On my recent trip to South Dakota, I visited Wall Drugs and the Corn Palace. I expected kitsch. I got art and history. Nice surprises in both cases. Wall Drug kicked off it reign back in the 1930s when the owners wife thought it might be a good idea to offer visitors a free glass of ice water. Back then it was a better draw than clean bathrooms. Now Wall Drug occupies at least two city blocks, if not more, sells lots of Nick-knacks, has clean bathrooms, but most importantly it’s wall are covered throughout with black and white pictures of the old days where you can literally see South Dakota grow up.

At one point the Corn Palace was one of about 30 or so corn palaces that dotted the South Dakota landscape to capitalize on the region’s big crop. Nowadays it’s the world’s only corn palace. The outside of the building is decorated with murals made of various colored corn and they’re continuously renewed and they’re what I, an amateur art critic, would consider great examples of art deco. Fascinating and lovely to look at. And inside there’s an entire wall dedicated to explaining the process and showing examples of past work.

Both cases, Wall Drugs and the Corn Palace, also are great examples of what the country looked like before we homogenized everything and made our cities a bland pastiche of big box stores and fast food outlets. Of course, that’s an over-simplification. On the surface our cities are bland, but in the nooks and crannies you can still find the individuals and idiosyncrasies that make places special. They’re just harder to find these days. Which is why it was so nice to find these two cities that you literally can’t find anywhere else but South Dakota.