The First Motel

We looked in awe at the construction as it rose day by day. There had been nothing like it in our narrow world.  We were filled with unrestrained glee, something like Christmas, as the builders produced more and more of it, as it became more itself.  Look at that! we said to one other.  We felt it was some kind of magnificence coming to our town, as if we’d been chosen above all other places in the world for the honor of having this building on our sandy shore, fronting the ocean.  

The first motel.

This was 1957.  I was twelve.

I don’t think we even knew what a motel was.  Yes—what was it?  Why didn’t they just call it a hotel? 

Before the motel, visitors to our town of Virginia Beach, Virgina would stay in small one-story guest houses.  These white wood buildings had expansive porches that faced the ocean. Families who stayed there summer after summer could sit in the evenings after supper and breathe the balm of salty breezes.  The houses had names like “Mrs. Wilson’s Guest Cottage” or “Sea Breeze Guest House.”  Families from Richmond and Washington, DC—so far away!—would come and stay for a week or two, year after year, at the same guest house.  

Day after day we watched the motel rise.  Finally, one day, it was finished.  It was called La Playa.  What was La Playa?  What language was that?  Someone finally told us that it meant the beach in Spanish.   It rose straight and narrow into the air four stories, obscuring the beach from the town’s main street.

La Playa Motel, around the time it was built in 1957

The first motel seemed to us to be the solution to something.  We didn’t know what needed a solution, but it seemed to suggest that something needed the solution of this stone, many-roomed building.  What we didn’t know was that once ensconced, this invasive species would be impossible to extract.  Like a brick and mortar Kudzu, it propagated others. Soon, there was a second motel, then a third, a fourth, then a twentieth and so on, each practically touching the one next to it.  

One by one, the wood guest houses were torn down to make way for these motels.  Soon, there was just one Mrs. Wilson’s.  Then none.  It was hard to even see the beach and ocean from the street where once the views had been plentiful and free.  The small stores that served the community were transformed into T-shirt shops and sellers of beach paraphernalia to serve the swarms of motel guests.  The movie theater became a haunted house.  Miniature golf courses sprung up everywhere. Each of these concerns was architecturally crass, as they always are.  We were too young to understand what this meant.  What it meant was the disappearance of intimate town life.  

Now, nearly sixty years later, there is no Virginia Beach.  There is a city with that name, but the personality of the town, the casual, human-scale living, has vanished.  It’s just motels and trashy shops.  I recognize hardly anything from my growing up.  Archeologists, many years from now, on some dig, will only be able to find traces of what existed, what sort of life was led, before La Playa and its stone companions arrived.  

Beware of the first motel.