In America, some people get statues in their honor. Some get airports. Some have entire thoroughfares named after them. And then there is the distinction of getting your name on a highway rest stop.
In New Jersey, you can ditch the congestion of the turnpike to visit the well-trafficked public restrooms at the Walt Whitman Travel Plaza in Cherry Hill. You can fill up at the gas station and snag a bag of Cheetos at the Woodrow Wilson Service Plaza, near mile marker 58.
“Alexander Hamilton,” NPR has pointed out, “was a rest stop in Secaucus before he was a Broadway musical.”
Those are just some of the long-dead poets and statesmen (dis)honored in this way, but there are also more contemporary figures. Jon Bon Jovi has a service area in a town called Cheesequake. Bruce Willis has one in Ocean View.
And of course they — or their representatives — do have the option to say no. The New Jersey Turnpike Authority did not receive the required consent to name a rest stop after the late author Toni Morrison. Bruce Springsteen politely declined.
Delaware has fewer famous sons and daughters than its neighbor to the north. But one of them, Joe Biden, currently runs the country — at least until next January, having said goodbye to the 2024 presidential race on Sunday, weeks after a disastrous performance on the debate stage against Donald Trump. It was an unglamorous end to a political career that some thought had ended, several years earlier, by the time his name appeared on a pit stop off Interstate 95 a few miles south of Wilmington.
The stretch of highway on which the rest stop sits is named for another president: John F. Kennedy. And until 2018, the glass-and-steel edifice, with its energy- and water-efficient design, was the Delaware Department of Transportation Welcome Center. Then the state legislature passed a bill to change the name in honor of Biden, who tended to eschew I-95 traffic in favor of Amtrak, famously commuting by train between Wilmington and Washington, D.C., during his long Senate career.
On a bright day that September, Delaware Gov. John Carney signed the bill right outside the rest stop entrance — with Biden alongside him. Biden had first been elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972. “How in God’s name did they trust a 29-year-old kid to go to the United States Senate?” he mused at the ceremony, referring to a time when people thought he was too young to serve.
When Biden stood beaming beside his sister, wife and daughter in front of the building newly bearing his name and declared the honor “one of the most meaningful things that has happened to our family,” he had served more than six terms as a senator. He had served two terms as vice president. He had chaired powerful Senate committees such as Judiciary and Foreign Affairs. He had run for president twice. Now he had a rest area named for him in his beloved Delaware, a state whose name he said would be written on his heart when he died.
The good-natured acceptance of the honor highlighted Biden’s appeal to some as a perennial underdog who wasn’t afraid to have his name attached to something at which other leaders might scoff. But it’s probably also safe to assume that no one thought through the unfortunate metaphors for the rest stop that could result if Biden did, one day, become president.
“Complete Shithole,” read a 2021 headline in the conservative website the Washington Free Beacon, which found Biden’s rest stop “in disarray,” its stated ambitions for environmental friendliness having devolved into dysfunction. The bathrooms were filthy despite their high-efficiency hand dryers. The Burger King was bereft of crispy chicken, despite its modern touch-screen ordering kiosk. Some of the parking spots for fuel-efficient vehicles were “roped off with caution tape,” even while the center’s namesake president “promised to elevate the electric car industry with $174 billion.”
In May, the Biden Welcome Center made local news when a man’s decomposing body was found in a vehicle outside the rest stop. One Reddit commenter dubbed this “a perfect analogy for our countries [sic] status.”
I showed up at the center on July 10 to check out the post-debate vibes. It was three days before a 20-year-old Pennsylvanian would try to assassinate Trump. The candidacy of the current commander in chief was on the brink of collapse. And a rest stop named for Biden seemed appropriate to the moment: It was a way station on the road to elsewhere. The difference was, most of the people paying a visit there had an idea where they were headed. Even with Biden’s withdrawal and his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats — and the country at large — still do not.
The Biden Welcome Center features the standard rest-stop fare like Auntie Anne’s, Cinnabon, Burger King and Panda Express. Regular gas at the attached Sunoco was around $3.60 a gallon. In line at the Pret, where a plain croissant cost $4.59 (the chocolate one was more than $5), a man behind me muttered that these were “airport prices.”
His name was Ethan, and he was wearing a polo shirt dotted with palm trees. He and his family, who didn’t want to give their full names while discussing politics, were traveling from New York back home to Florida. (They had moved from New York to the Sunshine State in 2023, because of the different pandemic response in the two states.) Ethan said he had wanted to turn around when he saw Biden’s name on the sign. “Let’s just say we’re here for the coffee.”
His wife, Sarrah, who was holding their baby, called Biden’s recent debate performance an embarrassment. “It makes you wonder who is running the country,” she said.
Steps away from the Pret, a few photos in a glass case marked the building’s dedication and the Biden family’s visit there. There was also a mini-shrine to John F. Kennedy near the entrance: A few shelves of photos topped by a metal bust of the former president and a quotation about transportation policy from his appearance in Newark in 1963. He had shown up, eight days before his assassination, to cut the ribbon on the newest section of I-95, from Baltimore, Maryland, to Delaware.
Searching for the hellhole the Washington Free Beacon had described, I did notice that two of the four bathrooms were closed and a wall-mounted box for discarded hypodermic needles in the women’s restroom was full. Paper posters warned bathroom patrons to be on the lookout for human trafficking. Though the sinks worked, most of the wall-mounted soap dispensers did not. A little redheaded boy accompanying his mother helpfully pointed out the spare soap bottles along the sinks.
Yet for the most part it was nice enough as far as rest stops go: generally clean, mostly friendly, lots of light and space, and plentiful charging stations for your phone and laptop. Employees said it was a good place to work.
Like many Americans, they didn’t much care about politics. A facilities guy who declined to give his name said he doesn’t think about the fact that the place is called the Biden Welcome Center. He just thinks about coming to work. Nazhea Briscoe of Maryland, who has been promoted to supervisor at the Pret after working there only six months, didn’t even realize the place bore Biden’s name until she started the job. She is 24 and said she would probably cast her first vote for president this year — in the days before the president’s withdrawal, she said definitely Biden over Trump, but she wasn’t paying attention to the race yet.
Ava Saunders, 19, was supervising the counter at the Z Market, where you can get everything from Tylenol and headphones to condoms and a keychain in the shape of a shark featuring the words “Delaware” and “Bite Me.” She also leaned Biden over Trump, if she had to pick one, but wasn’t terribly engaged with politics beyond thinking, “It’s very sad what’s going on right now.”
Yet the constant cycle of people through rest stops yields all kinds, and I did find more enthusiastic Trump love in the building. “I’m a Trump boy,” said Yefim Palenkern, a grizzled tour bus driver who was taking a break en route from New York to Washington, D.C. He liked the previous name of the rest stop better, he said. He liked the economy better under Trump, too. His employer, Academy Bus Lines, gave drivers a $25 coupon to spend on food at stops like this, and it didn’t go as far as it used to, Palenkern said. He was baffled by those Democrats who were sticking with Biden. “I feel sorry for him sometimes.”
Outside in the heat, a man in aviator sunglasses was getting his picture taken under the sign that read “Thank you for visiting Delaware / Endless Discoveries ™ / Home of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.” He didn’t speak much English but pointed me to the white guy in his four-person group. This was Don Barras from Louisiana, who was on a road trip with his three Guatemalan friends, two of them tourists, another a former co-worker in Houston. They were headed down to Washington after visiting Niagara Falls and the Statue of Liberty in New York. Barras said he wished he could take Biden’s name off the sign, at least for the sake of the pictures, and that he couldn’t wait to pull the lever for Trump. Federico Antonio Marcos, Barras’ former co-worker, was also a Trump fan and agreed with the candidate that there was too much illegal immigration. (A green card holder, he told me that if he were a citizen, he would vote for Trump.) Marcos asked me to take the group’s photo beneath the sign, making sure I got the American and Delaware flags on either side of it.
Elsewhere in the parking lot, I saw a Muslim couple praying on the asphalt beside their SUV, facing a Starbucks. There’s generally something icky and overly commercial about highway rest stops, which are like suburban shopping malls reduced to their most basic elements: bathrooms and feeding troughs. But such places also capture something beautiful about the diversity of America, a country where a white Louisianan Trump supporter might be memorializing his vacation with his Guatemalan buddies, as a Muslim couple worship on the hot pavement and people inside bond over the insanity of croissant prices.
And yet this moment in American politics is one of unease and incoherence. Many have recently pointed to comments Biden made in 2020 about being a “bridge” or “transition” candidate — a political rest stop en route from Trump to whatever the future might be. But while Biden settled the question of his own political future on Sunday, other questions immediately took its place. Could Harris beat Trump? What would be the essence of her campaign? Were Democrats just trading one weak candidate for another? Biden was finally making good on what he seemed to promise four years ago, but was it coming too late for his party?
As I wandered the food court at the rest stop, my phone was lighting up with texts about the gathering push to force him from the ballot. The first serious wave of Democratic defections from Biden in the Senate was underway. Dick Durbin of Illinois was “very concerned.” Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut was “deeply concerned.” Tim Kaine of Virginia had “complete confidence” that Joe Biden would do the “patriotic thing for the country.” “It’s Julius Caesar in the Senate today,” wrote a friend.
Not long afterward, I fell into a chat with a mustachioed biomedical scientist named Edmond Buck. He was driving his Prius from Connecticut to visit his mother in Washington, D.C. Given his gas mileage, the Biden Welcome Center was the only place he needed to refuel on the way, and he liked the food options. Our conversation ranged from Biden’s record and the events of Jan. 6, 2021, to the cognitive linguist and philosopher George Lakoff’s notion of “political families” and how people’s views about the proper role of government can fit into the framework of the “strict father” or the “nurturant parent.” (“I’m sorry you got me started,” he said at one point.) Though Biden’s debate performance was frightening to him, he said he would vote for “a sock” over Donald Trump, which seemed significant since he was sockless in Birkenstocks. But should Biden drop out? “Such a tough one,” he responded with genuine angst.
A custodian named Edward Badey put the problem of choosing between Biden and Trump more succinctly. “One’s senile and the other’s crazy,” he said, pausing briefly from sweeping under and alongside the food court tables. Now Americans won’t have to make that choice. But the uncertainty about the country’s future remains. Badey said he’d come out of retirement to take this job because of the rising cost of living and didn’t know how he would vote come November. Then he resumed clearing away the remnants of other visits to this place where people aren’t meant to linger.
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