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
Plus, a classic North Wildwood motel's sign is saved and more headlines
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 at the unlikely survival of this midcentury pizza parlor ideal?
This location might not be long for this world. A developer, Pahlisch Commercial, is in contract to buy the property, reports Portland Business Journal, just as Pietro’s is opening a new location nearby, at the home of the former McGrath’s Fish House in the Milwaukie Marketplace shopping center, reports The Oregonian.
There are more questions than answers. Could this location manage to stay open even with another one nearby? Will the new one try to emulate the one you see here, which opened in 1969? And whither the sign?
This is the second big change to this shopping plaza in recent years, after the 58-year-old Kellogg Bowl closed during the pandemic. (TODAY’S EXTRA FOR MY PATRONS: SEE MY ESSAY AND PHOTOS ON THE KELLOGG BOWL FROM MY 2021 VISIT.) That building is right next door and was sold to the same developer eyeing Pietro’s, which turned the Kellogg site into housing, The Henley Place Apartments, so it doesn’t require a wild imagination to picture the future of the Pietro’s site. (Kellogg and Pietro’s Pizza had long been tied by more than location — back in the day, a special telephone at the bowling alley reportedly patched you through to Pietro’s so you could conveniently order pizza.)
Pietro’s once had around 80 locations after periods of expansion and handovers to multiple large owners, from the Campbell Soup Company to BJ’s Restaurants. However, the chain has retreated to only three locations. This is the last one in the Portland area. The other two are in Salem and Hood River, Oregon. The chain was founded in 1957 in Longview, Washington.
I’ll share updates on Pietro’s as I get them, and if you have some intel, please send them along.
Putt putt to the Hut Lane
And speaking of pizza chains, the big one, Pizza Hut, is experimenting with a drive-thru concept restaurant called The Hut Lane
Reports the Houston Chronicle:
It's still Pizza Hut, but this restaurant features a different design, unique new technology, and a first-of-its-kind menu that caters specifically to folks using the drive-thru.
Located at 8605 Ohio Dr. in Plano, Texas, the restaurant includes self-service kiosks for faster order placement, cabinets for easy, contactless pick-up and a guest-facing pizza making station to showcase the quality and care that goes into every Pizza Hut pizza. In addition, the restaurant will introduce a drive-thru featuring a “Hut ‘N Go™” menu that offers a select list of “ready-now” items that can be quickly ordered and picked up at the window.
Have you checked it out? Pizza Hut joins a growing list of fast-food chains experimenting with spinoff concepts, from McDonald’s and its CosMc to Kentucky Fried Chicken and its Saucy by KFC. What do you think about this trend?
Bill’s Take Out sign is taken down for a big fix
One of California’s great neon signs, standing sentinel outside Bill’s Take Out in Santa Maria since the mid-1950s, is being restored and could be completed by the end of January. (The shop opened as Ed’s Take Out in January 1954, serving 19-cent burgers, and sold 8,303 of them during its opening weekend. The business assumed the Bill’s name two years later.) The sign has been taken down and is now going under the knife at Southpaw Signs in Oceano, where careful efforts are underway to restore it to its original color scheme, upgrade circuitry to make it more environmentally sound, and, of course, restore the neon, which has not been lit in many years. (Bill’s itself went through an extended closure after the deaths of its owners, and just reopened in June 2024.) The Santa Maria Times has an excellent overview of the neon-restoration process, with an interview with neon guru Larry Desario of Southpaw.
“Neon signs, it's part of California history,” he said. “They light up, they follow artwork to a T. Plastic signs, vinyl signs, internally lit LED signs don't really have the punch that neon does. The exposed neon look is what really makes it special.”
Southpaw’s Sean Beauchamp summed up the importance of these signs:
“Nothing makes a downtown look better at night than neon,” Beauchamp said. “You look at all the old photos of Broadway in Santa Maria, and it’s just, every business is neon. It seems like every year, we lose one or two, and it's just like ‘oh no!’.”
“Oh no,” or in the case of the salvation of the Bill’s Take Out sign, “oh yes”!
HT to Debra Jane Seltzer for this news. Check out her roadarch.com page featuring Bill’s.
King Penny is dethroned in Queens
The Queens Chronicle reports the Astoria mainstay King Penny, which never reopened after the pandemic, has been cleaned out.
As I wrote back in April:
That’s a grid of stainless-steel discs —resembling pennies — on the sign, the backstory of which can be found in James and Karla Murray’s excellent Store Front II: A History Preserved: The Disappearing Face of New York.
I especially like the giant, crowned penny just above! Not legal tender, sure, but priceless.
The quirky name, James and Karla explain, is a nod to the original owner. He was an optimistic fellow who carried himself like a king, despite not being particularly rich. So his friends described him as a king who only had a penny to his name. Thus was born King Penny!
Farewell, Mac’s Golden Pheasant
I was shocked when oldmotelsigns on Instagram shared photos of the removal of the beautiful neon sign for Mac’s Golden Pheasant in Elmhurst, Illinois. This was one of my favorite places in Chicagoland, and sadly, it closed last month, reportedly to make way for the expansion of a gas station. Oldmotelsigns says the sign was being saved, and would eventually end up on display. But — how often do we hear that, and how often does it actually happen? I wish it could have been donated to the Chicago Sign Museum.
Here’s my blurb on Mac’s, published not long after one of my visits there in 2019.
Mack’s Golden Pheasant in Elmhurst, Illinois is so named because the co-founder, a Czech immigrant named Frank Mack, was fond of these colorful birds. But a more appropriate name might be Mack’s Golden Phoenix, because this 1948 restaurant serving hearty Czech-Austrian cuisine has had three brushes with death, two from fires and one from a 1987 flood, but 71 years later is still thriving, celebrated as DuPage County’s oldest continuously owned restaurant. Still in the same family, Mack’s is a beauty inside and out, and that neon sign is a sight to behold at dusk, as I caught it here, or any time of day for that matter. Yes, that’s a pheasant, but spiritually, it will forever be a phoenix.
Well, at least the sign, I hope, will be a phoenix.
North Wildwood loses a ‘Medieval’ outpost by the sea
North Wildwood’s Ivanhoe Motel has closed, and the sign has been taken down by the ABS Sign Company and donated to the Doo Wop Preservation League, according to a Facebook post from the organization.
The Ivanhoe opened in 1969 and was inspired by the 1819 novel “Ivanhoe” by Sir Walter Scott, the story goes. However, in a 1989 Press of Atlantic City interview, the wife of the motel’s founding owner said they were looking to avoid the usual seashore-related names when they were casting about for a monicker for the motel. She had her eureka moment watching what she said was an old Joan Crawford movie on late-night TV, noticing the name Ivanhoe Hotel in a scene. The motel now had a name.
According to the Wildwood Video Archive, an application has been filed to turn the site into five single-family homes rather than the more traditional condo conversions of old motel sites.
According to the article:
If approved, this would mark a unique shift for North Wildwood’s motel scene. Instead of condos, which have become the default for redeveloped motels, we could actually see the Ivanhoe’s land transformed into five private family homes.
This shift could mean the end of an era, as the Ivanhoe, with its 1960s charm and family-friendly atmosphere, has been a staple for generations of beachgoers.
If these plans proceed, the Ivanhoe will join a large list of motels lost to new developments.
I’d always be sure to visit the Ivanhoe for a picture. It’s next to the iconic Panoramic, which is high on my list of Wildwood beauties. Both motels were reportedly run by the same family until 2022.
There’s comfort in knowing the sign has been saved, but adjeda in swallowing the bitter reality that the Wildwoods have lost another motel, each so important to the area’s overall Doo Wop character.
Signposts Up Ahead: The Retrologist Zone
This October, I finally swung through San Antonio. In addition to remembering the Alamo — and the World’s Largest Cowboy Boots — I remembered to shoot the restored Ranch Motel sign, which now represents a former motel turned boutique getaway. This article might be paywalled for you, so here’s another, older one with background on the new business.
The Somewhere Bar in Garden City, Idaho, near Boise, closed in October after a few years as a gay bar. The bar, famous for its rearin’ horse statue, is reopening under its older, longtime name, The Ranch Club, and promises to bring back “the hard-partying, fun bar it was,” new owner Ryan Steinbroner told the Idaho Statesman. Like the shuttered Hungry Onion nearby, the Ranch Club appeared in the 1980 Clint Eastwood movie “Bronco Billy.”
A neat holiday tradition I’d like to witness next year: The Hotel Bethehem in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has a large neon sign on its roof blazing its name. The word HOTEL is turned off on Christmas Eve as a nod to the holiday. The tradition began in the 1950s or 1960s and ended in the 1970s, until the hotel’s current owner learned of it back in 2018 and revived it.
The historic Modernaire Motel neon sign near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, has been saved, as the motel itself is set to disappear for a new development. The sign is set to resurface at the York History Center's Agricultural & Industrial Museum. This is a remarkable sign, and the Pennsylvania director of the Lincoln Highway Association, Tom Davidson, has written a lovely essay on the power of the Great American Road Trip (almost the title of my upcoming book!) and the importance of saving markers of these journeys like the Modernaire sign. The sign's restoration requires $15,000, and Davidson invites us to chip in here. Here’s an earlier report on the Modernaire in The Retrologist:
Donny’s Place was a notable gay bar in Pittsburgh that operated from 1973 to 2022. A former patron is part of a grassroots effort to declare it a landmark, saying it would serve as western Pennsylvania’s first LGBTQ+ landmark. The trouble is that the owner and namesake, Donald Thinnes, who died last year, wasn’t sentimental about the building and had agreed to sell it to a developer. Historic designation would protect the building from the bulldozer.
The Hiway Theater in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, is seeking donations to undertake facade repairs. They write: We need your help raising $66,400 by December 31st! We had an amazing 2024 thanks to your support. For 111 years, The Hiway Theater has been a community treasure. You can help help here.
An update on an item from my last newsletter: Seattle‘s Merchant’s Cafe and Saloon, dating to around 1890 and billing itself as the city’s oldest, is indeed shutting down, but not forever. The owner told the Seattle Times the Pioneer Square bar will undergo some work before reopening on March 1. Whew.
The Golden Dome, a fixture of Route 66 (Rolando Pujol/2013) Inside efforts to restore Oklahoma City’s Golden Dome, a geodesic dome built in 1958 as a bank building. After many false starts, and close calls with bulldozers, the next and perhaps last best chance to save it is an expensive transformation of the complex into a music venue.
Finally, with all the bad news about neon of late (to wit, the widely shared New York Times piece, Last Call for Neon), here’s one with a decidedly more optimistic take, and how’s this for a subhead, “The rise, fall, and return of neon.” It’s a profile of LA signmaker extraordinaire Paul Stoakes of Signmakers LA.
P.S.
Former President Jimmy Carter’s state funeral begins on Saturday. In 2022, I spent a morning exploring his hometown of Plains, Georgia, an adventure you might want to add to your bucket list. My guide to Plains is below.
