This is a Google Street View image from 2007, in Savannah, Georgia:

Now that’s actually not what this piece is about, although it’s neat that a Taco Bell building this old survived up to 2007. By 2012, when the next set of imagery was captured, this had been torn down and replaced with a modern building on the same spot. I can tell it was torn down and not heavily remodeled because it doesn’t have exactly the same footprint.

This demonstrates a point I’ve made before: often the only way for a piece of commercial architecture to be preserved is for it to go out of business. If it remains part of the chain, it will eventually be updated, whether that means renovation beyond recognition or demolition. If it goes out of business, however, someone else will often just take the building and keep it more or less intact. Sometimes another chain will take it, leading to something like this: a stock vintage Arby’s building rebranded as a Papa John’s!

But anyway, I said that’s not what this piece is about.

It’s actually about this:

This is the first, or nearly the first, iteration of the Taco Bell sign (there seems to have been an even earlier one, identical except for lightbulbs studding the middle part), in use from 1962 to 1972. That means the absolute most recent time that one of these signs could have been installed is 51 years ago!

According to Stephanie Stuckey, a roadside architecture enthusiast and the granddaughter of the Stuckey’s founder, it is the last remaining original sign “in the wild,” i.e. not in a museum or collection. She also got a great photo of it:

Now, the funny thing is the Taco Bell sign is actually between a Wendy’s and an Arby’s, and is not really that visible from the front of the Taco bell. It’s hard to tell from the old aerial imagery and online threads about the sign—several of which exist!—but the Taco Bell may have originally been where the Wendy’s or Arby’s is. On the other hand, it may be a leftover sign marking the drive-thru lane, which seems more likely to me given that the old Taco Bell building was pretty old itself.

I think this is so cool. I hope it’s more than inertia that keeps this sign up. I’ve said before that in a young country, stuff like this is real history, real landmarks. Time imbues ordinary things with significance; turns them into artifacts. And artifacts are worth keeping around.

Related Reading:

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

The Architectural Public Domain

The Howard Johnson’s Sign

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