Lincoln Motel

The Lincoln Motel was built in 1939 during a period when small independent operators were the dominant force in American roadside lodging. The building permits and construction contracts of that era typically went to local Chandler builders working with stock plans for the motor-court format — a layout that had been refined across the previous decade into what became the standard American roadside lodging type. The Lincoln's specific design uses a U-shaped arrangement of roughly a dozen standalone stucco bungalow rooms around a central paved drive, with the office at the head of the U facing the street.

Each bungalow originally included a single guest room with a private bathroom — a meaningful upgrade over the earlier 1920s tourist-camp model where bathrooms were typically shared. The individual standalone construction (rather than a long shared-wall building) was specifically intended to provide privacy and quiet for guests, an explicit selling point in 1930s motor-court advertising that distinguished motor courts from urban hotels. Most importantly, the layout let guests park their cars directly outside their rooms, which the era's advertising emphasized as a major convenience for highway travelers.

The stucco exteriors and the simple flat-and-low-pitched rooflines are characteristic of the period's economical Southwestern-influenced motor-court style. The construction is not architecturally pretentious — these were budget lodgings built for economy and function — but the proportions, the U-shape, and the surviving original detailing produce an unusually intact example of a vanishing American building type.

The single most photographed feature of the Lincoln Motel is its original neon sign — a tall vertical pylon reading "LINCOLN" in stacked letters with an illuminated arrow at the bottom pointing horizontally toward the motel office. The sign is the kind of vintage Route 66 neon that appears in coffee-table books, photography prints, and travel-magazine spreads, and is the primary reason photographers come specifically to Chandler to shoot at dusk.

The neon went through a long period of disrepair through the late 20th century — common for surviving Route 66 signage of this era — before being restored by the motel's owners in the early 2000s. The restoration repaired the original neon tubing, reconditioned the transformer and wiring, repainted the sign's painted-metal surfaces, and brought the sign back to full nightly working order. The restored neon is now lit every evening and is consistently cited by Route 66 photographers as one of the best surviving original-neon signs on the entire Oklahoma stretch of the highway.

Best photography is at dusk and just after — the roughly 30-minute window when the sky still has color but the neon reads as a strong dominant subject. Daytime photographs of the sign are also worth taking, since the painted metalwork and the vertical proportion against the surrounding stucco are visually distinctive even without the neon lit. Photographers should set up on the south side of East 1st Street looking north toward the sign and the motel's U-shaped court behind it.

Route 66 traffic through Chandler peaked in the 1940s and 1950s before declining steeply once I-44 (the Turner Turnpike between Oklahoma City and Tulsa) opened in 1953 and the subsequent interstate-highway buildout pulled long-haul traffic off the old alignment. The 1960s and 1970s were the period when most surviving Route 66 motor courts in small Oklahoma towns simply closed — once traffic volumes collapsed below the threshold needed to sustain nightly room rentals, the economics no longer worked for the original lodging-traveler model.

The Lincoln Motel's survival came from a deliberate pivot to a different customer base. Rather than continuing to chase the disappearing highway-overnight market, the motel shifted toward long-stay budget lodging — weekly and monthly rentals for working people, transients, and others who needed inexpensive lodging on a longer time frame than a single night. This is a common adaptation among surviving small motor courts; it sacrifices the romance of the highway-traveler model but maintains continuous occupancy and a sustainable revenue base.

The pivot worked. The Lincoln has been in continuous operation since 1939 — a genuinely rare achievement among 1930s-era Route 66 motels — and the surviving original layout, stucco buildings, and neon sign are direct consequences of the property never having been closed long enough to fall into the kind of disrepair that typically dooms restoration prospects. The current owners continue to operate the property as a working budget motel while welcoming photographers who come specifically for the sign.

For most Route 66 road-trippers, the Lincoln Motel is a 15-to-20-minute photography stop rather than an overnight destination. Pull off East 1st Street, park along the street or in the motel's drive (ask at the office if the lot is busy), photograph the sign and the U-shaped court, and continue. The motel office is generally welcoming to respectful photographers and travelers will not need to interact with anyone unless they want to.

Travelers who want to actually stay in a 1939 motor court can book a room at the Lincoln directly — rates are budget-tier (typically $50 to $80 per night depending on season) and the rooms have been renovated to modern budget-motel standards with private bathrooms, climate control, and basic amenities. The experience is not luxury, but it is a genuinely authentic stay in surviving Route 66 architecture that very few comparable properties can match.

Combining the Lincoln with Chandler's other Route 66 stops produces a tidy two-to-three-hour itinerary: photograph the Lincoln in the morning or at dusk, visit the Route 66 Interpretive Center a few blocks west for an indoor stop with substantive Route 66 history, and have lunch at Granny's Country Kitchen on the same East 1st Street strip. The Chandler-block itinerary is a natural midway stop between Tulsa (65 miles east) and Oklahoma City (35 miles west), with Arcadia and the Round Barn and POPS soda stop 15 miles west as the next destination toward Oklahoma City.