The Landscapes of Early Automobile Registration and Licensing Laws: Creating New Jersey’s Department of Motor Vehicles, 1903 to 1957

Abstract

The offices and facilities of New Jersey’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) are mundane boxes of concrete, glass, linoleum, and fluorescent lights, and yet they have a backstory to tell about the slow incorporation of the automobile into everyday American life at the turn of the twentieth century. Urban historians and geographers have attended to the development of everything from asphalt to stop signs, gas stations to automobile dealerships, motels to restaurants, bypass roads to the federal highway system, but not the government offices and facilities developed to service automobile regulation. The goal of this article is to detail the creation and evolution of DMV offices and facilities in the state of New Jersey, between 1903 and 1957: why they took the form they did and how they changed over time. These landscapes, perceived today as utterly ordinary and banal, are the tangible, physical expression of how people in the early 1900s struggled to live safely and fairly with the automobile.