket shaped building, boy, do I have something to sell you.

Rolando: Oh my God. The first time I saw that, you know, it was on my list and I knew I needed it for the book. And I was driving along the highway near there and it comes into view for the first time. And it’s just this giant—there’s nothing to prepare you for it. I’m sure if you looked at, you know, DOT records, there’s probably a slight spike in accidents in that approach because you see that, you’re like, oh my God, get my phone.

Dylan: I got to take a picture of this thing.

Rolando: What is that thing? And it is kind of a beautiful sight and a stirring sight. But then for the reasons that you state, the fact that it’s now abandoned, it is sad because I was walking around it a couple of years ago and you see the early signs of lack of care and nature sort of taking its course. So I’m with you. If there’s somebody who can do something with this place, let’s make it work.

Dylan: Let’s figure it out. Someone start a business called “Basket Case.” I don’t know what the business is, but then you just go buy that building and you’re all set to go.

Rolando: I would like to be a member of the board of directors because I am certainly certifiable.

Dylan: Same, same, yeah. Okay, so yeah, I mean, we talked a lot about mimetic architecture. Maybe we can talk about some of the other, because there’s sort of these themes you find. There are these types of stuff that start to dominate or define what you would call the vernacular architecture of Americana. And so maybe we can talk about what are some of those other things? What are the things that kind of fit into your criteria? What are the sets?

Rolando: Sure, yeah. I mean, for me, a big area of interest is fast food. I might call myself, and fast food chains. I mean, there’s two categories. There’s the drive-ins and the mom and pops and sort of related to that, the ice cream shops and that has its own unique taxonomy. But then also we have the chains. And the chains really fascinate me because chains like McDonald’s and Burger Kings and some of the defunct ones like Burger Chef, they say so much. The best way to get a feel for where the country was and is and what its style was in a particular time is to look at what a McDonald’s or a Burger King or a Pizza Hut looked like at a given moment in time, because those chains so reflect that.

I’ve always been a huge fan of McDonald’s and certainly its approach to marketing through architecture. I must say that from the very beginning, from the fifties, with the Stanley Metzen arched buildings, the red and whites, through the late sixties, when they were trying to expand and grow and they were getting resistance to those kind of garish buildings with the bright lights and the big golden arches. And so they created a little kind of suburban-y, kind of more nondescript brick building with a mansard roof. And that became the standard issue at McDonald’s starting around 1969, up until not long ago. Now I document their demise with a fervored passion. I will hop on a plane and go see one if I get a good tip about one before it gets demolished.

So I would say fast food and the look of fast food. And for me, the places that intrigue me are the ones where the building still survives from an earlier iteration of its design journey, shall we say. Because a good number of these chains have in recent decades, certainly the last 10 to 15 years, embraced a more stripped-down approach. I call it like a McBauhaus kind of, you know, where it’s very square and glass and pristine and the dining rooms are now small and austere and the focus is less on the dining experience and more on the drive-thru experience because that’s really where the money is.

So the experience of going to McDonald’s or BK or any of these places is somewhat diminished. But then there are those chains that are bucking those trends. And a good example of that is Pizza Hut, and in particular, the Pizza Hut Classics. Now, this was something that Pizza Hut embraced without really telling anybody. There was not a big press release. They don’t talk much about it. But what they have been doing starting in 2019 is working with franchisees that have a legacy Pizza Hut, saying the old red roof ones from the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

Dylan: You can always identify a Pizza Hut, no matter what it’s become.

Rolando: Whether it be a Chinese restaurant or a chiropractor’s office or a nightclub or whatever it is, it never betrays its roots. But the ones that sort of made it into the second, third decade of the 21st century, and they all had been stripped of a lot of that flavor inside, you know, the red booths…

Dylan: … the stained glass hanging lamps!

Rolando: The faux-Tiffany Pizza Hut lamps and, you know, the 1974 logo outside, that had been taken away, replaced with that 1999 swoosh—Pizza Hut!—you know, which of course, Burger King made a big logo change around that. It was a pre-millennial era where everybody felt their logo had to be this wacky, you know, racing cursive or italics, and it had to have a swooshy kind of dynamic logo. Everything had to be like Nike. I don’t know why. But this all happened around the year 2000. But they went back to their old logo in 2019, the 1974 logo.

Much to my surprise, they began to take these older restaurants and retro-renovate them to look like they did back in the seventies, you know, with the leather booths and the lamps you were talking about and the red cups and the logo outside and vintage photos. And these were designated as a specific sub-genre of Pizza Hut called Pizza Hut classics. And so I noticed enough of these and began to do research. You won’t believe how much time I spent on Google Street View or making, you know, crazy phone calls to a Pizza Hut franchise in Wisconsin: “Hi, I’m a writer and I’m just, question, tell me, how does, do you have the old Pizza Hut lamps inside?” And like, “Oh yeah, we switched to that recently.” “So I guess you’re like Pizza Hut classic?” “I guess.” “I just needed to confirm that. Thanks a lot!”

And then I built this list and I put it on my Substack and it is by far the biggest thing I’’ve ever had on my Substack. I’ve written hundreds of articles on it, but it’s this one article, my list of Pizza Hut classics, somebody created a Google Doc from it. I still get updates on it all the time. “Hey, I’ve got an update for you. This one is now a Pizza Hut classic too, add it to your list!” So, and, and sometimes I have to sort of like correct people and tell them it’s not really a Pizza Hut classic because it hasn’t been retro-renovated. Yes, it’s the old building, but it still looks boring and very 2001 update-y, you know, I mean, it’s not what, what it should be.

Dylan: We are going to take a quick break. When we come back, Rolando and I are going to talk about one of my all-time favorite categories of roadside attractions and whether it’s possible to create new roadside attractions in today’s culture. Do they fit into what he is chasing after?

Dylan: You have in your book a number of things about muffler men, which are maybe one of the more iconic and famous examples of these, but like quickly for people who maybe have seen one, but haven’t registered that this is really like a type, an architectural or like design sculptural type. What is it?

Rolando: What is a muffler man? Muffler men were first introduced in the early 1960s and they were manufactured by this company named International Fiberglass. They were based in Venice, California. And what they are, are these very large fiberglass giants, you know, they have these big lantern jaws and they’re big, tough guys. They were popular outside of auto repair shops and muffler shops. And many of them were holding mufflers, right? They took on the, the nickname of muffler men, but they’re also known as giant men, but whatever you want to call them, they spread like wildfire across the country in the 60s into the, into the mid-70s, by which time the company that manufactured them no longer made them, went out of business. And we were sort of left with this legacy of giants from, from coast to coast.

I think a lot of people love them because they’re fun, they’re quirky, they’re strange and you develop an attachment to them. And one of my early tastes of roadside Americana and developments of an attachment for roadside Americana comes from a muffler man. And that still is in Elmsford, New York at an Amoco station. And now he represents BP, British Petroleum, but then now he’s got the BP colors, not the Amoco colors, but he had been there since my entire life. And the first time I have been nine or 10 or whatever, when I’m driving around with my parents and I see another one holding something else with different colors, I felt almost a sense of violation. Like, “Who are you? You know, where do you come from? You belong in Elmsford!” You know? And then as you know, you got a little older, you began to realize, you know, that these were part of a tribe of giants that were unleashed upon the land at late mid-century. And there are variations of them.

Dylan: You know, there are the muffler women out there. There are women out there.

Rolando: There are some, there’s a really great one in South Jersey. There are the happy halfwits, the ones that look like Mad Magazine characters. There’s a great one, Ken’s Muffler, in Dallas that I visited last summer that made it into the book, another one in South Jersey. And there are more, there are all these interesting variations, and then there are spinoffs like the Texaco men that made, that also spread across the country, and then quirky adaptations of them where they have been turned into something freakish and frightening, but absolutely delightful, like the Chicken Boy, you know.

Dylan: Yes, the Chicken Boy!

Rolando: The Chicken Boy, you know, who lords over Highland Park, California, began outside of a chicken shop in Los Angeles itself and was rescued by an artist, a graphic designer, who was like, we’re not gonna let Chicken Boy die, we’re gonna save him, and he lives. And now there is a renaissance happening in appreciation of roadside giants, led by a fellow by the name of Joel Baker, who runs the American Giants Museum, which is based in Atlanta, Illinois, which is itself a bit of a cradle of roadside attractions. There’s also a giant hot dog man there in downtown Atlanta, who used to live in Cicero, Illinois, was rescued and brought to Atlanta, and now he’s got a lot of company, a lot of lost brethren. At the museum down, just down the street, so that’s interesting.

Dylan: Should we be concerned, like, they’re gathering, the giants are gathering.

Rolando: No, I think this is the kind of thing where we write it off as something cute and innocuous, and five years from now, we see they had a bigger plan.

Dylan: That’s right, that’s right, they’ve been working slowly in the background. What is it that is driving you as an individual person to, like, get in the car and drive hundreds of miles all over the country, you know, to get a photo of a beautiful old neon sign or a roadside attraction that, you know, most people are probably like, oh, that old place, like, yeah, they should tear that down. What is it that’s driving you to do this?

Rolando: It’s a great question. I think one of the reasons why I always resonated with your brand, with what you’ve built with Atlas Obscura, is a celebration of curiosity and wonder in the world. This stuff just fascinates me. I have questions. I need to know. And it’s not just enough to do a little research or make a few phone calls or find some old newspaper articles and satisfy the curiosity. I want to see it for myself.

And if it’s gone or it’s threatened, I want to go find wherever it went. You know, I want to find where the relics are. I want to find what’s left of it. I want to talk to whoever worked there once and can tell me a story that maybe hasn’t, you know, made the rounds yet. It’s just, to me, a sense of abiding curiosity that I have about most everything. I mean, I am very much engaged with the built environment, with the world around me, and I have questions, questions, so many questions. I must have been a very, very annoying 5-year-old. You know?

Dylan: Yeah.

Rolando: I was asking all the questions to my poor parents. God bless them.

Dylan: I do have another question, which is there is a way in which what you’re talking about, like you’re talking about going to see something before it disappears. Because a lot of this stuff does disappear. There is an aspect of this which is documentation of stuff that is maybe fragile or, like, just isn’t always considered to be valuable until it’s long gone. You know? It’s sort of like later people will be like, oh, dang, this really represented a time in American history, and now we’ve torn them all down and they don’t exist anymore. But my question for you is there’s an aspect of this that is nostalgic or documentarian or archival, but do you think it’s possible to make new things, new roadside attractions, new places that maybe share these qualities of, I don’t know, specificity, design, Americana, car culture oriented? Like, is it possible to make new stuff in this category or is it truly it must exist in this kind of time period I am documenting a moment in history?

Rolando: I think these tools and this approach to architecture and marketing and creating experiences for people is universal. I think it will have appeal in a thousand years because people are people at the end of the day. We’re attracted to the same things. And if anything, we live in this digital dystopia now, and we’re even more hungry to have real experiences in third places with not virtual versions of ourselves, but with ourselves. But I’ve got three examples for you to back up this argument. One can be found in Oklahoma along Route 66 in Tulsa. There’s a woman, her name is Mary Beth Babcock, and she has created a wonderland in downtown Tulsa along 66. She put up this shop in 2019 in an old Pemco gas station called Buck Adams Cosmic Curios. And she had this fellow, Mark Klein, who’s an expert in rehabilitating muffler men. Do you know about it?

Dylan: Of course you do. I know Mark Klein. I know Mark Klein. Yes, totally.

Rolando: Absolutely. Absolutely. The guy has masterful hands, right? Yeah. So he brought this cowboy character to life who’s also an astronaut. And there’s a great little backstory that she created for him. And then Buck Adams needed a girlfriend. So along came Stella. And so she’s a female muffler man, giant person that she has at her stop.

Then another good example is down in Gilbert, Arizona, Topo, which is this wonderful burrito place that has a wonderful kind of gopher for a logo that kind of sprouts out of the store. And he’s wearing a wide brim hat. And he’s very much based on those 1930s roadside animal-like structures that were in California. The work in New York of Noble Signs, which is a sign design group, is astonishing. Here are these guys who have a vision for how to make New York streets livelier and more attractive by working on the signage.

And last but not least, I said three, but I’ll add a fourth one. I think the work that Stephanie Stuckey is doing in reviving the Stuckey’s brands of roadside convenience stores is admirable. She sort of has embraced this—it’s her family company. And later, you know, she switched her career and her whole purpose. She kind of bought back the company, took it, and has invested in it and is marketing. And it’s growing. She wrote a great book called UnStuck as well, Stuckey Unstuck. It’s cute. It’s a nice book. And she’s reviving this roadside icon one pack of pecans at a time. But it is—but it’s working. And it’s, again, bringing back joy and mirth and curiosity to the American roadside attributes that we’ve—have been in diminishing supply. But I think it’s coming back.

Dylan: I’m going to make a case. Yes, I’m going to make a case. Like you get these huge, long design sine wave trends, right? And so there’s this period in the 60s and 70s particularly, you know, starting in the—there’s different—whatever. But, like, you get this kind of explosion, sort of a maximalist design period, right? There’s a kind of a lot of crazy stuff happening in this period. And then we go into this kind of long sort of starting maybe in the 2000s—you could define it at different places—but, like, it’s kind of like minimalist approach and everything becomes kind of this copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a sort of nice Scandinavian minimalist design thing. But, like, by the time you get to it, it’s just like a McDonald’s that feels like it’s not made for human beings, you know what I mean?

And then—and I think what’s happening, and I think you’re right, is, like, we are re-entering this kind of more maximalist, playful, weird design period. Serifs are back, baby. Yeah. And we’re just starting to go into this moment where, like, people are realizing that, like, the joy of something that is strange and playful and maybe too much, like it’s just a lot, is actually—there’s a real delight there. So, I’m very hopeful. The return of the neon signs, signage in general. I am very hopeful that we are entering a kind of new boom period in roadside Americana and just sort of American aesthetics. I don’t know what else to call it.

Rolando: That’s a very, very good way to put it. And I do think we are living through a similar moment. I think it’s definitely a reaction to the, again, the Bauhausification of the roadside. Yes. And now it’s, you know, it is kind of going back more toward that 50s, 60s, 70s aesthetics. It was long overdue. Goodness knows we need it. It brings joy. It brings excitement. And it nourishes our souls. So, it’s high time that that begins to happen again.

Dylan: That was Rolando Pujol. His new book, The Great American Retro Road Trip: a Celebration of Roadside America, is out now. As you can tell, this is like a book designed with me in mind as a reader. It is just a fantastic chronicle of this country. It defines a certain kind of American aesthetic. I just don’t know how else to put it. It is a lovely book to spend your time reading and looking at.