We’re in Belleville, Michigan, between Detroit and Ann Arbor, and if you know your Americana, you already know what you’re looking at:

These buildings—1960s-ish Howard Johnson’s restaurants—are all over America, and many are still in use, with innumerable modifications to update or tailor them to their current uses. I often feature workaday commercial buildings here, and I always enjoy seeing this process by which a standard product enters the “architectural public domain” and becomes raw material for new enterprises and business owners. It’s a level of complexity and incrementalism that you don’t expect in regard to chain architecture in suburbia. Some see chain-building conversions as tacky and downmarket; I see them as a sign of vitality and entrepreneurship.

I regret to inform you, however, that this building was once much, much better:

Those yellow roof tiles look like the original orange roof repainted, and the Howard Johnson’s cupola/weathervane was ingeniously adapted into a pagoda! I wish they’d retained that—such a neat, nodding adaptation—but I imagine the roof needed to be replaced, and it wasn’t worth trying to keep it. It was even preserved in Google Maps’ neat 3D view (a computer-generated composite of Street View and satellite imagery):

It underscores, however, that what’s valuable about these buildings culturally or historically is often just the signs and the ornamentation. Otherwise they’re just low-slung boxes. That’s one reason I’ve come to think that for ordinary commercial structures, retaining signs or logos and working them somehow into new buildings is the best form of preservation. In this case, that might mean removing the cupola/pagoda and putting it in the lobby, as the center of a fountain or something like that.

One neat thing about old buildings like this is they serve as a kind of fossil record; you can determine, simply by knowing the building is there, that it was a traveled or settled area at the time it was built. Take a look at where it is on the map. That area between Detroit and Ann Arbor was already somewhat built up in the 1960s. It’s neat that the existence of a common commercial structure can tell you that.

While I’m on the subject of Howard Johnson’s (and more for you here if you like Chinese buffets and Howard Johnson’s in the same piece, again), I want to share a piece from Quarantine Creatives, a Substack by podcaster and writer Heath Racela.

He touches on something I discussed here, that sometimes you don’t actually go somewhere but you value the fact that it’s there. But businesses, of course, don’t work like that.

As much as I love that old building, I also haven’t dined there in years and wouldn’t plan to anytime soon. It’s a blast from the past which is comforting to pass in a car, but not to stop for dinner.

Herein lies the challenge with Liebs’s prompt about preserving our roadside architecture: capitalism has a hard time monetizing nostalgia. After all, if your business isn’t constantly evolving, it gets left behind and a competitor takes your customers. We like the comfort of seeing old stuff, we just don’t like to patronize it.

And I also love this bit:

I’m not sure what I would prefer - a Howard Johnson’s that evolved with the times but that meant tearing down the older buildings (like Kowloon is trying to do or like McDonald’s has done at countless locations) or a chain that belongs firmly in the past but leaves us little bread crumbs of what once was.

I despise when fast food chains demolish a perfectly good building and rebuild the current model in place. Often, the only way for brand-specific architecture to be preserved is for the building to fall out of the chain and be occupied and lightly adapted by someone else. I find it odd how little these companies value their own histories, and the nostalgia many of their customers feel. With the notable exception of Pizza Hut, which Heath has also written about (and I have, too). Check him out.

Anyway, of all the many old HoJo restaurants I’ve seen, this is—or was, pre-new-roof—my favorite.

Related Reading:

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #2

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #3

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