A must-see, easy-to-miss relic of Howard Johnson's (just watch your step); FDR country travel guide; good (and bad) neon buzz; Toys 'R' Us, White Castle, DQ and more | Retrologist Roadside Roundup
Plus, following footsteps of Lucille Ball; fried chicken showdown in Queens and more headlines from the road!
The fabled Howard Johnson’s restaurant chain made its last stand in Lake George, New York, where it finally closed last year after a painful decade on the hospitality deathbed.
The HoJo’s here was such a faded representation of the classic Howard Johnson’s experience that it was hard, for me at least, to mourn the closure, as much as job losses pain me. The feeling was more relief than grief.
Unlike many former Howard Johnson’s restaurants, this one will not molder for years, falling victim to the vicissitudes of abandonment. A new operator has stepped in, and will be running a sushi restaurant here, News 10 reported.
I think we can say with certainty that sushi was never a staple of the HoJo’s menu, but it may well have found a place on it had the restaurant chain thrived and kept the innovative edge it once enjoyed in the days when Jacques Pépin was the chain’s culinary north star.
Sushi Wa, a restaurant in nearby Fort Edward, will reportedly by the end of the month open in the former site of the Howard Johnson’s restaurant, which opened in 1956 and was operated by the DeSantis family for most of its existence.
With an all-you-can-eat menu and ever-popular hibachi, Sushi Wa may well find a profitable niche here on Canada Street, where businesses largely cater to busloads of tourists and carloads of families who visit the charming and delightfully kitschy lakeside vacation getaway, the gateway to the Adirondack Mountain region.
The Lake George location meant a lot to me. A visit here in 2008 helped me cope with my lingering grief over the closure of the Howard Johnson’s in Times Square, one of my happy places in New York, a few years earlier. Back in ‘08, the Lake George restaurant still had enough of that old-school HoJo’s feel that it reminded me of the HoJo’s of my childhood in Tarrytown, New York, where my parents threw birthdays for me and my sister in the early 1980s.
Future visits to the Lake George location, in 2015 and 2019, a period when the DeSantis family had handed over the operation to other people, were increasingly disappointing. When the Howard Johnson’s restaurants in Lake Placid, New York, deeper into the Adirondacks, and Bangor, Maine, closed, the Lake George restaurant had become the last HoJo’s standing and turned into something of a media darling. But the press was not always good.
I will be curious to visit Sushi Wa to see if any traces of the old HoJo’s will be extant, from the orange roof down to the original Simple Simon and the Pieman weathervane, below.
Former HoJo’s have a funny way of betraying their roots. Often, it’s something as simple as the hidden orange paint bleeding through, as we see below in Parsippany, New Jersey. (Read more about this location, which also serves as a hibachi restaurant, and other vintage spots in New Jersey that I visited recently.)
But every so often, you find a special trace of HoJo’s, and one of the most astonishing can be found at a Mexican restaurant in Hyde Park, New York, not far from the FDR estate on Route 9.
Though it has not been a Howard Johnson’s since 1982, the restaurant still features a remarkable terrazzo plaque featuring Simple Simon and the Pieman, set in the floor tile by the bar at La Catrina.
Clearly, over the past 41 years, with different restaurant concepts and operators sweeping through the space, not to mention customers, many of the inebriated variety, there have been countless opportunities for this relic to be damaged or destroyed, and yet it has been spared.
There’s something so special and sentimental about it that it’s hard even to contemplate taking a sledgehammer to the terrazzo. Perhaps that aura of wholesome charm has protected it for these four decades.
I thought I had missed my last chance to see it when the Hyde Park Brewing Co. closed last year, but I was stunned to hear the terrazzo had survived when I got a surprising text from Thomas Rinaldi. (Follow him on Instagram and read his excellent books — if you like my stuff, you’ll become a fan of Tom’s, if you aren’t already.)
He told me he’d gone for lunch at the Mexican restaurant, and sure enough, there was the HoJo’s plaque.
It didn’t take long for me to get up there. Just hours later, dragging my parents along, who are always game for a Sunday drive, I was here, snapping a few photos of good old Simple Simon and the Pieman. (The food was pretty good, too.)
Tom explained the significance of the logo in a recent Instagram post:
Probably a total mystery to most who lay eyes on it now, the so-called “pieman” logo was once known coast to coast, one of the most recognizable corporate branding graphics of the 20th century. Said to have been created by industrial designer John Alcott of the firm Alcott, Thoner and Marsh in the 1930s, the logo could eventually be found on everything from matchbooks to weathervanes at more than 1,000 locations when HoJo’s reached its zenith as “the largest restaurant chain in the US” in the 60s and 70s (the last of them closed in March 2022; the brand lives on as a motel chain).
Dip into my archive of Howard Johnson’s coverage here.
What else is there to see in Hyde Park and nearby Rhinebeck? Lots!
OK, so I’ve talked you into visiting this Howard Johnson’s relic in Hyde Park. Here are other cool places to visit in town, a treat especially if you are a fan of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (It goes without saying you’d want to visit his estate as well as Eleanor Roosevelt’s Val-Kill.)
The Roosevelt Theatre, Hyde Park. | Opened in 1949
Hyde Park Drive-In Theatre | Opened in 1950, the theater is presently closed. I reported in March that the National Park Service, which owns the property, was looking for a new operator. The bucolic property cannot be developed thanks to the work of Scenic Hudson.
Roosevelt Inn | Website This inn not only looks cute, it features a neon sign.
The nearby Eveready Diner — pretty awesome as diners go — also features the Delano Room.
Dairy Queen | This vintage location comes complete with lawn cone!
And a little bit up the road, in Rhinebeck, stop at Foster’s Coach House, where you can admire its awesome neon sign.
Alas, the old five and dime in town, A.L. Stickle Variety Store, closed back in May, but here are some shots that you might enjoy. Not sure if the space has been gutted and the signage removed. I was sad to see this. Be sure to read the farewell sign in the window.
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Signposts up ahead!
Tucumcari Tonite! That promise of the billboard slogan has been dimmed by damage to the city’s great neon signs. A hail storm in May damaged signage tubing across this New Mexico city, a key stop on Route 66. The owner of the Blue Swallow Motel, perhaps the most famous sign in the town if not on Route 66, says restoring the signs — which sustained around a million dollars in damage— is essential to the community’s future. He tells KRQE: “I am afraid that if Tucumcari’s neon signs are not repaired, we will see a slow demise of Route 66 tourism in Tucumcari. A lot of businesses will suffer,” said Rob Federico.
This is a great writeup in the Chicago Sun-Times about the Windy City’s new vintage-sign-protection ordinance. (Now that’s something I wish existed in EVERY municipality. Go Chicago!)
The best of these signs did more than just tout businesses. They were part of a neighborhood’s identity.
So kudos to the City Council for passing an ordinance last month aimed at protecting some of Chicago’s vintage retail signs.
Under the old law, a new property owner had to rip down old signs if the building’s previous owner let the city-issued sign permit expire.
But the new ordinance lets commercial signs that are at least 30 years old and have some proven “degree of character and nostalgia” remain in place, subject to city review and a renewable five-year permit.
What’s your favorite sign in Chicago? Central Camera, above and photographed by me in 2018, is one of my favorites.
The historic White Castle in Jackson Heights, Queens, was one of the oldest in the chain dating to the 1930s. I told you about its closure in January 2022, and now I can confirm that it has been replaced by a Popeye’s.
Perhaps feeling the heat in the fryer, the Kentucky Fried Chicken across the street is undergoing a renovation, though it is still open for drive-thru service. This vintage of KFC logo dates the most recent update to the late 1990s/early 2000s.
Not far away, also on Northern Boulevard, are two nice vintage storefronts. This one, below, belongs to a laundry.
It’s very hard to shoot because of a tree outside. And down the street, I love the typeface for Dance Dynamics.
There is a LIQUOR store nearby, too, with nice channel letters, but it was “roped” — LED lighting was put in to replace the neon, and it breaks my heart every time I look that way. I suppose there’s always hope that a more sensitive renovation (even a better LED treatment) could one day be in the offing.
Malls! I love their history and I love exploring them. I grew up with them, and as they die off or change, my interest in their role in our lives has never been greater. Luxurydeptstore on Instagram just let me know about their curated mall-related film series at the Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan. Here is the link with the schedule! From the release:
“Shopping Worlds” offers an escape from the August heat with a selection of mall-core classics, including DAWN OF THE DEAD, MALLRATS, and Chantal Akerman’s GOLDEN EIGHTIES. The mall as a spectacle in and of itself – “retail theatre” as it has been called (by none other than a senior vice-president of the Muzak corporation) – is also on full display in NOCTURAMA, THE PHANTOM OF THE MALL, OBSERVE AND REPORT, and CHOPPING MALL. The once legendary locale for “people watching” has become its own focus of discourse, with documentaries like Frederick Wiseman’s THE STORE, Harun Farocki’s THE CREATORS OF SHOPPING WORLDS, and Hugh Kinniburgh’s MALL CITY laying the structural groundwork for a cultural and aesthetic appreciation of the shopping mall by exploring its architectural elaboration, its civic function, and the economic and technological shifts that brought it into being. A more instinctual, niche form of mall mania thrives in the corners of the internet, as both those who grew up at the mall and those who are too young to have experienced its heyday connect over their shared, emotionally-charged preoccupation with dead and decaying shopping malls. In her book “Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall”, Alexandra Lange, invoking Ray Bradbury’s writings on urban planning, describes the mall as “Somewhere to Go”, an idea that forms a peculiar liminality between human experience and commercial excess.
As shopping (and for that matter, movie watching) increasingly becomes an online, home-bound endeavor, “Shopping Worlds” invites you out, to explore the many different dimensions – historical, cultural, social, and aesthetic – that the mall continues to embody.
Back in January, when I last posted the epic storefront of Pizzaland in North Arlington, New Jersey, Homefront Designs reached out with a beautiful illustration inspired by my photo. Later, they kindly sent along what is now one of my favorite pieces of wall art, and it enjoys pride of place in Retrologist office headquarters, where I am writing this!
I encourage you to check out Homefront Design’s work at their new website, which you can visit here. They can turn your favorite sign or storefront into art that will elevate life in your home or office!
Which reminds me, I’m due to visit Pizzaland again — their slice is scrumptious. It doesn’t hurt that the place was immortalized in the opening credits of “The Sopranos” and is a shrine to the late James Gandolfini. Check out my tour of Tony Soprano’s New Jersey below:
The New York Times visits the Los Angeles hamburger-and-pie classic Apple Pan, a West Side mainstay since 1947. I had an exquisite meal here in December 2000. I can’t satisfactorily answer why I have not returned, but I intend to correct that soon. At the link, the great Huell Howser visits Apple Pan! Oh, how I wish I had met Huell. He’s with me on every road trip — tacked above my car’s rearview mirror is a brass Huell pin I received from KCET as thanks for contributing to the station’s effort to digitize Huell’s archive. It’s — I have to say it — AMAZING!
The owner of Mike’s Diner Bar in Palo Alto, California, was a day late on his $22,000 A MONTH rent — and now he’s facing eviction, reports Palo Alto Online.
The Tasting Table highlights one of my Manhattan favorites, the Lexington Candy Shop, and discusses how they make their own Coca-Cola. Here’s the piece on the candy shop I produced last year with Brittany Winderman.
When I published my guide to Maryland Fried Chicken locations, I marveled at discovering there was a location in Michigan, well away from the Southeastern base of this old chain. Jeff Jolly on Instagram at the time promised he’d send along a picture of the location next time he was in Imlay City — and he just did, above. I’d like to get up that way and interview the owners. The photo has been added to my Maryland Fried Chicken guide, which you can explore below. (Premium for patrons of my newsletter.)
Heath Racela at Willoughby Hills goes north of the border, where you can still be a Toys “R” Us kid. I had a similar experience last year, and you can read more about my visit to a Canadian Toys “R” Us here. As I wrote, “If a corner Toys “R” Us outlet at Macy’s just won’t do, visit Canada, where Toys “R” Us kids don’t have to grow up.”
Today is Lucille Ball’s birthday. She was born 112 years ago! Celebrate by exploring her hometown with me in the Retrologist’s guide to Jamestown, New York, below.
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I don't know if you've posted about this place before, but we found it several years ago, and checking on Google Maps, it looks like it's still there. It's sort of a place that time forgot. If you have the chance, check out the Green Arch Restaurant, 103 Elm St. in Cortland NY. The neon is lovely outside and if they haven't updated the interior, it looks like it hasn't changed since the 40s. Keep up the good work, we enjoy your emails!
As far as Chicago neon signs go, nothing tops the magic giant flashing neon red lips of the Magikist sign now long defunct. You could see it from the expressway and as a kid that meant we were driving somewhere special in the city like a museum, restaurant, the zoo or some other adventure. Those giant lips were the present, future, and past all rolled into one and a signpost for excitement to come. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magikist