By Amanda Cockrell Like the Route 66 of my childhood, I love Route 11 for its mythic quality, an attribute that its successor, I-81, lacks entirely. It’s not just a matter of scenery, or the occasional cow in the road. Route 11 goes where the people are — it goes through cities, not around them. You won’t generally find upscale places to eat or shop along its path, but you will find a pawn shop and a gas station with a jackleg mechanic on a Saturday afternoon. If you want to see a city’s back porch, take Route 11.

Route 11 comes into Roanoke from the north as Williamson Road. There you will find both those things as well as places to get a used car, really good Mexican pastry, a tattoo, and a lot more. Then it bends through Downtown, where it is pretty spiffy for a few blocks, heads up Salem Avenue, unspiffs, turns left at the multicolored fence (a local directional landmark) onto 13th Street and heads toward the Memorial Bridge. And just before the bridge, there it is... the place of my dreams, Black Dog Salvage. Black Dog itself is pretty upscale these days, having recently transformed its building into the Memorial Bridge Marketplace, with a new paint job and a jazzy sign. But its heart is still pure. You can still roam among rows of old doors; stacks of claw-foot bathtubs; disembodied mantels propped drunkenly against the walls; ornamental radiators, scabrous and paint-curling but full of potential; wrought iron fencing; a Tara-like collection of columns (any Southern house needs one of those, I’m going to put mine in the dining room); leaded glass windows, concrete bird baths, and cast iron lawn dogs.

It’s like a distillation of Route 11 itself: decaying architecture, potential artsiness, folk chic, surrounded by the fence from someone’s family graveyard. It even has a real black dog, snoozing in the parking lot. Black Dog had its origins in the demolition of a historic Roanoke house at 21 Highland Avenue. Mike Whiteside met business partner Robert Kulp when they got together over lunch to talk about building Whiteside a garage. The conversation slid into Whiteside’s notions about starting an architectural salvage business, and Kulp mentioned the Highland Avenue house. They made a deal with the demolition company, and removed the entire interior and much of the exterior, including the columns and granite foundation stone. The resulting resale grew into Black Dog Salvage, named for Whiteside’s black lab Molly. Whiteside and Kulp have tried, as Whiteside puts it, “to educate the city” about saving historic architecture, even in pieces. He hates to see old houses torn down but, “When they’re going to hit the ground anyway, we want to get in ahead of the ball.”

Begun in a lot on Franklin Road a convenient half mile from the Highland house, the business moved in April 2003 to the Memorial Bridge site, into a crumbling neighborhood eyesore which Whiteside and Kulp renovated. They plan to fill half the sprawling warehouse with “an eclectic interior design mall.” Among the project’s future tenants are a faux painter, a photographer, artists, antique dealers, a tile merchant, and interior designer.

Architectural salvage is hot. On a spring Saturday, a truck from a firm in New York was parked in Black Dog’s yard, buying wholesale for their New York City showroom. Black Dog sells to decorators local and otherwise, and individual shoppers who come to browse among the salvage and eccentric mix of antiques which dot the warehouse: a primordial television with a round screen, a row of jewel-toned soda siphons in yellow and purple and green, a hatbox with a shirred silk hat labeled Miller & Rhoads. Ten years ago, says Whiteside, architectural salvage wasn’t “mainstream.” Now it’s chic, one of the fastest growing sections on eBay, where Black Dog also sells its stuff. Black Dog is a destination stop for shoppers from Charlotte, Washington, Beckley, Greensboro, and Richmond, who come to stare through disembodied windows and think about what a large iron crocodile would look like in the day lily bed.

Whiteside and Kulp buy their goods locally, getting ahead of the wrecking ball, and from importers whose stock comes from China, India, England, Argentina, and anywhere else. Right now, says Whiteside, “I’m talking to a guy in Ireland about a Victorian train station.” Molly, the eponymous canine matriarch, is in residence most days, happy to greet customers and cadge dog biscuits, providing a certain historical nostalgia for the days when every grocery store had its resident cat asleep in the oranges. There’s something about Black Dog Salvage that sums up Route 11: a respect for history even when its paint is peeling; an inborn resistance to change, eccentrically coupled with a willingness to see art in oddity.

And you know you need a piece of a Victorian train station.