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Salena Zito joined the Washington Examiner in 2016 as a Pittsburgh-based columnist and reporter and is also a columnist at the New York Post. She is the author of The Great Revolt. She previously wrote for the Atlantic and spent the last 11 years at the Pittsburgh Tribune Review as both a reporter and a columnist covering national politics. Before that, she worked for the Pittsburgh Steelers and held staff positions for both Democratic and Republican elected officials in Pennsylvania. She has interviewed every president and vice president in the 21st century. In the 2016 election cycle, she interviewed 22 presidential candidates, both Democrats and Republicans.
This motor court is still in session.
There is a little burst of wonder that road travelers experience when they climb Tulls Hill, heading west out of Bedford, where the Lincoln Highway Motor Court welcomes them at the crest on their left. It’s a burst of wonder up for sale.
The motor court is a concept that is both familiar and foreign to the modern eye: part motel, part cabin, delightfully welcoming as 12 detached cabins all form a semicircle around the central office, nestled cozily among scores of pine trees waiting for their next occupants.
Long before the orange-roofed Howard Johnsons dotted America’s highways or Holiday Inns opened at interchanges of our newly constructed interstates, the middle-class family had nowhere to stay on vacation other than tourist camps.
Owners Debbie and Bob Altizer explained that tourist camps didn’t have much to offer this new generation of travelers other than a parking space and outhouses until some enterprising farmers turned portions of their fields into tiny coves of cabins and a main house.
“And thus, the motor court was born,” they said in unison.
“We estimate that our motor court was built in 1940, based on the number of people who have come back to see the place they stayed on their honeymoon just before being shipped off during the beginning of World War II,” explained Debbie.
Each cabin is lovingly preserved from the era, beginning on the outside of each cabin, where two red-and-white metal chairs are waiting for the occupants to step outside and sit a spell while lazily enjoying watching the cars zoom past on U.S. 30, America’s first coast-to-coast two-lane highway.
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