While I was in New Jersey a couple of weeks ago, I passed the Polar Cub, an old-fashioned roadside ice cream stand in Whitehouse Station, along U.S. Route 22. Route 22 is itself kind of famous—it’s one of the earliest highways to become lined with now-classic postwar commercial architecture, some of which survives to this day. If you ever find yourself driving through Union, New Jersey, keep a lookout for the giant ship-shaped building!

It happens that I passed the Polar Cub early, before it opened. That’s okay; I’m sure the ice cream itself is pretty standard stuff. This is one of those places where the memories enhance the actual place. In a way I was lucky it was closed, because I could walk around and take a few pictures. The building is large for a place like this, resembling a diner. Its placement, with a sign in a little spot of grass between the entrance and exit, and a long, partially unpaved parking lot, is very basic and evokes informal, family-owned roadside enterprises from the postwar years.

When I was a kid, my parents used to vote at a nearby church, and later a nearby school. After they brought me along for voting—one of them always brought me into the booth to see the ballot, and sometimes let me press the “cast vote” button—we would go out for ice cream at the Polar Cub. To this day, I think of treats on election nights. I don’t think my parents thought about it this much, actually, but I remember it as a kind of ritual.

One evening driving home from the Polar Cub, we were stopped on a backroad because a horse had escaped from a nearby farm! One side of the road was a nature preserve where we often pulled off to spot herons or egrets; the other side was a horse farm and a small racetrack. Welcome to Hunterdon County!

There’s another old roadside ice cream joint in a totally different direction in Pennington, called Cream King. That one is smaller and even more timeworn, but it’s also the source of lots of memories. One review on Yelp praises its rare “local feel”—places like this were everywhere 50, 60, 70 years ago, but they were individually owned and had their own character and quirks, not to mention unique signs. And the ones that have survived to this day are now throwbacks or curiosities.

Cream King had nothing to do with election nights. We’d usually stop there on the way home from long day trips in Philadelphia, often after dinner here, in the city’s excellent Chinatown:

There’s nothing like a roadside stand lit up a night, beckoning you. Just a few minutes off I-95, it was a landmark, noting that from here to home the drive and surroundings would be quiet and peaceful. These are not crowded highways. They’re more like country roads, and I’m thankful I got to experience both the energy of Manhattan and Philadelphia and the quiet of Hunterdon County as a kid. In some way, the association of ice cream, my childhood in New Jersey, and our American civic life are all a little connected in my mind.

The Polar Cub and Cream King pretty much still look exactly as they did in my earliest memories. Some of the spaces along these roads have been filled in over the years, and some buildings have been renovated or redeveloped, but they’re still clearly the same places.

Many parts of Northern Virginia and D.C.-adjacent Maryland once looked like this, but this kind of land use and these kinds of businesses can’t really survive the economic growth and population pressure there. It’s okay to miss these things, but when things change so much over decades, I believe the land use simply has to be allowed to catch up.

Do I want endless sprawl to cover over the retro roadsides and expanses of nature I remember from my childhood, and still love to explore? Well, no. But Hunterdon County, New Jersey isn’t Arlington County, Virginia, and we can allow places like this to grow without losing their solitude or green space. I’ll be writing more about that!

Related Reading:

The Screen Where You Started

Iconic Hometown Restaurant, Obsolete Dining Concept?

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