Concerns swirl over epic 1960s Arby's; a Motor City Miracle; and more sweet and sour news from the American roadside
Here's your Retrologist Roadside Briefing for June 5, 2024
There are rumblings about demolition plans for a beautifully intact vintage Arby’s in Huntington Beach, California.
I made my second visit to the store at 7942 Edinger Ave. (off Beach Boulevard) a couple of weeks ago, and finally shot the incredibly rare Western-themed mosaic floor inside.
The original Conestoga wagon building — and the neon-and-light-bulb “10-gallon hat” sign — survive, too. This store opened in January 1969, or perhaps just before. An ad touts the news in the Jan. 7, 1969, edition of the Orange County Register.
Incredibly, the place today looks EXACTLY AS IT DID in this 55-year-old advertisement. (See more vintage Arby’s over at roadarch.com)
Merch Motel on Instagram, citing Atomic Redhead, reports:
This is one of the last remaining original Arby’s restaurants, and an application was submitted to demolish the building in Huntington Beach.
I love this Arby’s, the building is shaped like a Conestoga Wagon next to the huge original neon sign, and inside you’ll find those mosaic tiles!
This Arby’s location might be the best preserved of them all, and it might disappear forever. I believe it opened in the late 1960s.
Thank you @atomic_redhead for letting me know about this.
Emails to contact to share your concern: permitcenter@surfcity-hb.org
Gracey.VanDerMark@surfcity-hb.org
Address: 7942 Edinger Ave
Huntington Beach, CA 92647
@arbys please preserve this building.
It would be remarkable if corporate stepped in and did something about this — perhaps making it a “heritage” location. I wish they had done that in Boardman, Ohio, where the chain’s first store opened in 1964.
The original building is still there, and recently was on the market after serving as a bird store for decades. Arby’s long ago moved the “first store” designation to a new structure across the street.
They missed an opportunity to buy back the original building and, at the very least, turn it into a museum/cafe. They could have also purchased an old 10-gallon hat for the location or commissioned a new one.
That quiet fantasy did not come to pass, but it’s a notable idea for the Huntington Beach location.
What do you think?
NOTED: Confirmed closings in the news include the wonderful Mrs. Hanna Krause’s Homemade Candy in Paramus, New Jersey, and, as I told you in an earlier newsletter, Whitestone Lanes in Queens, New York. Its fate is sealed — here comes a housing development — but the New York Post stopped by anyway to stir the pot with longtime customers. I’m all for this kind of New York Postian pot-stirring, but I don’t think it will make a difference in this case.
NOTED II: News that Hanna Krause is closing has caused a ruckus at the unrelated Krause’s Candies in Paterson, New Jersey, which is NOT closing despite the confusion the other news has generated.
A Rail Miracle: Michigan Central Station sumptuously restored in Detroit
Michigan Central Station in Detroit, one of the worthies of America’s great train stations, had fallen into seemingly irreversible dereliction after closing in 1988. By the early 21st century, it had become a magnet for scavengers and social-media documentarians of urban collapse. Hollywood, too, knew it was a reliable filming locale if societal calamity was the desired backdrop.
In yet another sign of architectural revival in the Motor City and against considerable odds, the transportation palace has been restored and reimagined under a project funded by the Ford Motor Co., an appropriate savior in that cars (and the interstates that carried them) were the kryptonite for trains (and the railroad hubs that served them) in the 20th century.
The restoration of New York’s Grand Central Terminal in the late 1990s is rightly held up as one of the greatest achievements of its kind. Now, the unlikely revival of Michigan Central Station can compete in this refined category.
Even some of those scavengers returned their purloined relics when word spread of the ambitious plans to restore the station.
Ford has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to restore the building it purchased for $90 million in 2018. The company intends to create a sprawling campus where the future of transportation challenges in America is crafted while opening the building to the public with restaurants, performance spaces, shopping, and more.
William Ford, the great-grandson of the founder, Henry Ford, told the New York Times:
“Our industry is about to change radically, and that change ought to be invented here,” Mr. Ford said. “It clicked for me that was the perfect purpose for Michigan Central Station.”
He added: “We want Detroit to once again be a destination where the future is invented, and preserve its title as the Motor City for generations to come.”
In all, Ford will spend nearly $1 billion to create a 30-acre campus, ultimately with thousands of workers, with the station as the centerpiece — along with other buildings the company owns, including Newlab, a former book depository next door that opened last year and currently houses 97 startups and about 600 workers.
The company hopes the station, in its vibrant urban setting, will lure top-notch talent at a perplexing time for the fiercely competitive auto industry, as it sorts out its future with autonomous, electric and hybrid vehicles. The company expects most of the campus to come online in three to five years, with the first tenants moving into the station in June and some Ford workers moving in this fall.
WDIV got a preview of the restored structure, which you can watch below.
To mark this new era, a concert will be held at the Michigan Central Station on Thursday. Performers will include Detroit’s very own Eminem, who filmed a music video here, 2009’s “Beautiful,” during the days of inexorable decline.
The place was beautiful in its own way then, but there can be no question about that assessment now.
Retrologist Roadside News Ticker …
Atlanta’s oldest Black church, Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, has long been known to passersby for its “Jesus Saves” sign on its steeple. Now, a marker has been added to shed light on the church’s history.
Hawaii’s long-shuttered historic Jaggar Museum is being demolished after the building at Kilauea’s summit was damaged in a series of 2018 earthquakes.
It’s nice to know this world still has cobblers, but we’re about to lose what is apparently the very last one on Long Island’s East End. Fred Ruvolo opened his Riverhead shop, The Village Cobbler Shoppe, in 1971. At 72, he is a year older than the 20th century was the year he went into business, a time when his trade was a common one in downtowns across the land. Now, a big part of that world is ending with him.
This sign did stand a ghost a chance. Rather than let it fade away, the people of Shellsburg, Iowa, broke out the virtual tin cup and then filled it themselves, saving the Gold Medal Flour mural from the 1920s.
Alas, this sign did NOT stand a ghost of a chance, after haunting a Pennsylvania wall for over a century.
I’m an Atlas Obscura devotee, so you can’t go wrong with this list of 17 diners that revel in retro Americana, not all in the United States.
Australians are apparently obsessed now with American diners, too, and their hearty breakfast fare.
The city that never sleeps is a little sleepier than it was. There was a time when saying a New York City diner was open 24 hours was stating the obvious. Now, it’s headline news.
Lots of diner news today, and the man to whom we owe so much of our knowledge and understanding of them is Richard J.S. Gutman, who is being feted in an amazing exhibit, Dick Gutman, DINERMAN, at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. I hope to visit this summer and will bring you more news later, but I wanted to put this show on your radar as you plan your adventures this year. In the meantime, follow him on Instagram.
LA’s Original Pantry Cafe is turning 100! On my last visit — in 2008, alas — I noticed, with a burst of enthusiasm, how the floor, see photo below, was well worn by the cash register, subtle and beautiful evidence of the passage of time and the place’s enduring popularity. The proprietor noted my interest in the place and shared brochures and postcards with me — an act of kindness I appreciated.
Some people like to apply white paint on historic brick facades — for some reason. Others — my kind of people — don’t. To wit, read this dispatch on a “travesty” that went down in Lakeland, Florida.
After over 70 years, two massive — and massively beloved — plywood bears have been removed from the Polar King restaurant in Gresham, Oregon. They were taken down when the owner was advised during roof work that the bears posed a safety risk. Fortunately, the local historical society managed to save them.
Scoops, a 40-year-old Brooklyn ice cream shop, is facing eviction.
Brooklyn’s legendary Totonno’s Pizzeria Napolitana faces an uncertain future as the Coney Island business, which turns 100 this year and has survived its share of calamities, is placed on the market.
Below, please enjoy a nicely written, shot and edited profile — with CBS Sunday Morning vibes but produced for the owned station in New York — of John Diakakis, the blind man who owns New Jersey’s Bendix Diner in Hasbrouck Heights. He is a joy, a blessing and a great deal of fun, and you need to visit to experience this beautiful diner, and his bright, bantering presence. The Times also just filed a report with lovely cartoons about the Bendix, and here’s their take. The Bendix and its owner bring out the artists in all of us.
The doomed 99 Cents Only stores — 170 of them anyway — get a last-minute white knight thanks to Dollar Tree’s divine intervention. Dollar Tree snapped up IP rights to the bankrupt brand in Arizona, California, Nevada and Texas.
A McPizza comeback in the offing? Well, sorta.
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I really hope Arby’s corporate owner steps up asap and saves the amazingly well-preserved 7942 Edinger Ave location. This Conestoga Wagon styled building and its ten gallon hat sign are highly unique, historically important contributions to restaurant architectural and marketing design. This should be an easy decision for Arby’s coroorate to make.
I love that Huntington Beach location. They also still have the original Stone back wall behind the kitchen that used to be such an esthetic presence in all the old Arby's. I truly hope they can try and preserve this building instead of demolishing it. The mosaic floor alone with the old original logo is priceless.