Five places where cowboys, seaside palaces, financial history, Indigenous traditions and the old American West stubbornly refuse to disappear
America has always had a peculiar talent for putting its history in places where you are least expecting to find it.
You go to Florida for palm trees and somehow encounter cowboys. You walk onto a New Jersey boardwalk expecting saltwater taffy and discover an architectural monument designed by the people responsible for Grand Central Terminal. You book a grand hotel in New Hampshire because the leaves are pretty and learn that the modern international financial system was essentially invented downstairs.
This is one of the pleasures of traveling around America. The country is forever pretending to be simpler than it is.
Florida is beaches. New Jersey is suburbs. Montana is mountains. Oregon is wilderness. New Hampshire is foliage.
Then you actually go there.
This week offered five particularly good reminders that the most interesting Americana is rarely preserved behind velvet ropes. It is still being ridden, danced, restored, paddled through, argued over, cast in bronze and occasionally financed with tens of millions of dollars in public support.
The result is a journey from Florida cattle country to the Jersey Shore, from the White Mountains to a powwow in northeastern Montana, and finally into the Wallowa country of Oregon.
It is difficult to imagine five places having less in common.
Which is precisely what makes them so American.
The Florida Town That Forgot Florida Was Supposed to Be Tropical
Arcadia, Florida, has committed the considerable social offense of being a cowboy town in a state where visitors generally expect their wildlife to consist of dolphins, alligators and exhausted parents carrying children through theme parks.
This is unfortunate for Arcadia but excellent for the traveler.
On August 26, the Florida Department of State named Arcadia Main Street its Florida Main Street Program of the Month, providing an excuse to look again at one of the most pleasantly improbable towns in the Southeast.
Arcadia sits in DeSoto County, well away from the Florida of beach clubs and condominium towers. Its story begins not with resorts but with cattlemen, farmers and the Peace River.
In the 1850s, Waldron’s Landing developed along the river as a point of commerce for the surrounding agricultural country. Then the Florida Southern Railway arrived in 1886 and Arcadia became an important shipping center for cattle, citrus and phosphate.
For a while, everything proceeded in the conventional American manner. A railroad arrived. Commerce flourished. Buildings went up.
Then downtown burned down.
In November 1905, a fire destroyed four blocks of Arcadia’s commercial center, whereupon the city adopted the sort of policy that municipal governments generally create only after discovering exactly how badly things can go wrong. New downtown buildings would henceforth be made of brick or cement.
This turned out to be an excellent decision.
Much of the brick commercial center that gives Arcadia its character today emerged from that rebuilding. The result is a downtown that feels substantial in a way that many small American towns no longer do. There are old commercial blocks, antique stores, faded facades and the wonderful sense that the buildings were erected at a time when nobody expected them to become artisanal coffee shops seventy years later.
But architecture is only part of the attraction.
Arcadia is cattle country.
And not cattle country in the modern promotional sense, in which somebody has installed three decorative wagon wheels outside a steakhouse and begun charging eighteen dollars for something called Cowboy Fries.
Florida has an authentic cattle tradition stretching back centuries. Long before the American cowboy became inseparable from Texas, Wyoming and John Wayne, cattle were being driven across Florida.
Arcadia inherited that culture.
The town has staged rodeos since 1929, and the All-Florida Championship Rodeo remains one of its defining institutions. Rodeo here is not an imported weekend theme. It belongs to the place.
That matters because one of the great misconceptions about American culture is that the cowboy belongs exclusively to the West.
He does not.
The American cattle story is far messier, older and geographically more interesting than Hollywood allowed. Spanish cattle arrived in Florida centuries ago. Florida cattlemen developed their own traditions. The Florida cow hunter, sometimes called a cracker cowboy because of the cracking sound of the whip, belongs to a strand of cattle culture that developed independently of the later mythology of the Great Plains.
This makes walking around Arcadia rather enjoyable.
There are cowboy hats and brick storefronts. There are antique shops filled with the accumulated archaeological evidence of American domestic life. There is the Peace River nearby, sliding lazily through cypress country as if determined to remind everyone that Florida possessed natural attractions before anyone thought of building a roller coaster.
The river is especially good for paddling, camping and fossil hunting, which is one of those hobbies you seldom realize you desperately need until somebody tells you that you can spend an afternoon digging prehistoric shark teeth out of a Florida river.
The downtown, meanwhile, has avoided the fate of becoming merely picturesque. Since joining the Florida Main Street program in 1985, Arcadia has recorded millions of dollars in public and private investment and dozens of net new businesses.
There are murals and wayfinding improvements now. New businesses have appeared. But the antique stores and old buildings remain.
This is the difficult balance in historic towns. Preserve too little and you get anonymous redevelopment. Preserve too much and you end up with a downtown that feels like an elaborate diorama staffed by people selling candles.
Arcadia still feels inhabited.
The best time to go is between October and March, when Florida ceases trying to steam cook its visitors. The Fall Rodeo runs October 16 through 18 this year, while Bulls and Bands arrives September 19.
Go for the rodeo. Walk the old commercial district. Buy something unnecessary in an antique shop. Paddle the Peace River.
Most importantly, enjoy the small satisfaction of discovering that Florida has been keeping cowboys hidden from you all along.
The Palace at the End of the Boardwalk
If Arcadia is an argument against our assumptions about Florida, Asbury Park is an argument against knocking things down simply because repairing them has become inconvenient.
At the eastern edge of New Jersey, where the continent runs out and the Atlantic begins, sits one of America’s great surviving seaside entertainment complexes.
The Asbury Park Convention Hall complex was built between 1928 and 1930 and designed by Warren and Wetmore, the architecture firm behind Grand Central Terminal.
This is an extraordinary fact.
Imagine hiring the architects of one of the greatest railway stations on Earth and saying, essentially, “Very nice. Now could you do something for us at the beach?”
They did.
The resulting complex brought together Convention Hall, the Paramount Theatre, the Grand Arcade, shops and amusement spaces in a giant oceanfront composition decorated with nautical flourishes.
It belonged to an era when Americans did not merely go to the seaside. They constructed monuments to the experience.
Boardwalk towns had theaters, dance halls, hotels, amusement rides, arcades and architectural extravagances that suggested spending Saturday beside the Atlantic was an activity deserving civic grandeur.
Then came television, air conditioning, cheap flights, suburbanization, changing vacation habits and the thousand other small forces by which Americans gradually stopped doing one thing and began doing another.
Many great seaside entertainment buildings vanished.
Asbury Park’s survived.
Barely.
The Convention Hall and Paramount spaces have been closed for several years because of structural concerns. Now New Jersey has approved up to $75 million in tax credits toward a restoration project valued at roughly $130 million.
That is a large sum of money to spend on an old building.
It is also precisely the sort of old building on which money is worth spending.
Because Asbury Park Convention Hall is not simply architecture.
It is accumulated memory.
Big bands played here. Jazz passed through. Rhythm and blues passed through. Rock followed. Bruce Springsteen rehearsed and performed here, adding another layer to the mythology of a city already inseparable from New Jersey music.
You can practically measure American popular culture in the acoustics.
But the more interesting Asbury Park story extends beyond Springsteen.
Across town on the West Side, another musical history developed within the Black community. Clubs flourished along Springwood Avenue. Musicians crossed cultural and racial boundaries. Clarence Clemons played at the Turf Club, a surviving piece of that history that is itself being preserved through the Asbury Park African-American Music Project.
This gives Asbury Park something most heritage destinations would kill for: several histories happening simultaneously.
There is the architectural history of the grand seaside resort.
There is the social history of the boardwalk.
There is Black musical history.
There is rock and roll history.
There is the long decline of the American urban resort.
And now there is the story of its return.
For the moment, the Convention Hall restoration is something to watch rather than something to enter. There is no definitive reopening date.
That should not deter you.
Walk the boardwalk. Study the Paramount facade at dusk. Look at the nautical ornament. Find the surviving signs and fragments of old Asbury Park among the rejuvenated restaurants and new development.
Then go west and remember that the city’s musical history was never confined to one famous building beside the ocean.
Old entertainment architecture is particularly vulnerable because people have difficulty explaining why it matters.
Nobody questions the preservation of a courthouse where an important law was decided. We understand the significance of a battlefield. We instinctively protect a president’s birthplace.
But a dance hall?
A theater?
An arcade?
These are places where people went to waste time, which in retrospect turns out to be one of the most culturally important things human beings do.
People danced there. They courted there. They heard new music there. They dressed up. They misbehaved. They saw performers they never forgot.
Civilization is not constructed solely from important meetings.
Sometimes it is constructed from Saturday night.
Asbury Park understands this.
New Jersey is now betting $75 million that future generations will understand it too.
The Hotel Where Everyone Quietly Rearranged the World Economy
The Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, looks like the sort of place where a wealthy industrialist might have retired after successfully cornering the nineteenth century market in railroad bolts.
This is not far from the truth.
The hotel opened in 1902, the creation of industrialist Joseph Stickney and architect Charles Alling Gifford. Around 250 craftsmen, many from Italy, helped construct the vast Spanish Renaissance Revival building beneath the White Mountains.
It was enormous.
It was luxurious.
It had a veranda measuring more than 900 feet.
In other words, it came from an age when hotel designers believed guests might reasonably require the better part of a quarter mile merely to sit outside.
People arrived by train from Boston and New York. Families stayed for weeks. The great mountain resorts operated almost as seasonal communities for people possessing enough money to regard relocating an entire household for the summer as a form of rest.
The Mount Washington has recently undergone another major renovation, refreshing its historic rooms, public spaces, dining areas and wellness facilities for a new generation.
All of which would make it an excellent heritage hotel even if nothing particularly important had ever happened there.
Unfortunately for anyone attempting to write a simple hotel review, something very important did.
In July 1944, while the Second World War was still raging, delegates from 44 nations assembled at the hotel for the Bretton Woods Conference.
This must have produced one of the strangest guest lists in hotel history.
The delegates were not there to admire the veranda.
They were there to design the postwar international monetary order.
The conference produced the framework for the International Monetary Fund and what became the World Bank. It established a system of financial cooperation intended to prevent the economic chaos that had helped destabilize the world between the wars.
Thus one of the defining structures of modern global finance emerged not from Washington, London or New York but from a vast white hotel sitting in the New Hampshire mountains.
I find this wonderfully American.
You can have breakfast, inspect the Gold Room associated with the conference, contemplate the architecture of international finance and then go hiking.
There are very few places where macroeconomics and autumn foliage can be enjoyed before lunch.
The hotel became a National Historic Landmark in 1986, but importantly it remains a functioning resort.
That distinction matters.
There is an understandable tendency in heritage preservation to freeze important places at the moment when something significant occurred. The result can be historically accurate and emotionally lifeless.
Mount Washington never stopped being a hotel.
People still arrive with luggage. They still drink in the bars. Children still race through spaces in which very serious men once argued about exchange rates.
Outside are Bretton Woods, Crawford Notch, White Mountain National Forest and, rising above everything, Mount Washington itself.
Go in late September or early October and the landscape becomes ridiculous.
New England foliage has somehow escaped criticism despite being an annual event in which millions of perfectly sensible adults drive considerable distances to look at leaves.
The remarkable thing is that they are right to do so.
The White Mountains in autumn are magnificent.
Stay at the hotel if the budget allows. Tour it if it does not. Drive Crawford Notch. Walk in the forest.
Then stand in the Gold Room and consider that while soldiers were still fighting across Europe and the Pacific, representatives of 44 countries came to a mountain resort in New Hampshire and attempted to design what came next.
History has occurred in grander rooms.
It has rarely enjoyed better scenery.
Montana, Without the Museum Glass
Today, August 28, the Fort Kipp Celebration begins on the Fort Peck Reservation in northeastern Montana.
This is where the idea of heritage requires some care.
There is a tendency in American tourism to treat Indigenous culture as something belonging to the distant past, usually represented by reconstructed settlements, archaeological sites and museum cases.
Fort Kipp offers the opposite.
The Fort Peck Reservation is home to Assiniboine and Sioux communities, and the celebration is a living gathering centered on dance, drums, craft, food, family and community.
Visitors are welcome.
But visitors are visitors.
This seems obvious, yet it is an important distinction.
The Fort Peck Tribes maintain their own Cultural Resources Department, museum collections and preservation programs concerned with Dakota and Nakoda heritage, archaeology, historic structures and traditional knowledge.
The interpretation therefore begins within the community itself.
This makes Fort Kipp particularly valuable for travelers interested in Indigenous history because you are not encountering culture principally through somebody else’s explanation of it.
You are entering a place where those traditions remain alive.
The powwow runs through August 30.
There will be dancing, drumming, beadwork, jewelry, food and the astonishing visual experience of all this taking place beneath the tremendous northern plains sky.
The landscape is part of the story.
Northeastern Montana has none of the theatrical mountain scenery that sends millions of tourists toward Glacier and Yellowstone.
Instead, there is space.
Enormous amounts of it.
The prairie stretches until conventional ideas about distance become unreliable.
Nearby Wolf Point has Amtrak service, making Fort Kipp one of the comparatively unusual rural cultural gatherings in America that can at least partly be approached by train.
This is worth considering because arriving in eastern Montana by rail feels somehow appropriate.
The landscape does not suddenly begin at a parking lot.
It accumulates outside the window.
Poplar offers the Fort Peck Tribal Museum, while farther west the Fort Peck Interpretive Center provides another perspective on the region, including its natural history and the extraordinary engineering story of Fort Peck Dam.
But the celebration is the reason to make the journey now.
Attend respectfully.
Listen to announcements.
Follow photography rules.
Ask before photographing individual dancers or elders.
Do not behave as though the entire event has been organized as background scenery for your social media account.
This is not difficult.
The reward is an encounter with an America that is ancient and contemporary at exactly the same time.
Indigenous cultures are sometimes described as the beginning of the American story.
That is inadequate.
They are the beginning, middle and present tense.
Fort Kipp makes that unmistakable.
Where the West Refuses to Become One Story
Finally we come to northeastern Oregon, which is what happens when somebody takes mountains, ranches, bronze sculpture, Indigenous history, wilderness and one enormous canyon and decides that all of them should occupy approximately the same neighborhood.
The Hells Canyon Scenic Byway runs roughly 218 miles through some of the most dramatic country in Oregon.
Calling it a scenic drive is accurate in the same way that calling the Mississippi a body of water is accurate.
It rather misses the point.
The byway travels through the Wallowa Valley and toward Hells Canyon, carved by the Snake River into the borderlands of Oregon and Idaho.
Hells Canyon is often described as America’s deepest river gorge. The scenery is immense, but the landscape becomes considerably more interesting once you stop treating it merely as scenery.
Start with Enterprise.
This is the working agricultural center of the Wallowa country, where ranching still gives the town and surrounding valley much of their identity.
Then drive to Joseph.
Joseph is one of those places that initially seems almost implausibly attractive. There are mountains behind the town, handsome storefronts along Main Street and monumental bronze sculptures standing around as casually as parking meters.
The bronze tradition began taking root when foundries appeared in the area in the early 1980s.
It grew.
Today Joseph has an unusual concentration of foundries, sculptors and Western art. The bronzes lining Main Street give the town the curious atmosphere of an outdoor gallery that happens to have restaurants and pickup trucks passing through it.
This would already make Joseph interesting.
Then comes the name.
Joseph is named for Chief Joseph.
The Wallowa Valley is Nimiipuu, or Nez Perce, homeland.
Joseph Canyon, north of Enterprise, carries profound significance. National Park Service interpretation identifies it with Chief Joseph’s band, and oral tradition holds that Chief Joseph was born there.
This complicates the comfortable Western imagery considerably.
And it should.
The American West has been packaged so successfully that it is easy to forget how many different histories lie underneath the packaging.
There is the ranching West.
The Indigenous West.
The military West.
The mining West.
The artistic West.
The conservation West.
The tourist West.
They occupy the same valleys and seldom tell exactly the same story about how everyone arrived there.
Around Joseph and Enterprise, these layers remain unusually visible.
Spend a day with the towns and foundries.
Spend another exploring Nez Perce history.
Then go outside.
Wallowa Lake sits below the mountains. Beyond are the Eagle Cap Wilderness, the Imnaha country and eventually Hells Canyon itself.
You can hike, camp, ride horses, fish, raft or disappear into the backcountry for considerably longer than your inbox would prefer.
Late August and September are ideal.
The high country is still accessible. Temperatures begin to moderate. Summer crowds thin. Ranch fields turn gold beneath the mountains.
And everywhere there is that immense Western landscape that has inspired several centuries of Americans to look at it and come to completely incompatible conclusions about what it means.
That may be the most American thing about it.
The Country Between the Attractions
There is a temptation in travel writing to believe that America consists of major attractions connected by inconvenient stretches of highway.
The opposite is often true.
The inconvenient stretches are where the country is hiding.
Arcadia survives because cattle, railroads, fire and rebuilding produced a Florida town quite unlike the Florida of popular imagination.
Asbury Park matters because entertainment architecture can hold collective memory just as powerfully as a courthouse or battlefield.
Mount Washington demonstrates that a luxury hotel can become a stage for world history without ceasing to be a hotel.
Fort Kipp reminds us that Indigenous America is not an archaeological category.
And northeastern Oregon shows why any simple version of the West collapses the moment you spend enough time in it.
These places share almost nothing architecturally, geographically or culturally.
One has rodeo bulls.
One has a boardwalk.
One has international monetary policy.
One has drums beneath the Montana sky.
One has bronze cowboys standing beneath some of the most beautiful mountains in the Pacific Northwest.
Yet together they reveal something essential.
Americana is not a decorative style.
It is not simply boots, neon signs, old pickups, diners and country songs, pleasant though all those things can be.
It is the accumulation of places where Americans built things, lost things, rebuilt things, argued about things and occasionally discovered that what seemed obsolete was worth saving after all.
Sometimes that means spending $130 million restoring a seaside palace.
Sometimes it means maintaining a tribal cultural department.
Sometimes it means keeping a rodeo alive for nearly a century.
And sometimes it simply means leaving the old brick buildings standing.
America has always been extraordinarily good at reinventing itself.
The more remarkable achievement is remembering enough of the previous versions to make the reinvention interesting.
For that, thankfully, there are still places like Arcadia, Asbury Park, Bretton Woods, Fort Kipp and the Wallowa Valley.
You simply have to get off the interstate and go looking for them.