On the Breezewood Interchange

Thoughts on a grotesque slice of America

When you drive through the heart of the eastern seaboard—as I do on trips to and from my hometown, mostly on holidays—there are miles upon miles of nondescript highway among ever-changing climates and topography: flat, droning interstates of Ohio, Pennsylvania roads that wind through the fog-enveloped Alleghenies, dense and slow regional freeways of Maryland. It’s all the same to me, except for one stark point that stands out among the crowd and draws increasing rage out of me with each passing trip: the Breezewood interchange.

Breezewood is a small, unincorporated community inside the innocuous Bedford County in southern Pennsylvania. Its not known for anything but the interchange itself, which connects the I-76 turnpike to the smaller I-70 that shoots southeast into Maryland, a common passage for travelers headed towards the mid-Atlantic. Except it’s not like any other interchange I’ve ever seen. Instead of sweeping exit and entrance ramps which dump you off one highway and funnel you onto another, you must get off the highway, drive down a surface road for a quarter mile, and then re-enter the next freeway. It’s a baffling infrastructural decision that causes confusion at best and otherwise unnecessary bumper-to-bumper traffic at worst, even during off-peak travel times. According to the Federal Highway Administration, the toll-free I-70 (which was built after the Pennsylvania Turnpike) did not qualify for federal funds for highway building and that if connected directly to I-76, I-70 drivers would be forced into tolls. The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission was unwilling to use their own state-provided funds to build an interchange that allowed drivers to select a free route. To proceed with federal funds, they had to dump drivers off on US-30 (the surface road) and build a separate on rap to the turnpike.

The surface road that bridges the two freeways in Breezewood is vapid, chock full of gas stations, chain restaurants, ephemeral souvenir shops and budget hotels. It is not immune from outside ridicule, even from casual sources. Social media users joke about its shameless Americanness aside other embarrassingly freedom-loving photos of Cookout menus and the Bass Pro Shop pyramid.  In 1991, Business Week called Breezwood “the purest example yet devised of the great American tourist trap… the Las Vegas of roadside strips, a blaze of neon in the middle of nowhere, a polyp on the nation’s interstate highway system.”

Upon further review of this hellscape of a place, I disagree with Business Week’s assessment and align with social media’s judgement of the interchange as a uniquely and absurdly American monolith, but perhaps with more dreamy eyes. Breezewood isn’t a polyp, it’s the blood of America, or its spit; something grotesque and unsavory that nonetheless contains the DNA of its host. It’s less an unwelcome growth on otherwise smooth skin and more of a sample of the blood that pumps through the rest of the nation alike. When you drive through Breezewood, it’s like cutting a piece off a worm and watching it regenerate into a new worm of its own. You begin to understand the greater picture from just one strip of pavement.

Before the highway system existed, there were hundreds of Breezewoods, towns whose otherwise negligible economy relied upon weary travelers passing through looking for respite or a refuel. The old ghost towns of America’s Route 66 can relate, and this place feels like a twisted hypothetical of what old wayside towns would look like across America if they still existed en masse today; they’re gone now, for when the highways took shape, they also took the souls of roadside strips. Breezewood is an ode to time passed, a last vestige of a sick, yes, but genuine American culture long since dead. Truck stops, Holiday Inns, BP stations, and diners with health inspector grades on the verge of catastrophe are a pastiche of what the essence of a road trip might have once been like, had our generation been alive for it.

This is why, to me, Breezewood exists to this day. The shops and stations on US-30 employ ten times more people than the unincorporated community’s population, and even though federal funding laws for interstates have relaxed since the creation of I-70, the community doesn’t want to take away its own lifeblood. If they lose the interchange, their grim fate will be pre-ordained like the lost towns of the West. And, let’s be honest, the stretch of road is so short that it doesn’t ever take more than 15 minutes to get through, even in the most congested of times. The interchange isn’t pretty, nor is it convenient or logical, but maybe sometimes it’s good to take a break from cutting through America’s heartland at breakneck speed to look around and embrace a change from life’s ennui and remember how things used to be. Somewhere deep inside the soul of this faceless hellscape lies a fragment of America’s spirit.

Long live Breezewood!