  Museum location on US 66 in Illinois | |
| Established | January 2011 |
|---|---|
| Dissolved | 2017 |
| Location | 7003 W. Ogden Ave., Berwyn, Illinois |
| Coordinates | 41°49′32″N87°47′51″W / 41.82545°N 87.7976°W Coordinates: 41°49′32″N87°47′51″W / 41.82545°N 87.7976°W |
| Type | Route 66 Museum |
| Director | Jon Fey |
| Website | www |
The Berwyn Route 66 Museum was a small not-for-profit facility, located in Berwyn, Illinois, that documented the history of the former U.S. Route 66. It has been closed now.
The path of Route 66 traveled through the city of Berwyn along Ogden Avenue, a main thoroughfare through Chicago and its western suburbs; the section of the route that passed through Berwyn was known as Automobile Row during the route’s heyday. In Illinois, the original path of the former Route 66 has been federally designated a National Scenic Byway known as the Illinois Route 66 Scenic Byway, so that Ogden Avenue is once again part of Historic Route 66. [1]
The museum opened in January 2011 in a storefront at 7003 W. Ogden Ave. and shared space with the Berwyn Arts Council, a local community arts organization that had a small gallery within the museum. [2] The museum's mission was to discover, present and preserve the history and culture of Route 66, in particular the section that passed through Berwyn. The museum’s executive director was Jon Fey, [3] who is also a board member of the arts council. Information, artifacts and memorabilia about Route 66 and Automobile Row were stored and displayed at the museum, which also made its data available to researchers by appointment. The museum was staffed entirely by volunteers; its docent was Myles Slaughter, and Tony Lavorato was in charge of collections research.
The museum’s beginnings were two display cases of memorabilia set up in 1994 in the former Skylite Restaurant on Ogden Avenue near Ridgeland Avenue by Larry Ohler of the volunteer group known as Berwyn Preservation of Historic Route 66, [4] a committee of the Berwyn Development Corp. Ohler had collected the material. The displays were later moved to Anderson Ford, a dealership formerly located on Ogden Avenue (the dealership closed in 2009, and the building was repurposed during the spring of 2012). [5] Fey’s company SWF Products, which owns the building in which the museum was housed, offered the space so that the collection could have a home of its own. [6]
The Berwyn Route 66 Museum was perhaps best known for its co-sponsorship of the Historic Route 66 Car Show, [7] an annual event held on the first Saturday of September that features classic and custom cars, trucks and motorcycles [8] and has been organized by that same local Route 66 preservation group since 1990. In addition to being reported locally, [9] the event has been covered by specialty automobile media such as the Auto Channel. [10] The museum also occasionally sponsors other events, including book events featuring authors who have written about U.S. Route 66 in Illinois. [11] In addition, the Berwyn Arts Council stages art showings at the museum's gallery; one such display has been a collection of artistic interpretations of automobile hub caps. [12]
The museum was engaged in fundraising to support two future installations. The first was the restoration and relocation of the historic Art Moderne neon-illuminated glass-block Berwyn Route 66 welcome sign to the museum grounds; the sign previously stood on the north side of Ogden Avenue just west of Lombard Avenue in front of a CITGO gas station, where a Route 66 multimedia information kiosk erected by the Illinois Route 66 Scenic Byway authority now stands. The glass-block marker was removed by the city during the summer of 2012 due to damage and was replaced at that time by the multimedia kiosk.
The second project was the partial reassembly of the 1989 Dustin Shuler Pop Art sculpture known as The Spindle. [13] [14] The Spindle, which had eight cars mounted vertically on a pole and stood 40 feet tall in the Cermak Plaza shopping center in Berwyn, [15] was commissioned by shopping mall developer and modern art collector David Bermant, who contributed his own silver-blue 1976 BMW New Class sedan to the assembly (it was mounted second from the top; the license plate reads DAVE). Shuler's own 1967 red Volkswagen Beetle was mounted at the top. The Spindle was installed in 1989 and disassembled and removed in 2008 [16] after attempts to find a buyer failed. At the time of the sculpture's removal, the top two cars (Shuler's VW and Bermant's BMW) were saved and stored by museum director Fey.
The red VW was on display at the 2012 Berwyn Car Show, where museum volunteers circulated information and petitions to gain support for the rehabilitation of the sculpture's remains. [17] The glass-block illuminated sign, on the other hand, has been temporarily placed in storage by the museum in order to keep it from further damage until funds are sufficient for its restoration and reinstallation at the museum, Fey said.
The Route 66 Museum had the additional distinction of having one of Berwyn’s three electrical charging stations for electric cars and trucks located on its front doorstep. [18]
The museum was open Mondays through Fridays 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., except holidays, and other hours by appointment.
The former location of the museum has been turned into a gift shop. The restored original (1990s) Berwyn Route 66 entry marker can be seen displayed in the parking lot adjacent to the gift shop, along with a "distance marker pole", the large school bell from Berwyn's early 1900s LaVergne School and a 12' x 15' wall mural panel with a full color Route 66 Shield. It is open 9 to 5 M-F and closed Saturday and Sunday. [19]
Mr. Shuler’s most famous work was “Spindle,” a 50-foot-high metal spike onto which eight cars had been threaded like onions on a skewer. Erected in 1989, the sculpture — quite literally an eight-car pileup — stood for nearly 20 years in the parking lot of Cermak Plaza, a shopping center in Berwyn, Ill., near Chicago.
In 1990, in a nonbinding referendum, the people of Berwyn voted by a ratio of more than two to one to dismantle “Spindle.” But the sculpture endured anyway until 2008.
U.S. Route 66 or U.S. Highway 66 was one of the original highways in the United States Numbered Highway System. US 66 was established on November 11, 1926, with road signs erected the following year. The highway, which became one of the most famous roads in the United States, originally ran from Chicago, Illinois, through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona before terminating in Santa Monica in Los Angeles County, California, covering a total of 2,448 miles (3,940 km).
Berwyn is a suburban city in Cook County, Illinois, coterminous with Berwyn Township, which was formed in 1908 after breaking off from Cicero Township. As of the 2020 census, the city had a total population of 57,250.
Spindle may refer to:
M-1, commonly known as Woodward Avenue, is a north–south state trunkline highway in the Metro Detroit area of the US state of Michigan. The highway, called "Detroit's Main Street", runs from Detroit north-northwesterly to Pontiac. It is one of the five principal avenues of Detroit, along with Michigan, Grand River, Gratiot, and Jefferson avenues. These streets were platted in 1805 by Judge Augustus B. Woodward, namesake to Woodward Avenue. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has listed the highway as the Automotive Heritage Trail, an All-American Road in the National Scenic Byways Program. It has also been designated a Pure Michigan Byway by the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT), and was also included in the MotorCities National Heritage Area designated by the US Congress in 1998.
A Pure Michigan Byway is the designation for a segment of the State Trunkline Highway System in the US state of Michigan that is a "scenic, recreational, or historic route that is representative of Michigan's natural and cultural heritage." The designation was created with the name Michigan Heritage Route by the state legislature on June 22, 1993, and since then six historic, seven recreational and seven scenic byways have been designated by the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT), and another two have been proposed. These byways have been designated in both the Upper and Lower peninsulas of the state. The current name was adopted on December 30, 2014, and it references the Pure Michigan tourism marketing campaign.
U.S. Route 34 (US 34) is an east–west United States highway that runs for 1,122 miles (1,806 km) from north-central Colorado to the western suburbs of Chicago. Through Rocky Mountain National Park it is known as the Trail Ridge Road where it reaches elevation 12,183 feet (3,713 m), making it the third highest paved through highway in the United States. The highway's western terminus is Granby, Colorado at US 40. Its eastern terminus is in Berwyn, Illinois at Illinois Route 43 and Historic US 66.
Illinois Route 171 (IL 171) is a 38.61-mile-long (62.14 km) north–south state road in northeastern Illinois. It runs from U.S. Route 6 (US 6) in Joliet north to Illinois Route 72 at the Chicago–Park Ridge border. The section of IL 171 on Archer Avenue from Joliet to Summit is historically significant, originating as a Native American trail, and later serving for a time as part of the first numbered highway between St. Louis and Chicago.
The Grand Rounds National Scenic Byway is a linked series of park areas in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, that takes a roughly circular path through the city. The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board developed the system over many years. The corridors include roads for automobile traffic plus separate paths for pedestrians and bicycles, and extend slightly into neighboring cities. About 50 miles (80 km) of roadway and paths are in the system, and much of it was built in the 1930s as part of Civilian Conservation Corps projects.
U.S. Route 66 is a former east–west United States Numbered Highway, running from Santa Monica, California to Chicago, Illinois. In Missouri, the highway ran from downtown St. Louis at the Mississippi River to the Kansas state line west of Joplin. The highway was originally Route 14 from St. Louis to Joplin and Route 1F from Joplin to Kansas. It underwent two major realignments and several lesser realignments in the cities of St. Louis, Springfield, and Joplin. Current highways covering several miles of the former highway include Route 100, Route 366, Route 266, Route 96, and Route 66. Interstate 44 (I-44) approximates much of US 66 between St. Louis and Springfield.
U.S. Route 66 was a United States Numbered Highway in Illinois that connected St. Louis, Missouri, and Chicago, Illinois. The historic Route 66, the Mother Road or Main Street of America, took long distance automobile travelers from Chicago to Southern California. The highway had previously been Illinois Route 4 and the road has now been largely replaced with Interstate 55 (I-55). Parts of the road still carry traffic and six separate portions of the roadbed have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
U.S. Route 34 (US 34) is an east–west highway In the state of Illinois that runs from the Iowa state line at Gulfport, west of Galesburg, to Illinois Route 43 (IL 43) and Historic U.S. Route 66 at Harlem Avenue in Berwyn. The entire highway in Illinois is named the Walter Payton Memorial Highway after Pro Football Hall of Famer Walter Payton, who wore #34 for the Chicago Bears. The highway is 211.37 miles (340.17 km) long within the state.
Cermak Road, also known as 22nd Street, is a 19-mile, major east–west street on Chicago's near south and west sides and the city's western suburbs. In Chicago's street numbering system, Cermak is 2200 south, or twenty-two blocks south of the baseline of Madison Street. Normally, one mile comprises eight Chicago blocks, but the arterial streets Roosevelt Road, formerly named Twelfth Street and at 1200 South, and Cermak Road were platted before the eight-blocks-per-mile plan was implemented. Roosevelt Road is one mile south of Madison Avenue and there are twelve blocks within that mile. Cermak Road is two miles south of Madison Avenue and there are ten blocks within the mile between Roosevelt and Cermak Roads.
Delaware Route 52 (DE 52) is a state highway in New Castle County, Delaware. The route runs from U.S. Route 13 Business in downtown Wilmington north to Pennsylvania Route 52 (PA 52) at the Pennsylvania border near Centerville. DE 52 runs through the city of Wilmington and passes through areas of the Brandywine Valley north of Wilmington. DE 52 intersects Interstate 95 (I-95)/US 202 and DE 2 in Wilmington and DE 100/DE 141 and DE 82 in Greenville. The entire route is designated as part of the Brandywine Valley National Scenic Byway, a National Scenic Byway and Delaware Byway, while most of the route is also designated as part of the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway of the Delaware Byways system. The road was built as the Kennett Pike, a turnpike, between 1811 and 1813. The Kennett Pike was bought by Pierre S. du Pont in 1919 and was widened and paved before being sold to the State of Delaware for $1. The road received the DE 52 designation by 1936.
Spindle was a sculpture created in 1989 by artist Dustin Shuler (1948–2010). It consisted of a 50-foot spike with eight cars impaled on it in a manner reminiscent of documents on a desk spindle.
Berwyn is one of three stations on Metra's BNSF Line in Berwyn, Illinois. The station is 9.6 miles (15.4 km) from Union Station, the east end of the line. In Metra's zone-based fare system, Berwyn is in zone B. As of 2018, Berwyn is the 79th busiest of Metra's 236 non-downtown stations, with an average of 669 weekday boardings. There is a staffed station building on the south side of the tracks.
Dustin Shuler was an American pop art sculptor and mixed-media artist, best known for a 1989 piece called Spindle, a 50-foot steel spike with eight cars impaled on it that became emblematic of the city of Berwyn, Illinois, where it was installed for two decades in the parking lot of a popular shopping mall. Most of Shuler's major works consisted of outdoor art installations, and the majority of his sculptures used elements of consumer-goods detritus.
