O. Winston Link Museum and Downtown Roanoke

After a pretty bad night’s sleep at the Days Inn Roanoke — which Greg nicknamed the Days Inn Islamabad for its crumbling walls and filthy rooms — we headed out early in the morning to get some brekky and check out the O. Winston Link museum. O. Winston Link was a commercial photographer who worked on Madison Avenue shooting products for ads and PR campaigns, but he had a special passion: The Norfolk & Western Railway. He spent countless hours and untold amounts of his own money to document the last of the steam engines running these lines in the 1950s, and his collection of extraordinary photos is housed at the museum, which itself is housed in the former Roanoke train station.

Perhaps his most famous photo is here below, “Hot Shot Eastbound at the Drive-In, Ieager, West Virginia.”

O. Winston Link was a genius when it came to lighting. Don’t forget, this was before digital strobes or anything like that. This photo, and all of his others, was lighted with those enormous one-time flash bulbs, along with smaller bulbs hidden in places like lanterns or behind bushes or structures.

There are hundreds of photos collected in the museum. They are all beautiful and admirable for their craft, but they also show you how life was in rural Virginia and West Virginia during that time period, and for that they are even more special. This one on the right, called General Store, is especially telling. Look at the community, the products, the setting. You know that place.

After the jump, a look around Roanoke and the exterior of the museum. No photos were allowed inside.

We started the morning back on Market Street. It was quite early so only one farmer was out at the market yet:

We went for breakfast and coffee at the High Rise Bakery. Eh. OK.

Very cute, though.

We walked past the art museum —

— and over the overpass —

to the O. Winston Link Museum:

There’s Hunna, hiding:

The museum itself is in the former Norfolk & Western Passenger Terminal, which was renovated in the 1940s by Raymond Loewy, a famous industrial designer:

The look is as modern and sleek as if it were done today:

Loewy was also responsible for some of America’s most iconic logos, including the United States Postal Service, Shell and Exxon:

Hunna is impressed.

For our final stop in Roanoke, we popped into the hotel where we would have preferred to stay, had it not been booked: the Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center.

It was quite grand for more than 100 years — built as the railroad brought people and prosper to Roanoke. In the Depression, according to the website, the railroad spent $225,000 “for a wing with 75 rooms, a 60-car garage and such ‘modern’ amenities as circulating ice water, movable telephones and electric fans.”