Abstract
Having been a resident of Southwest Pennsylvania all of my life and growing up in the shadow of the steel mills of the Homestead Works in Munhall, neighboring Kennywood amusement park was always a part of our summers in the region. However, as a child, my family always liked to take day trips to various attractions in and around the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. And chief among those attractions that we did every summer was a visit to Idlewild Park and Story Book Forest.
U.S. Route 6 in Pennsylvania is a scenic drive — “one of America’s most scenic” according to National Geographic — but it is also a veritable outdoor museum of mid-20th-century roadside culture, and that is primarily the focus of this book. Stretching some 400 miles from the midway point of the Mid- Delaware Bridge at the border of Matamoris and Port Jervis, New York, to the Ohio line near Pymatuning State Park, it is a section of the larger transcontinental route that originally ran from Provincetown, Massachusetts, to Long Beach, California. The route’s western terminus is now in Bishop, California.