Route 66 at 100: A Century of Diners, Deserts and Neon, Image by Image

Route 66 turned 100 on 11 November 2026, and The Guardian marked the date with a 22-image photographic survey of the highway once billed as the "main street of America." The gallery, published on the anniversary itself, runs from a 1928 Arizona garage-café to vintage neon photographed as recently as November 2025.

The earliest images fix the road in its founding era. A 1964 map in the series illustrates Route 66's full span. A 1928 photograph shows the Square Deal Garage and Cafe in Winslow, Arizona. Another frame captures Highway 66 running through Waynesville, Missouri, in 1931.

How did the road look in its mid-century heyday?

The 1930s and 1940s supply some of the essay's strongest scenes. A woman poses by a cactus opposite an Arizona service station, circa 1939. A stretch of New Mexico highway appears as it stood around 1940. Main Street on 66 in Baxter Springs, Kansas, is dated 1946, and the Royce Cafe diner in Edmond, Oklahoma, to 1949.

The postwar decades bring traffic, commerce and politics onto the asphalt. A 1951 image shows the road west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. August 1968 finds cars and pedestrians passing police headquarters along Route 66 in Chicago during the Democratic national convention, when protests and riots over the Vietnam war broke out. Ernst Haas photographed Albuquerque's rain-slicked streets in 1969. McDonald's signage looms over the highway in Azusa, California, circa 1979.

Who appears along the route's later decades?

The gallery widens from highway scenery to the people who used it and sold it. Bill Clinton addresses a crowd at the intersection of 5th Street and Central, Old Route 66, in Albuquerque while campaigning on 13 October 1996. Two frames come from the Guardian's own "Grapes of Wrath revisited" road trip from Oklahoma to California in August 2009: the Route 66 Casino beside Interstate I-40 near Albuquerque, and the post office in Oatman, Arizona.

Angel Delgadillo crosses Route 66 on his bicycle at dusk in Seligman, Arizona, in May 2011. Delgadillo has long been associated with the town's preservation efforts, and the image anchors the essay's later turn toward memory-keeping.

What survives of the road today?

The most recent photographs concentrate on the relic economy that now defines the highway:

• Motorists cross the Colorado Street Bridge, a Route 66 landmark in Pasadena, California, in November 2025.
• "Lumi the Pie Lady," a 19ft (5.8-metre) Uniroyal Gal statue, stands on the route in Atlanta, Illinois, as of March 2025.
• Main Street in the historic mining town of Oatman, north-west Arizona, appears in May 2026.
• The roadside attraction at Buck Atom's Cosmic Curios in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was photographed in January 2025.
• Vintage neon lights glow at sunset at the Blue Swallow motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico, in November 2025.
• Terry and Christie Partee visit Route 66 Neon Park inside George M Reed Roadside Park in St Robert, Missouri, in November 2025.

What does this change for the reader? It confirms that Route 66, a century after its establishment on 11 November 1926, has shifted from transport corridor to photographed heritage site, and that photographers keep returning to its diners, deserts and donkey-inhabited towns to document that shift.