One woman's quest to save a New Jersey diner; Arby's hat set to vamoose; great 'Goonies' news | Roadside Roundup
Plus, a much-anticipated 'sign garden' is set to open and more news from the home of 'The Great American Retro Road Trip'
The Retrologist newsletter often imparts sad news -- heartbreaking closures of places we know and love, treasured signs felled by man or nature. It is an occupational hazard on this particular news beat. But here’s something different to begin my latest dispatch — a tale that, rather than wreck the heart, actually restores it.
A woman who grew up in Little Falls, New Jersey, is trying to save her long-shuttered hometown diner. The Little Falls Diner has been closed almost as long as Dana Schaeffer has been alive, but she took an interest in the diner even as a child, wondering why it couldn’t be reopened as she peered through its windows.
Sometimes, listening to the wisdom of that inner child trapped inside each of us can set us on a virtuous path, perhaps a foreordained one.
Schaeffer is walking that path.
This iteration of the Little Falls Diner was built around 1947 by Master Diners and closed on March 20, 1995, the victim of a kitchen fire. It has declined into a beautiful, mysterious ruin over the past 30 years.
The owners of the diner and the land beneath it, Cestone Associates, were poised to demolish the building after attempts to revive it were never realized. Schaeffer, who is friendly with the owners, stepped in, hoping to rescue it before there is nothing left to save.
Her plan is to save the diner by moving it to another spot, ideally still in Little Falls, keeping the name and the vintage vibe while updating the menu to a farm-to-table concept. The undertaking will undoubtedly cost an ungodly amount of money, and she’s hoping that supporters of her vision — it has the backing of City Hall, eager to revitalize this part of town — might pitch in within their areas of expertise to help get the job done.
It will take a village to save this diner.
Follow Dana’s story on the Little Falls Diner Instagram and check out her website devoted to saving New Jersey diners.
Consider this newsletter a prelude to a profile on Dana’s efforts that I will produce for my newsletter and ABC Localish later this month.
Here’s some more good news: You can count a shuttered Jersey diner back in the “open” column. The Roadside Diner in Wall, New Jersey, which closed in March, is back in business under new but battle-tested ownership, diner expert Michael Gabriele reports. The goal is to open by Memorial Day or early June. The Roadside appears on the cover of the 1994 Bon Jovi album, “Cross Road.”
Overall, the news on the Jersey diner beat remains grim. For instance, the Bendix Diner of Hasbrouck Heights will stay closed and is for sale (see my earlier post here), and the numbers back up the sense that we are witnessing a mass extinction. New Jersey is reportedly down to just 15 diners that are still open 24 hours a day, and dozens of these architectural marvels have fallen over the past decade here in the Garden State.
Before we move on to other news, here is a reminder that many of the places in today’s newsletter — and hundreds more that are not — are featured in my new book, “The Great American Retro Road Trip.” It’s available for preorder wherever you get your books!
Retrologist Roadside Roundup:
HAT’S OFF — BUT TO WHERE? The fate of the Arby’s sign in Hollywood, California, at the 1969 location that closed last year, remains uncertain. The site will become a Raising Cane’s, the booming chicken-finger chain. While the building will be renovated and expanded, the hat sign will not stay. (Raising Cane’s is building its own sign.) Quoted in SFGATE, a spokesperson for Raising Cane’s said Arby’s has expressed interest in moving the sign to another location in the Los Angeles area, which would be exciting news. The spokesperson said the chicken chain has been working with preservationists on the sign’s ultimate disposition. Raising Cane’s is clearly treading carefully here, as it inadvertently summoned holy hell against itself last year when it attempted to move into the revered home of Norms, a masterpiece of coffee-shop Googie design, on La Cienega Boulevard in West Hollywood. The backlash sent Raising Cane’s packing. Above is a photo from my visit to the Arby’s in July 2024, when the site had been closed only for a month but had already fallen into graffiti-marked dereliction.
Jack in the Box is looking to close up to 200 locations as it struggles with the balance-sheet blues, aggravated by its purchase of Del Taco, which the hamburger giant might be looking to unload, not envisioning meaningful near-term cash flow from the Mexican-food chain. (Inflation and a swinging-and-hitting Taco Bell have not helped.)
A production designer has been brought in by the new owners of the “Goonies” house in Astoria, Oregon, with big plans to give it an 1980s makeover ahead of the 40th anniversary of the film’s release. Every frame of the film shot in the house has been studied to recreate the look in the home. And while it’s not clear how Joe Q. Public will have access to the house, the owner is determined to share it with fans, one way or another. Check out my visit to Astoria (and all its “Goonies” goodness) right here. This reminds me of how “The Brady Bunch” house in Studio City, California, was renovated to appear just as it did, inside and out, on the 1969-74 ABC sitcom. (Of course, in that case, the interiors were never in the house, which was only used for the establishment shots, but on Stage 5 at Paramount Television.)
Hey you guys! Take a 'Goonies' tour of Astoria, Oregon
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There must be something in the air. Two of the most famous houses featured in 1980s cult film classics recently hit the market.
Miller’s Luncheonette was a staple of Findlay, Ohio, until it closed in 2007 after a particularly devastating flood. (Miller’s was all too familiar with floods and even fire.) The sign was salvaged and made its way to the Hancock Historical Museum, where a new exhibit gives a taste of the soda-fountain experience at Miller’s.
A Jersey shore motel that’s been in the same family for 70 years is hitting the market. For $10.5 million, the Windswept Motel in Point Pleasant Beach could be yours. I’d need one heck of a windfall to afford it, but a boy can dream, right?
The sad fate that awaited the Chateau Bleu Motel in North Wildwood has come to pass: the motel was demolished. To make matters worse, the letters of the “fontastic” sign were stolen, too. Three homes will be built on the land. My earlier post on the motel is here.
The historic Mountaineer Inn, a staple of Asheville, North Carolina, is facing foreclosure over unpaid taxes. The motel, famous for its gigantic neon sign featuring a barefoot, rifle-toting man, was sold in 2023 to LOGE, a hospitality group that caters to outdoors enthusiasts. It’s billed as LOGE’s first location in the South. The entity that runs the property has been moving to renovate it, seeking permits for a range of work. It remains unclear what will happen next. My photo, below, is from a February 2019 visit.
We tend not to see Vegas-style hotel implosions in the New York region, but the demolition of New Jersey’s Sheraton Mahwah, which opened in 1987, was a sight to behold on Saturday. The building was an unofficial landmark, a skyscraper poking out from the trees and suburban office parks on the New York-New Jersey border, a beacon for motorists along the busy highways.
Mesa’s much-anticipated Neon Garden, planted with some of the Arizona city's most iconic signs, will hold a lighting ceremony on Thursday, May 15. Among the signs in the collection is Bill Johnson’s Big Apple, below, which I shot when it was still outside its original location in 2018. I’m particularly excited about the return of the Watson’s Flowers sign, a towering beauty that was felled by a windstorm in 2014.
The sign for Pietro’s Pizza in Milwaukie, Oregon, has been removed, with “word on the street” it will turn up at the pizzeria’s new location nearby, which is under construction. I visited Pietro’s back in 2020, and here’s an earlier newsletter discussing the big move.
Pizza Hut's 'Hut Lane'; tears for a Chicagoland classic and fears for an old-school Pietro's Pizza location; facelift for a California burger joint's sign | Retrologist Roadside Roundup
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When I think of a classic pizza parlor where I could spend some idealized Friday night in a misty-eyed manifestation of my lost youth, I think of Pietro’s in Milwaukie, Oregon. The building’s candy-stripe facade, the old-timey lettertype composed of lightbulbs, the neon sign of the pizza man brandishing two pies — how can you not look at this and marvel…
A touch of MiMo in Manhattan (Rolando Pujol/2024) CUNY, New York City’s public university system, has acquired more space in a former midtown Manhattan hotel turned dormitory designed by Miami Beach master architect Morris Lapidus. These future dorms come with a steep price tag — $86 million. The hotel, built in 1961, was originally known as The Summit, and its swanky Miami Modernism was always wonderfully out of place in the staid business precincts of Manhattan’s East Side. (And the subject of complaints by New Yorkers who like to complain about such things.) In its final hotel incarnation, it was doing business as a DoubleTree when pandemic woes shuttered it.
From The Land of Sky Blue Waters comes a refreshing revelation: A long-hidden mural for Hamms Beer in Sioux City, Iowa, so excellent I feel compelled to get out there and see it as soon as possible. It’s at the former site of the Red Room Lounge, and while I hope it will be saved, this is not my first rodeo. Go if you can. Now ideally.
One of the original Pennsylvania Station pink-granite eagles, which had been in storage since 2019, has found a new nest near Penn Station. Unlike others that were part of the original Penn Station, horrifically demolished in the 1960s, this eagle stood outside the modern Penn Station until being put away in 2019. It’s now back in a park nearby. Eighteen are known to have survived intact.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s skyscraper, the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, has found a new owner. It’s the only skyscraper the great man ever had built, its design based on a tree and originally intended as part of a set of apartment towers in Manhattan that were never built.
Papa Cristo's, the beloved 77-year-old Greek restaurant in the Pico-Union District of Los Angeles, has closed. Heartbroken fans of the place can take comfort in a small thing: spices from Papa Cristo’s are for sale online.
Cheese n Stuff, a Phoenix mainstay since 1949, was set to close last month but has not. Whither the delicatessen’s beloved globe sign? [Ed note: Updated 6/4/25)
Claudio’s, a historic dockside restaurant in the fishing village of Greenport, New York, is losing its name and reopening with a new concept this spring, Newsday reported. (The Claudio’s name will survive in an expansion to the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas.) It’s good that the name will live on, as the original Claudio’s was opened by a fellow named Manuel Claudio, who arrived in Greenport aboard a Portuguese whaling ship in the 1850s and opened his restaurant in 1870. It enjoyed a good, long run in the Claudio family until 2018, when they sold. According to the National Restaurant Association, it was America’s long-running restaurant operated by the same family.
Another legacy Long Island restaurant, Hildebrandt’s, is in the news for a very different reason. The luncheonette sponsored Junior Alvarado, the jockey who rode Sovereignty to victory in the Kentucky Derby. Sovereignty will not be entered in the Preakness Stakes in Baltimore, dashing prospects of a Triple Crown winner this year.
The renovation of a Long Island theater yields long-concealed treasures.
A Manhattan recreation center that the parks department closed years ago and appears determined to demolish is in salvageable condition, according to preservationists who visited last month. And there’s a glimmer of hope that the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center may have a future after all, along with its Keith Haring mural.
The remnants of the Arne’s Royal Hawaiian Motel in Baker, California, have been demolished, but at last check, the sign was still standing. I had the pleasure of visiting the roadside relic in July of last year. The motel was built in 1957 and was for years a reliable stop on I-15 connecting Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The motel fell on hard times and has been closed since 2009.
Another sad situation for a roadside remnant: The sign for Sun ‘n Sand Motel in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, recently collapsed in a windstorm, and, at last update, was still sadly supine. It would need immense love (and money) to be saved, but look at it — it deserves all of that and more. I visited in June 2013.
The Tucson Inn, purchased by Pima Community College for restoration and use, was demolished after the school changed course, and a last-ditch legal battle to save it failed. Two other motels, the Frontier Motel and the Copper Cactus Inn, on West Drachman Street, were also demolished. The Tucson Inn’s gorgeous sign was restored in 2022, and for now, it is still there.
On a much happier note, the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego, that seaside dowager of a destination, has been lavishly restored to its 1888 grandeur. (My photo, below, is from 2014.) The obscure 1972-73 TV series “Ghost Story” had episodes filmed here when the paranormal anthology program was hosted by Sebastian “Mr. French” Cabot. (1959’s Billy Wilder classic “Some Like It Hot” will undoubtedly be a more familiar Hotel Del reference.)
The Chrysler-Plymouth tower sign, in Bristow, Oklahoma, along Route 66, will be restored after decades of neglect, and will get neon tubing for the first time on all three sides. The goal is to have it finished by next year’s 100th anniversary of the Mother Road.
Mister Softee trucks are an icon of summer in New York City and elsewhere, and the jingle attracts children of all ages like a Pied Piper of soft serve. In Long Island’s East Islip, you can now visit a brick-and-mortar Mister Softee. I checked it out the other day. While rare, storefront Mister Softees do exist elsewhere, including in Yorktown, New York and in South New Jersey. There’s also a Mister Softee stand at the TWA Hotel in Kennedy Airport.
You may have assumed Boston Market was gone, another once-popular chain that lingers only in a few zombie stores, links that are no longer part of a chain. That’s true, but the owner of the company has found an unconventional way to resume growth, with a new Boston Market opening in the Buffalo area.
And finally, a roadside stop of a decidedly 21st-century bent: Starbucks has opened its first 3D-printed store (you read that right) in Brownsville, Texas. This store only offers drive-thru service, but will undoubtedly draw plenty of curious customers to take a picture.
END NOTE: America’s most-endangered historic places
The National Trust for Historic Preservation has published its list of 11 most-endangered historic places of 2025. Details here.
The places are:
Terminal Island Japanese American Tuna Street Buildings, Los Angeles, Calif.
The Chateau at Oregon Caves, Caves Junction, Ore.
May Hicks Curtis House, Flagstaff, Ariz.
Mystery Castle, Phoenix
San Juan Hotel, San Juan, Texas
Cedar Key, Fla.
Hotel Casa Blanca, Idlewild, Mich.
French Broad and Swannanoa River corridors in western North Carolina
Pamunkey Indian Reservation, King William County, Va.
The Turtle, Niagara Falls, N.Y.
The Wellington, Pine Hill, N.Y.
