Every coast-to-coast drive in America once ended the same way: at a red light in downtown Wallace. Interstate 90 runs more than 3,000 miles from Seattle to Boston, and for years the entire route was a modern, limited-access freeway, except for a few blocks in this little silver town in the Idaho Panhandle, where the interstate simply stopped, funneled every car and truck down Wallace's streets, and made them all wait at a single traffic signal.
The gap was no accident. The Federal Highway Administration originally planned to carry I-90 straight through Wallace at ground level, an alignment that would have demolished much of the historic downtown. Wallace sits in a narrow canyon with barely room for its own streets, and the freeway would have taken the heart of the town with it.
So Wallace fought back with paperwork. In the 1970s, city leaders set out to place downtown on the National Register of Historic Places. The Wallace Historic District was listed in 1979, and an expanded listing followed in 1983, until every building in downtown Wallace stood on the Register. Because federal law protects listed historic places from the harmful effects of highway construction, the government had to go back to the drawing board.
The answer was to lift the highway over the town. Engineers designed an elevated viaduct that carries I-90 along the north side of Wallace, above the streets it once threatened. Building it meant moving one landmark out of the way: on May 10, 1986, the historic Northern Pacific Depot was shifted about 200 feet to clear space for the viaduct.
While the lawyers argued and the engineers built, the interstate waited. Traffic left the finished freeway at both ends of town and followed the old surface highway, the former U.S. Route 10, through downtown. At the corner of Sixth and Bank Streets stood the lone signal, soon famous far beyond Idaho as the last stoplight on a coast-to-coast interstate highway.
In September 1991, the Wallace Viaduct opened, completing the final gap in Interstate 90 and ending Wallace's reign as the one pause in a 3,000-mile drive. The town marked the moment the only way it could: with a funeral. The retired stoplight was laid in a casket and carried through town in a horse-drawn hearse, complete with bagpipes, while residents celebrated the strange honor it had brought them.
The stoplight still rests in its casket today, on display at the Wallace District Mining Museum on Bank Street, a few steps from the corner where it once stopped traffic on America's longest interstate. Downtown signs still proclaim Wallace "The Last Stoplight," and the old route through town is now Interstate 90 Business.
The corner itself never lost its fame. The same intersection of Sixth and Bank Streets later gained a second claim on the map when Wallace proclaimed the manhole cover there the Center of the Universe, and drivers who once cursed the red light now stop on purpose to stand on the spot. A bicycle path runs beneath the viaduct, and the Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes passes through town where the trains used to run.
Stand on Bank Street today and you can look up at the viaduct humming along the hillside, then back down at the brick storefronts it was built to spare. Wallace did not stop the interstate. It did something smarter: it made the interstate go around, and kept its town.
Photograph: The Interstate 90 viaduct above Wallace, by SounderBruce, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.