Owner of reopened Arthur Treacher's eyes expansion; NYC's Subway Inn makes 3rd stop in 86 years; Gold Medal not just a ghost sign; 'spiedie' emporium closes (what's a spiedie?)
Plus, news from Wildwood, the Lincoln Highway and Montreal, where the Orange Julep has inspired a Lego artist, and many more roadside headlines from The Retrologist
New owner of Ohio Arthur Treacher’s hopes to expand almost-defunct chain
The new owner of the revived Arthur Treacher’s fish-and-chips restaurant in Garfield Heights, Ohio, has plans to open more locations, reports Cleveland Scene. With that location’s reopening, there are now only two standalone Arthur Treacher’s from a chain that once numbered over 800 during its 1970s heyday.
The new owner, George Simon, at first had no plans to keep this building an Arthur Treacher’s, figuring he’d bought the property as a real estate investment. He was buying the store from Ben Vittoria, who shut it amid the pandemic in 2021. Vittoria was a longtime Arthur Treacher’s operator who hung on to what was for almost two years the last standalone location, in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. It was there that Simon met Vittoria to have some fish and seal the real-estate deal, and it’s where Simon had a change of heart.
Simon was awed by the fact that this last Arthur Treacher’s was a genuine tourist attraction, with folks snapping shots inside and out. He realized that he was not just buying real estate, he was buying an American institution.
With Vittoria’s OK, Simon embarked on his mission to revive a moribund chain.
“When I sold the real estate, I was hesitant to relinquish anything to do with Treacher’s, but the gentleman seemed to have the wherewithal to do a good job,” Vittoria told Cleveland Scene. “He convinced me that he would rehab the property – the inside and the exterior – in a way that would do justice to Arthur Treacher’s.”
And Simon told reporter Douglas Trattner that he is looking at opening additional Arthur Treacher’s in Ohio.
How appropriate that Arthur Treacher’s rebirth would begin in the state where it was born, in 1969, and where it almost died in 2021.
RELATED IN THE RETROLOGIST
Arthur Treacher’s reopens in Garfield Heights
A former Arthur Treacher’s with 1970s vibes
Spiedies emporium Lupo’s S&S Char Pit in Binghamton closes after 45 years. What’s a spiedie, you ask? Read on!
If you know, you know, and the news that Lupo’s S&S Char Pit has closed in Binghamton, New York, is sad news indeed for the spiedie cognoscenti.
Spiedies, if you don’t know, are a Broome County culinary staple, a local grilled delicacy of skewered marinated meat cubes served on bread.
The closure of S&S Char Pit comes a few years after the 2020 demise of another emporium of spiedies goodness, Sharkey’s.
Back in 2018, I visited Lupo’s with an old friend who was showing me around his hometown for the first time, and I enjoyed the meal — an obligatory stop on a Southern Tier spiedies tour — almost as much as I appreciated its vintage look and feel.
This vast barn used to be a Dairy Queen Brazier — one of the red-roofed buildings from “the Country Fresh” period — that opened in 1969. Lupo’s moved in back in 1978, according to reports.
The owner, Steve Lupo, told WNBF radio that he was enjoying the slower pace since closing on Jan. 15, but that he still wasn’t closed to the idea of a new location, but the opportunity would have to be just right. The trend for the Lupo family has been to back away from retail locations, as they shuttered their restaurant in Endicott back in 2003, as well as a location in Vestal in the mid-1990s.
The Lupo family name and spiedies seem inseparable, and indeed they are not parting ways. The family business’ web address is spiedies.com, where you can at least still buy their much-vaunted marinade and sauces to spice up your spiedies. Steve Lupo says the family will continue to run its wholesale business, Sam A. Lupo & Sons, centered around meat packing and sauce bottling. WNBF reports Lupo’s will still offer its spiedies at tentpole community events throughout the year, including the Spiedie Fest & Balloon Rally in Otsiningo Park.
(Note: There is a separate business, the Original Lupo’s Char-Pit in Endicott, which is not affiliated with the location that closed. )
So why is this dish called spiedies? This is one of those questions where making a sweeping statement can get you, well, skewered, but a popular working theory is that the word derives from the Italian word “spiedino,” or skewer.
Below, as an extra, is a photo from the defunct Sharkey’s, which I visited back in August 2009.
Subway Inn makes its third stop in its 86-year history
There’s no keeping a good bar down.
Manhattan’s Subway Inn has moved for the third time in its 86-year history. The bar first got pushed out of its longtime home at East 60th Street and Lexington Avenue back in 2014, a spot where Marilyn Monroe sipped drinks in the company of then-husband Joe DiMaggio. In fact, when the bar first moved in 2014, they brought along a table that is supposed to be graced with an ossified wad of Monroe’s chewing gum.
The Subway Inn resurfaced a few blocks east, right off the entrance to the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge. It lasted there for several years before becoming yet again entangled with the cruelties of New York real estate, dodging another date with a wrecking-ball-wielding landlord. This time, the Subway Inn didn’t have to go far, just a few storefronts up the block. It took the bar eight months to have its liquor license transferred, a bureaucratic nightmare if there ever was one for, well, a bar.
Owner Steven Salinas put it poetically to Crain’s New York Business.
“The license is bound to the location, not the business, even if we’re moving five stores down,” Salinas, 42, said in an interview. “You know how you believe in a system, and you put all your faith in it and it fails you every single time? That’s what I felt.”
The State Liquor Authority in the Crain’s article explains why that red tape happened, but, to me anyway, this sad affair is a reminder of how people like Salinas are heroes for not giving up on meaningful institutions like the Subway Inn, the sorts of places that New York does so little to support, yet the sorts of places whose presence keeps New York from becoming the soulless hell hole it seems so hell-bent on becoming.
Will the third spot finally be the charm? Given what places like the Subway Inn are up against, it seems unlikely but let’s hope Salinas can confidently put down roots here and keep on avoiding the fate that has felled so many of his barroom brethren.
For Salinas, keeping the bar alive is personal, a tribute to his own father, Marcello Salinas, who first worked at the bar in 1970 at the side of longtime owner Charlie Ackerman, who as a 90-year-old was described in the New York Times as a “puckered, saggy-bottomed crank. Salty as a pickled fish. Warm as a furnace without oil.”
In other words, just the sort of fella made for running The Subway Inn.
In that spirit, my first visit there, back in 2006, came charged with that dive-bar edge. Ordering at the bar, I kept it simple and asked for a beer. A friend of mine got fancy and asked for a pinot grigio and I’m surprised the bartender didn’t show her the door the way salonkeepers did in old Westerns.
Ah, memories.
May it never be “Last Last Call” at The Subway Inn.
Seeing a ‘Ghost:’ Gold Medal Flour at the supermarket
I love to spot old Gold Medal Flour ghost signs in my travels. Above is one outside Colesante’s Tavern in Watertown, New York, which I visited in November 2020. Gold Medal signs are often treated as cherished landmarks in the usually smaller communities where you find them and are often vibrantly restored. Even if they are not, that old lead paint fades slowly.
I think it’s neat that you can still find Gold Medal Flour at the supermarket. While doing a little Saturday shopping this weekend, I snapped this photo of a Gold Medal display and smiled a crack.
Those old ghost signs are still driving sales, all these years later. General Mills, which still owns the brand, should look for blank brick walls across America and start painting them again.
Notes From the Road
Very sad news from the Lincoln Highway: the historic Kings & Queens Restaurant & Pub on Route 30 in Stoystown, Pennsylvania, has been destroyed in a fire. All that was left of the castle, built in 1970 and teeming with medieval-style decor, is the corner tower. This is one I never got to shoot, and I’m so sorry to see it go in such a fashion. [Photos: Lincoln Highway Facebook group]
These photos, below, of the felled signage for the shuttered Melody Cruise-in in Springfield, Ohio, do not inspire confidence. Does anybody know what’s going on? The poster, David Lindley, calls it the “crime of the century.”
Kelly’s Cafe, the beloved Wildwood bar, recently closed and changed hands. The new owners will call the place the Copper Dog, but the signage for Kelly’s is reportedly staying put. [Wildwood Video Archive]
The Walnut Creek, California, location of the Caspers’ hot-dog chain is closing after 40 years. The owner said COVID was difficult on the entire chain, but the Walnut Creek location was hit especially hard. I’m a big fan of the architecture of Caspers’ locations and will need to do a roundup soon. [East Bay Times]
I love Gibeau’s Orange Julep in Montreal so much that I took a seven-hour drive there on a whim last year because I simply had tired of waiting to shoot it myself. I also very much wanted to try the frothy, creamy orange concoction they purvey here. I totally understand why Lego artist “brickablock” on Instagram made an homage to the Orange Julep out of Lego blocks, and it took a lot longer than my seven-hour drive!
Enjoy my writeup from one of two recent visits to the Julep.
Ghost signs of Philadelphia: the story of Esslinger’s Brewery. [Hidden City]
“Blizzard can’t stop blizzards” at the beloved Dairy Queen in Moorhead, Minnesota, which opens for “the season” every March 1 snow or shine. This location is famous for bucking corporate directives and staying pure to its vintage vision of what a DQ should be, architecturally and gastronomically. I hope to see this one this year. [Bring Me the News]
Unique Cafe, offering Jamaican and American cuisine, reopens in the former home of Blanchard’s 101 Diner, a rail car structure in Worcester, Massachusetts. [Mass Live]
Architect Rafael Viñoly, who birthed buildings in almost a dozen countries including each borough of New York City, has died at 78. I always loved the design his ad-hoc team, called THINK, proposed for rebuilding the World Trade Center. It would have built twin open lattice-work towers that would contain cultural complexes within.
Their plan was the first choice of the committee tasked with choosing the design and was a popular favorite with its respectful echo of the lost towers, but former Gov. George Pataki overruled that decision, embracing the view that they were “skeleton” towers built over a place of mass death.
He opted for the concept hatched by Daniel Libeskind that underlies today’s new WTC, with the tallest tower coming in at 1,776 feet tall, followed by a ring of towers of descending size surrounding a memorial.
Pataki was overruled on one point — he wanted to call the tallest building the Freedom Tower, but the Port Authority wasn’t having it, eventually christening the structure One World Trade Center, the old name of the lost North Tower, and calling the overall complex the World Trade Center. But since so many still call One World Trade Center the Freedom Tower, maybe Pataki got the last laugh on that count, too.
In any event, the THINK proposal was one of the great missed opportunities for the New York skyline. It would have yielded a haunting and beautiful memorial in the skyline, a modern-day Eiffel Tower on America’s most sacred ground.
And so it goes.
One skyscraper Viñoly did build in Manhattan, 432 Park Avenue, was briefly the world’s tallest residential skyscraper but has not been without controversy over both its role in the skyline and its allegedly flawed construction and design. Fred Bernstein in The New York Times has a nice overview of his career and life.
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