Rare chance to grab relics from 'Roadside America' miniature village; polishing up a California classic; coffee party is over at Boston's Steaming Tea Kettle
The Retrologist news update includes the fate of West Virginia fiberglass colossi, a vamoosed Arby's hat and a neon presentation this week I'm hosting.
I thought I’d start my latest newsletter with an update on what I’ve been up to recently, as I’ve been somewhat scarce in these parts, what with promotions for my book, “The Great American Retro Road Trip,” which just passed its three-month anniversary, a busy workload at my job covering news in New York, and other commitments. These are all good things, and all things for which I’m grateful, but it’s been … a lot.
That said, one of my great passions is my Substack newsletter, for which over 6,600 people have signed up since I launched it three years ago this month. (Where does the time go?) Thank you for being here and for your support of my work. From today onward, you can expect to see much more content from me, with regular updates on news from the American roadside, special coverage and profiles, and a few surprises along the way. This roadside Americana beat, as it were, is busier than ever, and I intend to bring you more of that news as it happens, along with exclusive content for patrons. (Thank you!)
Well, enough throat clearing — let’s get on with it. I’m often told my newsletter traffics in a lot of sad news, so I’m happy to defy that trend with my first item, about a beloved restaurant in Corona, California, that suddenly has a bright future.
The site of the Silver Dollar Pancake House has long been a dining mainstay on East Sixth Street, with an eatery on the site dating back to as early as 1922. In 1936, a restaurant called the Copper Kettle was on the site. It had other names and concepts before settling on the Silver Dollar Pancake House name in 1962. (According to research linked to above, the sign dates to 1965.)
Last September, the longtime owner, Charmayne Killingsworth, died at the age of 94, and her four children placed the business on the market. They received offers, including an eye-popping one from a coffee company, to redevelop the land. It doesn’t take much imagination to conclude the restaurant would have been demolished or irrevocably changed.
The children decided to sell to Mark and Paula Fogel, locals who intend to polish the Silver Dollar back to its shiniest midcentury gleam. The family was paid somewhere between $800,000 and $900,000, sacrificing bigger bucks for the biggest payout of all: “We took less money to do the right thing,” son Kevin Killingsworth told the Press-Enterprise. “Everybody agreed that was what my mom, Charmayne, would have wanted.”
“It’s kind of my idea to bring back the nostalgia of it,” Mark Fogel of his plans for the Silver Dollar Pancake House.
The new owners, along with devoted restaurant operator Robert Hernandez, who has worked here since 1976, will keep the pancake house the same as it ever was. The Fogels already invested over $100,000 in property improvements and hope to restore the neon sign, both the free-standing one and a roofline sign. Preservationists have been helping get the word out, too. Just shy of $1,000 has been raised to fix the sign, which long ago lost its neon tubing, and they are hoping to raise $30,000 — a restoration will surely cost more.
Be sure to check out the article to see this photo of the beautiful U-shaped counter and longtime proprietor Hernandez.
How lucky we are that the Silver Dollar Pancake House has a bright and shiny future here in Riverside County. If the sale had been solely about extracting the maximum number of silver dollars from the site, the outcome would have been most unhappy.
Have you ever been here? My first and, to date, only visit, in October 2021, was marred by bad timing — the place was closed and the sun was in the wrong position for the kind of photos I had wished to take. I can’t wait to step inside next time and enjoy one of 18 varieties of pancakes under the freshly restored neon sign.
Retrologist Roadside Roundup
Sherman’s Sports and Army Store is closing after 103 years in business. (103!!!) The mom and pop in Hendersonville, North Carolina, has been in the Sherman family from the first day — and soon the last.
“After 103 years, Sherman’s Sports & Army is saying goodbye as the family owners retire. Everything is 25% off, so grab something special and take a moment to thank this downtown icon for over a century of memories,” according to the municipal Facebook page.
Starbucks is closing hundreds of stores and laying off many corporate staff as part of a reorganization its new CEO is billing as a return to its roots as a “third place”- a welcoming environment where customers can sit for a spell inside an inviting coffeehouse. Fair enough — Starbucks had strayed from its roots, and this seems like a necessary pivot.
But in these closures, we are losing some stores that had been good stewards of historic buildings. Among the Starbucks that will be closing is the “Steaming Tea Kettle” location in Boston. The copper kettle has been attached to the building since the 1960s, when it was relocated during the construction of the Government Center in the former Scollay Square, but dates back to 1873, serving as a promotional device for the Oriental Tea Company. Surely, the kettle is safe, but we now wait to see who its next custodian will be.
Check out this cool report from 1977 from the WCVB-TV archive, featuring the retirement of a waitress from the pre-Starbucks coffee shop, then called The Steaming Kettle.
Starbucks deserves credit for using historic buildings to host its stores, and here are some other examples of adaptive reuse by the company.
Roadside America in Shartlesville, Pennsylvania, was an extraordinary place, featuring a massive miniature village and an O-gauge model railroad that captured the nuances of small-town life. Construction began in 1935, the product of the fertile mind and gifted hands of Laurence Gieringer, who died in 1963 but not before Roadside America became a beloved piece of Roadside Americana.
I must have driven past Roadside America, in its longtime and final home since 1953, dozens of times over the years, but stopped here only once. (When you spotted it on I-78, it was difficult to turn around and get to, alas.)
I explored the gift shop, but never took the time to check out the big attraction itself, all 8,000 square feet of it, featuring 10,000 small trees, 4,000 tiny people, and so much more in mind-numbing number and detail.
Sadly, Roadside America closed in 2020, a Covid casualty that had already been ailing. Now, memorabilia and rare ephemera from the lost attraction are up for auction, with bidding on the first lots starting to close on Monday, with the first batch of 150 now live and open for bidding.
It’s unfortunate that the collection could not stay together, or that Roadside America could not have been saved, but at least these precious heirlooms now stand a chance to end up in appreciative hands, their legacy scattered across the land.
The Lake Effect Diner in Buffalo, New York, is for sale. I swung by for some photos of it back in 2019. A restoration of the signage was a bit heavy-handed, stripping the neon, though I was too nice to point that out when I wrote this about the diner back in 2019:
For many years, the words “lake effect” signaled one thing in Buffalo — snow, and lots of it, coming off Lake Erie. But these days, a 1952 Mountain View Diner has changed all that. Oh, the snow still comes, make no mistake about that. But the words now also call to mind a great retro-dining success story — the Lake Effect Diner. The diner was built in Singac, New Jersey and originally installed in Wayne, Pennsylvania, in the Philadelphia suburbs.
Called the Main Line Grille, it closed in the 1970s and did service as a succession of Chinese restaurants over the years. New owners couldn’t work with the rail-car diner, but rather than trash it to clear off their valuable land, they reached out to preservationists to get the diner sold. It ended up in the hands of the Curtain family, who moved it to Buffalo, a big haul followed by a big restoration and a new life as the Lake Effect Diner starting in 2002. The food here isn’t your typical diner fare — it’s high quality and locally sourced, and has become even more coveted by tourists after a visit from Guy Fieri.
I stopped by on a stifling summer day — lake effect humidity, I suppose. The chrome gleamed gorgeously under the August sun. Just three months later, lake effect snow blanketed the Lake Effect Diner. A record storm, they’re saying it was. That would have made for a pretty picture, don’t you think?
The Federal Theatre in Denver has reopened after decades, and the restoration of the marquee is breathtaking. Congrats to Morry’s Neon Signs and everybody involved in making this happen. It will serve as a live-entertainment venue.
Like many of the city’s classic old movie houses, the Federal closed in the 1970s. “It was sort of largely nothing for fifty years,” [owner Scott] Happel says. “A church utilized it as a space for the last ten or twenty years, but it’s not clear how much they used it. The church left in January 2023, and the landlords gave us a call.”
Wow.
Barnum Duckpin Bowling in Stratford, Connecticut, closed in 2013 after a 75-year run. The blade sign was placed in storage and was donated this year to the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio, where it has been restored.
(Duckpin bowling uses smaller, no-hole balls and tinier, lighter pins, making it harder to get a strike, so bowlers get three rolls per frame.). Another New England classic has also landed at the ASM.
The historic Arby’s sign in Hollywood, California, has been removed, more than a year after the location closed. I’m not sure where it went, but there have been reports that we haven’t seen the last of it.
While these were manufactured in the hundreds between 1964 and 1975 or so, the Arby’s signs are becoming scarce, as they keep falling every few months, it seems, despite the nostalgic curiosity about them.
The town of Unger, West Virginia, is home to a collection of fiberglass giants set on a single property. American Giants reports they will be moved to Minnesota over the next couple of years, but it’s not too late to see them in their longtime home.
Atlas Obscura has more on the Farnham Colossi.
Mixue is billed as the world’s largest fast-food chain, as measured by the number of stores, with over 45,000. They’ve opened their first store in NYC, in TriBeCa, which I plan to check out this week.
From Delish:
If the name’s new to you, that tracks; abroad, Mixue’s already everywhere from China to Thailand and Vietnam. The playbook is simple and wildly effective: soft-serve cones, fruit teas, classic milk tea, and chewy add-ins, all priced to fit your budget. It’s the sort of menu that overly floods social feeds and happily empties wallets. Now it’s test-driving that budget-friendly formula in a city where spending money on overpriced food and drink is very much a personality trait.
In other news …
Preserving one ghost sign leads to the discovery of another one in Bakersfield, California.
The owner of San Francisco’s House of Prime Rib has died at 86.
The Olympia Diner’s date with destruction may still be in the offing, as the owner is considering offers to buy the property in Newington, Connecticut, after a deal to develop the site fell through and gave the beauty you see below a reprieve. (As you can see, it pays to go on a rainy night when business is slow and the pavement sparkles like this. Magic.)
My ABC7 colleague Joelle Garguilo visits Long Island’s St. James General Store, the longest-running in the nation.
A 90-year-old diner operator is bringing back 24-hour service on Staten Island.
A not-so-encouraging update on the fate of San Francisco’s oceanside Cliff House, shuttered since 2020.
“Law & Order”-themed Dun Dun Diner, a pop-up restaurant at 1 Rockefeller Center, will celebrate the show’s 25th season. Operating over three days this upcoming weekend, the diner already has sold-out reservations. Instead of Dun Dun, let’s call it Womp Womp.
Utz Potato Chips is sprucing up its Pennsylvania headquarters.
The neon sign for the shuttered Old Canteen in Providence, Rhode Island, has a new home.
Take a virtual tour of American neon with me!
I had the pleasure of speaking at the Neon Speaks festival at the Verdi Club in San Francisco earlier this month. In case you missed it, I will be giving my presentation again virtually on Wednesday, Oct. 1, at 7 p.m. PDT. The presentation is told through the prism of signs I featured in my book, “The Great American Retro Road Trip.”
In case you missed it …
Check out my report for ABC Localish to learn about the work Dana Schaeffer is doing to save New Jersey diners, including the long-shuttered Little Falls Diner, which is behind us.
Recommended follow: The Society for Commercial Archaeology’s Substack
I am a proud member of the Society for Commercial Archeology, which programs monthly Zooms on topics you’ll surely find interesting, supports research, organizes group trips, and advocates for the preservation and celebration of our roadside heritage.
I am now also a proud columnist for the society, and my reports on signage and other matters will now regularly appear in the SCA’s newsletter and journal.
Aside from joining the SCA, I’d love it if you could follow their new Substack, which I highly recommend.
Join me on the Great American Retro Road Trip!
If you haven’t bought my book yet, now is a great time! Plan a fall getaway, a winter excursion, or polish off your holiday gift list with my book. (Hint hint!)
Order it here, and DM me if you’d like to buy an autographed copy!
Thanks as always for the support.
The Starbucks under the steaming kettle is closing (along with 100s around the country), the company has announced. I hope that the next tenant keeps the kettle. (I believe it used to emit steam, but no more.) Dunkin would be a natural fit, but there is one around the corner.
The Amish Couple statues that were at Roadside America were auctioned off to Creative Crafts in Myerstown, PA where they can be seen today. In 2021, they were damaged by an arsonist but restored by Mark Cline.