Leftover Motels

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #199

Credit for today’s features to this great article on some surviving and (almost) disappeared motels of Richmond Highway, the local name for U.S. 1 as it runs through Virginia south of Washington, D.C.

I’ll start with one I have my own pictures of, which is still in business. My photos are from early 2020 (one of the last times I was out on the road before the pandemic, incidentally):

Here’s one from the article:

The totem pole from the Totem Pole Lodge — which later stood outside the Mount Vernon Antique Center at 8101 Richmond Highway — continues to lie on the now vacant parcel where the building burned down in 2017.

Here is the totem pole standing outside the post-fire antique store, to the left of the street light. I can’t see it in the street view after demolition, and while it would be cool to drive down there and photograph it, I can’t justify that much driving!

Here’s a postcard of that motel, of which no trace remains:

Isn’t it interesting how addresses were never given on these old postcards? People just followed the general directions and looked for the sign. It complicates finding this stuff sometimes—it’s wild that we have these perfect images of sites from the 1930s-1950s, but the actual exact location is something you have to hunt for!

And apparently this office for a trailer park is a surviving cabin from a time when the site was a motor lodge. The old-school kind with the detached tourist cabins:

Here’s a fun one, which I happen to have featured early in this newsletter!

In some cases, the buildings are long gone, but the names of former motels live on. According to Barbuschak, Fairfax County’s first-ever modern motel was the Penn-Daw Motor Hotel, built back in 1927 at 6300 Richmond Highway — now a Wells Fargo Bank.

You would really think no trace of the motel remains here from looking at the site today. But the Wells Fargo building, believe it or not, actually is the old restaurant/dining area from the Penn Daw Motor Hotel!

I read that here, I think, and didn’t believe it, but if you look at the satellite view, you can see the bank has the same distinct shape as the original motel structure!

A postcard of the site, with the relevant building on the right (the others are definitely gone):

And the postcard image compared with the current satellite view:

There are heavy alterations, but you can see how the underlying structure is the same.

There’s one more example in the original article, which I won’t reproduce here. Check it out.

It’s the coolest thing how a building like this can just keep going, proving that disposability, or not, is in the eye of the developer and the property owner.

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Related Reading:

A Little Bit Of Motel

Room And Board

Dine Like It’s 1950 in Warrenton, Virginia

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