I took a fishing trip with a friend back in September, in the Newport News/Hampton area of Virginia. We stayed in a pretty nondescript boxy hotel along a stroad, and drove about 20 minutes to the coast to fish off a pier.

On the way to Walmart for some last-minute supplies and then dinner, we passed a building that I made a mental note to go find on Google Maps and feature here. It’s in this screenshot—a very typical bit of fast-food sprawl.

Can you spot it?

This one is…a little different:

I hardly have to tell you what this building once was: a Burger King! It had the much larger warehouse appended onto it after the Burger King closed.

But it’s even neater than that. If you thought the Burger King structure had simply been truncated where the warehouse begins, you’re wrong. Take a look at this photo from Flickr (copyright Ryan/ryanrules), taken from inside the warehouse:

Is that cool and unusual or what?

Here’s a whole album of photos from the site, from the same photographer. He also notes that the Burger King operated from 1987 to 2002, and the glass shop opened pretty quickly, later in 2002.

One of those photos shows a humorous sign hanging inside, which reads:

This is Not Burger King

You Don’t Get it Your Way

You Take it My Way or You Don’t Get the Damn Thing

That little acknowledgement of the former use is nice. And this makes a point I’ve often made: one of the surest ways that old chain-specific architecture gets preserved is for a location to go out of business. As with McDonald’s, many Burger Kings of this generation or older ones have been updated or torn down over the years. The ones that still look as they did when they were built are often the ones that are no longer Burger Kings at all. Isn’t that interesting?

Related Reading:

Land Your Plane for Pizza

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #28

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #8

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