Route 66 Centennial · 1926–2026

Catch it before it's gone — and celebrate what came back.

Americana Century is the first Rooted & Remembered collection — a hundred years of the American road and its neon, told three ways. More collections (other byways, other vanishing places) follow.

The idea

One place. Remembered three ways.

Every sign, motel, and diner enters once — observed and pinned to the map. Then the same data is read three different ways, each its own product.

Still litsurvived in place
Restoredbrought back to life
Relocatedsaved by moving
Lostgone — the urgency

Three of the four states are a kind of keeping. We track the loss to fight it — and the comebacks to celebrate them.

The three

The collection.

Americana Century is one collection inside Rooted & Remembered. Other byways and historic places become their own collections later.

How three products stay one family

Powered by Habitus — three knobs.

They aren't three codebases. They're one place-intelligence engine (Habitus) with three settings turned differently — so the family is consistent without being identical.

Brand

the canvas

The warm Rooted & Remembered register — and the night vs. daytime mood each product lives in.

Perspective

structure & function

Echoes leads Tempo (across time); Neon Mile & Get Your Kicks lead Scenario (the trip).

Subject

palette & texture

Neon night vs. open-road daytime — and the filter that rides along: signs, corridor, or the whole road.

Why in public

Including what didn't work.

Our first neon app stalled — and that's the most useful part of the story. We're documenting the dead ends alongside the wins, because the re-think is what made the real thing possible.

The frozen demo
~30 signs hardcoded in the page; a planner that only pretended to route. Nothing saved, nothing real.
The naming fog
Capture vs Observe, a "universal key" that wasn't. The concepts blocked the building.
Two codebases, one idea
Competing prototypes under one name, each restarted, each abandoned. No spine.
The turn
Every dead end maps to a fix now in the architecture: real data, real routing, one clean engine.
Read the full story on Stories →

Follow the build.

Mile by mile, all the way to the stage at BUILD with Mapbox — Sept 15–17, 2026.

See The Road to BUILD →