Photograph by Johnathan Esper
Malfunction Junction, Dysfunction Junction, Spaghetti Junction, Crazy Corners—or, often for first-timers, What the Hell. Those are a few of the epithets for the intersection of Routes 9 and 73, in New Russia, a head-scratching tangle of road plopped into the middle of the wilderness. Plenty of folks—even longtime locals—assume that the jumble was dreamed up to tame traffic to the five-ring circus at Lake Placid’s 1980 Winter Olympics. There’s a logic to that. In the run-up to the Games, The New York Times reported that officials expected more than 50,000 ticket holders a day to flood into the area, half to come up the Adirondack Northway to Route 73.
But this engineering anomaly was actually built in the late 1950s, in the days before the Northway, when Route 9 was a hopping thoroughfare between Albany and Montreal. Back then traffic would often back up at this busy spot, where Route 73 starts and Route 9 takes an almost 90-degree turn toward Elizabethtown. The newfangled design allowed the once-heavier traffic on Route 9 to keep up its steady flow. A satisfying explanation—but less poetic than one put forth by a Reddit user last year: “I think the original designer got bit by a black fly and died so they just had to scramble and ended up hiring a loon or something to finish it off.”
