It happens that there was once a Kmart here as well, but it’s long gone. It’s the Vestal Plaza, now known as University Plaza. Unlike many properties in parts of upstate New York, the Vestal/University Plaza is not abandoned or distressed. In fact, it’s thriving.

This what it looks like today:

If you think it’s a bit…odd-looking, you’re right. That’s because it is, essentially, a combination of a fairly dense housing development built within the footprint of, and some of the remains of, an old strip plaza!

Here’s the property in 2002, looking pretty much how it looked when it was built decades ago, apparently in 1962, along what was at the time a growing suburban commercial strip.

At this point, before its redevelopment, it was in rough shape and suffered a high vacancy rate:

Here’s a nice blog post showing the history of the redevelopment.

This is a really fascinating example of what’s sometimes called “suburban retrofit”—that is, more or less, the incremental addition of urban design features to fundamentally suburban patterns.

It looks like the two outparcels, and only three segments of the original shopping center, still remain. Much of the old parking space and retail space has been replaced with housing. The housing is U Club, a student housing complex for Binghamton University students.

It places them fairly close to campus—a six-minute drive or a walk just under half an hour, with free shuttle service available. It also places them right near a number of restaurants, two banks, a gym, and a couple of stores. It is, now, a place. A place to live and a place to be, not just a place to park, run in, and go home—home being physically separated from everything else.

The view on the ground is a little uncanny:

Or at least we tend to find it uncanny. Suburbia isn’t really designed to have its constituent parts altered and swapped out like this; this is how urban environments and city streetscapes grow, but it can be strange in this context. How much of that uncanniness is the perception of some real discordance, and how much of it is just a lack of familiarity with such mixed forms, I really don’t know.

But such concerns aside, ultimately this is a fine example of doing something, in an incremental way, with these large, faded commercial properties. Maybe all that parking made sense in the heyday of big suburban shopping centers. But the nature of retail has changed, university towns need housing, and cars are increasingly expensive.

A lot of what I mean when I talk about “urbanism,” and related themes of economic opportunity and lowering the barriers to doing things, is this. It’s not about wanting everyone to live in perfectly walkable cities, or hating suburbia or cars. It’s not an ideology or even a set of lifestyle or aesthetic preferences.

It’s more of an approach to the built environment in which gradual change is possible as conditions evolve, and in which the scale of change is low enough that small firms and even regular people can participate in building the place in which they live.

Suburban ruins are strange; how can entire once-thriving shopping centers just sit empty, slowly decaying, for decades? Not all of them can be saved or transformed; we probably did overbuild retail, now that we have e-commerce. Even housing doesn’t make sense everywhere. Lots of places have lost population and it isn’t just 1960s shopping centers that are distressed.

But much of this phenomenon is a symptom of an ossified land-use regime and commercial landscape, where building and adapting and tinkering are either impossible, or someone else’s job. So we would all do well to look at quasi-redevelopment projects like this as examples of a way that is just a little different, a little better, and a little more human.

Related Reading:

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Urbanism Without Cities?

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My argument was that there’s no reason Americans couldn’t also run tiny businesses out of their homes, or commercial accessory units on their properties, or in tiny leasable retail spaces. Culture is probably a factor, but the Japanese are not mystically different; they just have a regulatory framework that allows them to do this, so some of them do it. America has a regulatory framework that makes it almost impossible, so very few of us do it.

In my follow-up, I wrote:

Japanese people start tiny physical businesses because it is possible. And a great deal of what we call “culture” is an interplay of human choices with the set of things which seem possible. There is no wall of separation between “culture” and “technocratic tinkering,” because a thing which is artificially foreclosed by the regulatory regime cannot be a part of the common culture.

In the course of making this argument, I briefly mentioned online, social-media-driven businesses as a kind of American alternative—not that only Americans do this, but that perhaps this fills the same niche as tiny physical businesses in Japan.

I want to think a little more about that here. Should we think of online businesses—whether accounts on e-commerce platforms, or people doing sales on TikTok, or other similar enterprises—as real businesses? Or, with a slightly different emphasis, real businesses? We don’t exactly have a good language for this. Someone with a successful eBay or Poshmark account is technically an independent contractor or a “gig worker,” and only in a very narrow formal sense a “business owner.”

Someone who uses social media accounts to sell directly to consumers, or who sells at volume through a looser platform like Facebook Marketplace, is probably a sole proprietor, but their business is still tied to a specific corporate platform. What about someone who sells cakes or other homemade foods through very informal networks in a manner which might be only quasi-legal?

In any case, though, almost anyone can just up and start an online business, if we consider these things businesses. And that ability to just do the thing is to me what distinguishes the Japanese tiny businesses from what we Americans would think of as “small businesses,” which are already larger than these micro-enterprises.

Is the online/social-media-driven business, basically, the “same thing” as the Japanese tiny physical business, filtered through American culture and land use? Is it a bit misguided to try to insist on bringing a different culture’s expression of micro-enterprise to America? Or is there an important difference, such that we really should see Americans as deprived for not being able to easily do micro-scale business in the physical world?

I also wonder if there is a gender aspect to this—whether these online or social-media-driven micro-enterprises are seen as things women do, and if this marginalizes the idea of being a micro-entrepreneur in the larger culture. In my experience, it is often women doing such things. Of course, it would be narrow-minded and sexist to think that this makes that kind of work less valuable or worthwhile, or that it is inherently “women’s work” in any way. And I don’t think that, but I wonder if that is one of the reasons why “anybody can start a tiny online business” isn’t a little bit more of a universal cultural script.

Now on the matter of culture, there is one counterpoint. I was chatting with someone who’d spent some time in Japan, about the excellent trains and public transit. She said that reducing it to it’s allowed so they do it there is actually missing something. A lot of the important decisions about transportation policy were made in the postwar period, and the Japanese have had decades under that set of rules to develop along those lines. We have had many decades with an opposite set of rules and incentives, so what you’re really seeing is a split which then self-reinforces, or develops along a different set of path dependencies.

It’s a bit like the point I made here, using the idea of schism as an analogy for America’s break with traditional urbanism. The point is that time changes things; it hardens differences; it leads to divergent logic chains and understandings. So the immediate things we urbanists like about Japan, that you can just go there and see, aren’t things you can just copy; they’re the endpoints of decades of development along a distinct path.

Is that true? Or is it just a different way of saying they’re so different, we could never be like them?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on anything to do with this; it’s one of my favorite topics with regard to urbanism and urbanism-adjacent issues!

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Backyard Coffee And Jazz In Kyoto, Japan

That Damned Elusive Parking Spot

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If we take aesthetic concerns seriously, we can let them guide policy priorities. But it’s very important to establish up front that addressing aesthetics alone won’t solve the housing shortage. No matter how pretty anything is, zoning and land use rules will still prevent housing from being built.

I’ll be touching on this question in a piece coming soon, but yes.

Which leads to:

That doesn’t mean we cave to every NIMBY demand. But if we accept that many people sincerely dislike abrupt changes in neighborhood scale, and also that we need political will to build more housing, how do we reconcile those?

This is a good, rigorous attempt to take aesthetic concerns seriously without pretending it would be a panacea or mollify many, or any, of the “professional” NIMBYs, as opposed to regular people who sincerely value harmony or continity in the built environment. Read the whole thing.

No One Sings About Kalamazoo Anymore, Can’t Get Much Higher, , August 27, 2026

This is one of those pieces I wish I wrote. It’s a really interesting question, and it feels like part of a larger cultural shift. (It brings to mind two pieces I’ve written, here, and here.) Anyway:

[Joe] Weisenthal recently reposted an old tweet from another financial commenter, Michael Antonelli. Antonelli’s post pondered why musicians of the 1930s and 1940s were so often singing about unexpected places, like Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Anontelli is alluding to “(I’ve Got a Gal In) Kalamazoo,” most famously performed by Glenn Miller’s Orchestra in the 1940s. And his observation feels correct. I don’t know much about music of the 1930s and 1940s, but I can easily call up scores of songs about places that (a) aren’t that large in terms of population and (b) don’t often get written about today.

He includes this fascinating chart:

This roughly tracks the fortunes of cities and small towns themselves; the 1990s are an absolute low, and the 1940s are the high (although we don’t know the data before that), which precede the era of urban renewal, mass suburbanization, and the crime wave. Then in more recent decades (except the 2010s) American cities specifically see more mentions, which tracks with the revival of cities and the urban housing crisis.

But of course I have a one-track mind on this stuff, and there’s much more in the piece. Read the whole thing.

Atari Is Re-Releasing 39 Atari 2600 Games on Working, Physical Cartridges, IGN, Luke Reilly, August 26, 2026

This is cool:

Atari has today announced a new physical game collaboration with Activision called the Atari x Activision Collection. The unexpected project reunites Activision with Atari after almost 50 years.

The full set of working, physical game cartridges includes 39 classic Activision games, like Pitfall!, River Raid, and Kaboom!, and there will be three ways to purchase them.

I’ve been following this phenomenon of “retro tech,” I guess you could call it, for awhile. The most famous example is the vinyl record revival, which for a time was viewed as a bit of a bubble composed of aging people who grew up with vinyl and young people getting into it for aesthetic reasons.

But it has proved quite durable—vinyl records sales have been climbing year over year since 2007—and a lot more “retro” stuff has seen a revival of interest. You see this with tube televisions, cassette tapes, the recent revival and quasi-re-release of the Commodore home computer, and this revival of Atari consoles and games.

Some of this, of course, is aesthetics or nostalgia. But I think there’s a real demand for what they actually represent, which is purpose-built, internet- and ad-free entertainment. That demand is substantive, and while it obviously overlaps with “retro” tech, since that stuff mostly predates things like the internet and social media, it’s also an independent demand all on its own.

Change My View: Almost all food dishes are sandwiches, Reddit

And for some light fare:

I kept on thinking on this topic, slowly went insane, and I realized that almost everything is a sandwich.

A sandwich is defined in the dictionary as two pieces of bread with meat, vegetables, and other ingredients. The US FDA says it’s two pieces of bread with meat in the middle. This is an outdated definition because a peanut butter sandwich is a sandwich. I would say an ice cream sandwich is a sandwich, which uses chocolate graham cracker and ice cream as its ingredients. I mean...sandwich is in the name. Change the structure a little and a chicken wrap is a sandwich, bread wrap with similar ingredients to a traditional sandwiches. Go radical in both ingredient and structure, and you get a Pop-tart is a sandwich, which to me is a logical step. What about ravioli? Sandwich. Burritos? Sandwich. Egg roll? Sandwich. Crab Rangoon? Sandwich. Corn Dog? Sandwich. But let’s go deeper...

An amusing little read.

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Typically, this refers to preferences in favor of more traditional, ornamented, or “beautiful” architecture, raising the question of whether more aesthetically pleasing new construction would actually change the basic level of support for it? Or is this mostly either a secondary concern or a bad-faith argument? And further, can “beauty” or “good aesthetics” be codified into a style that most people would agree upon?

To put it a little differently, is ingrained opposition to new housing the fault of housing advocates who thumb their noses at the preferences of regular people, in favor of either modernism or lowest-common-denominator throwaway architecture?

While the chat covered these questions, it also zoomed out and attempted to define what is really properly meant by “aesthetics,” concluding that this should be understood not only as a question of architecture or styles, but also one of building and street design overall. That is to say that much of the popular demand for “better aesthetics” is in fact a shorthand for precisely the sort of old-fashioned, well-loved urban design which modern zoning codes largely prohibit.

I’m going to summarize the discussion—this is long, but I think it’s all important—and then, below the paywall, make a few further points of my own. (So scroll down if you want to skip the summary, but I don’t think you should.)

The genesis of this conversation was a social media post Jeff wrote, offering his opinion that he didn’t think the aesthetics question was much of a factor in pro- or anti-housing opinion, and that it should not be a major concern for public policy:

This is definitely a controversial opinion, especially among some of the more traditionally minded urbanists who find the YIMBYs to be too emphatic about “more housing units at any cost,” or however they would perceive the YIMBY position. It is a less controversial opinion among housing advocates in housing-crunched cities, where the aesthetics issue can seem like a distraction.

Jeff said he was surprised how controversial his opinion here was, and because of the conversation it sparked, this live chat came together.

Now notice that in his social media post, Jeff uses “prettier facade” as a stand-in for “aesthetic considerations.” This question—what precisely should “aesthetics” be taken to mean?—was the first topic of discussion.

Andrew defined “aesthetics” as “A complete sensory and emotional experience…what something feels like.” We experience it as vibes or as loose impressions, but there are real, concrete design details we are perceiving when we speak of a building or a place as having good aesthetics. However, because we lack a precise, commonly understood language for good urban design, we express these feelings in shorthand.

Andrew argues that if you really drill down into aesthetic differences, “you’ll find functional differences that matter underneath.” To flip this, he is arguing that what regular people perceive or describe as “bad aesthetics” is really their perception of design flaws.

Stephanie more or less agrees in different words: aesthetics is architecture and architectural style, but also urban form, and the relation between buildings and other elements of the built environment. She also adds that while aesthetics matter, we don’t have a good way of implementing those concerns. Discretionary design reviews or code elements that require large facades to be broken up with different materials, for example, rarely have the result of producing buildings that are generally considered aesthetically superior.

Jeff agrees with all of this, and adds that he previously used “aesthetics” to mean visual or style preferences, and assumed that the discourse around aesthetics was also mostly about this. He agrees that the expansion of aesthetics to include functionality and design considerations is very useful.

He then asks whether there is an objectively superior aesthetic, or a common enough set of subjective preferences, that rough general agreement could be had on “good aesthetics”? In other words, it is one thing to acknowledge that these concerns matter, but another thing to discern how, or whether, they are actionable in the realm of public policy.

It’s agreed that a simplistic idea of mandating beauty is not possible. Stephanie argues that it’s easier to exclude the things people generally don’t like than to define what they do like. (For example, green space yes, parking lots no.)

Andrew returns to the design question. He notes that a typographer can tell you what makes type more legible, or a tailor can explain why a shirt fits. Urban planning and architecture, he says, lack a language for objectively explaining good architecture or urban design. He argues that there are four distinct elements we should consider—scale (size), form (building type), orientation (to the rest of the built environment), and ornamentation (style).

Of these, scale and orientation are most important, because they define the feel of a place overall. Again, Andrew is emphasizing that the aesthetics discourse is largely a design discussion being had in the wrong language.

Andrew also says that because regular people don’t know this language, they will say, to use an example Stephanie offered, that the historic district of Santa Fe is cool because it has “Santa Fe style” brown stucco. And, as Stephanie notes, they know that a Lowe’s covered in stucco is not a true Santa Fe style building.

But people, Andrew says, lack the language to express their own preferences: “People are trying to say a thing they want, but they don’t really understand the thing they want.” In other words, “better aesthetics” or “ugly new construction” are imprecise ways of expressing why we like traditional, “fine-grained,” walkable urban environments over bland, spread-out car-oriented environments: “There are functional characteristics of old places that we really like and value and would like to see more of.”

Jeff asks Stephanie what specifically makes historic Santa Fe popular? Mostly, she says, that it retains its pre-WWII, largely pre-automobile urban form. It has the narrower setbacks (less distance between a building and the street), buildings in line or attached without gaps or awkward dead spaces, trees, plazas, small shops, and fewer parking lots. Parking lots, she notes, make buildings feel taller than they are, which partly accounts for the perception of four- or five-story suburban buildings as “high-rises.”

She says people think of this bundle of traditional urban characteristics as “aesthetics,” but it’s an urban form that was once allowed, and is mostly no longer allowed, by the land-use regime. “So much of what is perceived as aesthetic by people is actually pretty objective,” she says.

Andrew adds that zoning and the era of car-oriented suburban development were largely imposed in a paternalistic way: “We’re not in a world where we don’t have aesthetics governing us….We are in a world where aesthetics govern us intensely.” We cannot mistake the status quo for a state of nature.

Fascinatingly—and I would love to follow up on this with some examples—he says that developers in the transitional period of the 1940s and 1950s lamented that the burgeoning new regulatory regime no longer allowed them to build the kind of things they’d previously been accustomed to building.

Next, Jeff asks what regulations did look like in the old days. Andrew notes that cities like Paris and Washington, D.C. had strong urban planning, while other cities had basically none of what we would now think of as urban planning. There weren’t really that many regulations. Andrew says that the first laws that resemble modern zoning codes were designed in Germany, to deal with rapid industrial expansion and separate industry from the rest of the city. This separation, largely rooted in the even older idea of nuisance regulation, slowly accreted into “Imagine if we separated everything from everything!” Zoning quickly became an elitist, technocratic idea of imposing “order” on the “messy” pre-zoning built environment.

Stephanie adds that the progressive movement in the early 20th century, which largely supported zoning from this technocratic-moralistic perspective, was also motivated by xenophobia, and that eugenicists of the era also supported anti-urban policies.

All of that, believe it or not, is just the first part of the chat, trying to work out a definition of “aesthetics” from which the question of the role of aesthetics can then be answered.

Jeff observes that obviously these things matter, but is good aesthetics—properly understood—actually a useful way to change anyone’s mind, such that with the current political process we can get more housing where we need it?

Stephanie feels that refusing to raise these issues leaves a lot of potential support on the table. “Supply, demand, and units” just doesn’t resonate. “People don’t want their cities to look like shit,” she says bluntly; a pro-housing pitch that addresses the pervasive feeling that new development is “ugly”—meaning largely, to Andrew’s point, poorly designed—would help bring people in. Furthermore, find good ways to explain how good aesthetics and traditional urban design elements work together.

Stephanie also says that the people who go to the public hearings to make comments are a very narrow slice of the general population, and that most of them, despite raising seemingly reasonable objections, are probably not appeasable. But again, she emphasizes that the question of convincing the professional NIMBYs is a different question from reaching neutral, mildly skeptical, or mildly interested people.

Andrew agrees that there is an intransigent minority of people who use bad-faith arguments as a way of simply saying no. But some of their objections might still have merit, or be shared by people who do raise them in good faith. There is not a monolithic anti-housing sentiment or coalition, and much of the “opposition”—a term to which Andrew objects—can be reasoned with.

The bigger answer is to reform the “10 angry people” vetocracy, and have a more democratic and less arcane process for gathering or considering public opinion. And, I think, a greatly simplified ruleset in which fewer projects trigger discretionary reviews and public input hearings.

Andrew gives specific examples where taking aesthetic concerns seriously moved certain housing reforms forward. He points to a building type called “slot houses” in Denver, which have entrances along alleyways and often present a blank facade or garage to the street. The code was altered to require an entrance/front on the street-facing side, such that the buildings interacted with the main street. This is one of those functional and aesthetic elements, and he says that this increased support for these houses.

He also points to some new rules in Denver which are close to being passed, which would increase the number of homes allowed on a single lot in exchange for requiring the new multi-unit buildings to resemble houses. He thinks that many regular people really do object to the garish or incompatible appearance of much new construction, and not to the number of housing units they contain. Taking these considerations seriously really can get more housing built.

Given this full discussion, Jeff says he sees the value of aesthetics, again properly understood, as a relevant concern for housing advocates and housing policy. However, does this actually peel off NIMBYs, or mostly bring in weakly pro-housing people with more intensity?

Andrew says it’s difficult to say who’s being added or peeled off, but his experience above from Denver suggests that a lot of people who initially got involved for NIMBYish reasons ended up supportive of the final policies after these concerns were considered. He believes the majority view is that more homes are fine if they look nice. The citywide nature of the reforms he noted is also important, because there is no narrowly targeted redevelopment.

Making a similar point, Stephanie says that by-right development—that is, projects simply allowed under the rules and not triggering discretionary reviews and public input—needs to be a big part of this discussion. The discretionary review/public input process creates a vetocracy. We would get a better outcome “in every way possible” if we basically let people do their own thing, within a legible and greatly simplified regulatory framework.

Jeff concludes by agreeing that aesthetics probably does matter within our political process, in terms of raising support for new housing in some way. However, it probably does not peel off hardcore NIMBYs, which still points to the need for process and regulatory reforms. Everyone agrees with these conclusions or finds them acceptable.

This discussion was fascinating and very productive, in my view. There are subtle disagreements, or differences of language or emphasis, which are difficult to discern except when the intent is explicitly to uncover them.

This is what I mean when I write about applying the format of an ecumenical dialogue to questions or disagreements within the housing/urbanism world.

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The history of this little diner is long and a bit convoluted, so I had to divide it into two parts, and this is part 2. In last week’s piece, I jumped around a little bit with regard to the timeline, but I concluded with a mention of the diner’s construction and initial name, which was Golden Dream Diner.

Searching for “Golden Dream” in the newspapers.com archive, we find that it was planned and began construction in 1965, and owned by “Peter Feli.” From the report at the time, it sounds like the property was just a piece of land, so the diner was likely the first time the property was developed.

Later that year the Golden Dream Diner was hiring, calling itself “the most modern and convenient diner in the area.” 1965 is almost a little late for a diner; quite a lot of them predate that. So while, if this place had survived, it would today be just another diner, it was in fact a newer generation of diner even from its inception.1

It opened in July of 1965—that’s pretty fast. And it had a live lobster tank. I didn’t really know New Jersey diners sold lobster, but again, it looks like the menu and concept here, despite undergoing multiple refreshes and elevations over the decades, was always a bit elevated over typical diner fare. That’s interesting; the newspaper articles oversell how dramatic each conversion/refresh is; every iteration of the diner looks pretty similar.

By September of 1965, Golden Dream has become one of the most modern diners in the whole state! It was a nice looking place.

How did all these diners, so many decades ago, manage to make money as 24-hour operations? I live in a county of over a million people, and we don’t have all that many 24-hour, or even late-night, establishments. What was different back then?2

The latest reference I can find to the Golden Dream Diner is from a 1992 review of the Felix No. 9 Diner, where it is mentioned as one of diner magnate Peter Felix’s previous eight diners. (It seems like there was a lot of overlap in this industry.)

Now that’s interesting. The Golden Dream was owned by “Peter Feli.” Turns out that is a minor newspaper error: “Peter Feli” was Peter Felix, and the Golden Dream was his second of nine diners! Here is a 1967 reference to Felix as the owner of Golden Dream.

The final mention of the Golden Dream Diner as a going concern is from 1980, in a reference to a grass fire in the back of the property.

Now in the first installment of this piece last week, I was able to fully trace this North Plainfield diner’s history from its final iteration in the 2000s back to late 1980, when it was converted to the Renaissance Diner. And now we have its first iteration, Golden Dream, from its construction out to 1980. Thus the entire history is Golden Dream < Renaissance3 < Midnight < Carousel < Time to Eat Too < Fin and Claw. (Those names were all covered in last week’s part 1.)

However, a series of newspaper articles from the 1980s appears to confuse this timeline.

A 1985 article on Peter Felix mentions that the Golden Dream is now the Renaissance; that fits with everything else we know. But then we get this article from 1983:

A North Plainfield diner on Route 22 at one time called the Golden Dream, destroyed by a fire. This definitely happened, because in 1989 we learn that the Blue Ridge Diner—again, formerly the Golden Dream—is sitting vacant, with the current owner offering it for free to whoever will haul it off the site. The site is planned for a Grease Monkey auto shop, entailing the removal or demolition of the diner.

We learn that this Blue Ridge Diner was formerly the Highway Diner, Riviera Diner, and Golden Dream Diner; both the 1983 and the 1989 article give these three formee names, and no others. They also give the same rough age for it, which comes out to 1943 or 1944.

Since no address is given, it isn’t obvious where this building was. But since neither the other names, nor the opening date, match with our Golden Dream Diner—and since we have multiple 1980s articles that make it clear our diner was open during those years—this burned-out 1940s one-time-Golden-Dream diner must have been a second Golden Dream Diner on Route 22 in North Plainfield.

That, or these newspaper articles are mistaken in attributing the name Golden Dream to the Blue Ridge.

One way we can find out is to search those other names—Blue Ridge, Highway, Riviera—and see if we can pinpoint where this building stood, and if any other reference exists to it as Golden Dream.

The oldest reference to Blue Ridge Diner is from August 1977, in a hiring ad. A different local paper from the same day includes a grand opening ad. That ad gives an intersection, which we can go map:

And at that intersection sits a former Grease Monkey auto shop (renamed a couple of years ago, but unaltered).

In late 1979 there was some sort of diner equipment sale at the Blue Ridge, which would suggest it had closed, but maybe it upgraded; the hiring ads continue. In late 1982 the Blue Ridge Diner was cited for an exterior maintenance violation.

And then in July 1983, we have an article about the blaze, with a photo of the diner, noting it has been closed for a few months at this point.

Another article specifies that by the time of the fire it had been closed for six months, and was in fact undergoing a remodel. The fire was traced to a former cook at the diner, who was eventually convicted of arson.

That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t answer whether this diner was ever also the Golden Dream. None of the Blue Ridge Diner references talk about a conversion or remodel, so the order in which it was all of these other names isn’t clear.

But trying Riviera Diner as a newspaper search, we find a first reference in 1970, in which…a report was made of (unignited) Molotov cocktails being thrown through the windows. Some very interesting things happened in diners!

The last reference to Riviera, other than in the later articles about the fire, is a hiring ad from April 1977. Recall that the first reference to Blue Ridge is an August 1977 hiring ad; so mid-1977 is when those names changed.

Now we’ll try searching “Highway Diner” and see where the range of those references slots in. However, because of the way the newspapers.com search works—not well—this search brings back thousands of results. To narrow it down, I went ahead and searched for both “Highway Diner” and “Golden Dream” in a single search. This was serendipitous: a February 1969 newspaper happens to have ads for both of these diners!

Golden Dream—the one this two-part piece was originally about—re-opened as West End Diner4 in early 1969, which is why it’s “formerly” here in late 1968. The Highway Diner is this second one we’re looking at.

Because this is 1969, and the first reference to Riviera is 1970, that’s another conversion point: Highway Diner < Riviera Diner < Blue Ridge Diner < fire and demolition.

With a little more precision, adding a street name to the “Highway Diner” search, I was able to find a trade name filing from December 1944, and a new management notice later that month, identifying the new Highway Diner as “formerly Foster’s.”

I’m not going to dive into Foster’s, but this does mean that in its diner form, this establishment goes back to 1944—as those articles about the fire said—and first opened as the Highway Diner. These dates all connect together, so there could not have been a Golden Dream period for this second diner.

That means a couple of newspaper writers mixed up two diners, and their mistake got written into articles, which are now some of the only documentary evidence there is about these old businesses. These newspaper articles are mostly reliable, but they are not always completely accurate; simply summarizing them uncritically would repeat historical errors.

I find these bits of local history interesting in and of themselves, but I also find this exercise of reconstructing them interesting. I hope you do too!

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

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It was interesting talking to someone who shared the same basic viewpoint, but who wasn’t familiar with, say, the intricacies of zoning. I actually wish more new folks showed up to these things; explaining something to someone who has no prior knowledge of it really helps to sharpen your own understanding.

And this happened to set the table for another conversation I had that evening. One fellow, who seemed to go to a lot of events and meetups, mentioned that right-wing and MAGA events in Washington were a lot more fun: girls, drinks, barbecues, pools, etc. We policy nerds were, by contrast, a little boring.

But maybe it’s not a right-left thing: another guy mentioned that the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) has fun, joyful, enthusiastic activities. Maybe it’s more that both the right and the left know how to have fun, while we YIMBY types are more a collection of train dudes and centrist neoliberal abundance white-paper nerds. How many people aren’t being reached, he wondered, because this pro-housing advocacy movement seems kind of square?

So we got to discussing whether, and how, housing advocacy could be made more fun and engaging. Have musical act show up to meetups? Host them at wilder bars? The first guy didn’t care for an alcohol-free happy hour earlier this year, which I also went to, and liked a lot!

That struck me as interesting, and as a specific example of a larger and broader phenomenon. Trying out an alcohol-free setting—it was at a little neighborhood restaurant instead of a bar—might have brought in some new people who don’t want to drink as a precondition for socializing and being civically involved. The restaurant filled up, and I remember thinking it was kind of nice, a rare little bit of innocence, to be in this tight, cozy setting and not, you know, feeling like I needed a drink.

But this guy was bored, thought the restaurant was tiny and cramped, and left in 10 minutes. So it might be that for every person you gain, you also lose one, and in the long run, these details don’t really matter for engagement. I don’t think that’s quite true—well-executed events absolutely drive engagement and retention—but it is true that attempts to change things up to bring in more people often alienate other people, and it’s also true that there may not be a universally appealing or welcoming environment for the general public. It’s something to think about.

Here’s another thing to think about: the fellow who mentioned the DSA meetings also mentioned that he had a job. I think he rather meant that some of the DSA folks did not, and he definitely meant that he himself couldn’t do so much of that sort of thing anymore. Maybe, the issue isn’t “make these meetups more fun” as much as the fact that precisely the kind of people you want involved are time-constrained and not necessarily looking for fun or to “be involved.”

I don’t mean we’re too good to get involved. I mean that statistically, housing advocacy will probably always struggle to bring in a critical mass of married, employed, comfortably housed 30-somethings, who are also people who give the movement more conventional credibility.

In fact, this phenomenon is one reason NIMBYism is so successful; often the minority of highly involved, intransigent people who show up at 7pm Wednesday evening hearings to oppose things are retired or otherwise have the time. These are people who have the leisure to “do politics” as an activity unto itself. That’s interesting: NIMBY organizing almost resembles college activism, more than either resembles the more serious advocacy work that housing and urbanism groups are doing.

Before I ask for your own thoughts and comments, I have one more thought of my own. I find it strange that so unremarkable a sentiment as “let’s build enough housing so people can afford to live near good jobs and amenities” is viewed as activism at all. Housing advocacy is something extremely normal, relatable, really universal—which separates it from a lot of activist or political causes—yet it’s filtered through something of an activist culture and vocabulary.

So I would pull the question back a bit conceptually, from “How do we get more people involved?” to “How do we break the dynamic where you have to make yourself slightly abnormal in order to advocate for one of the most normal and universal things there is?”

I’m very interested in what you think of this question, or if it’s even the right question. Leave a comment!

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It’s always a bit of a strange feeling to drive down that corridor; it’s like returning to an origin point. These days, there isn’t all that much left from the American roadside heyday, but there are still a few bits and pieces, and I still like to make that drive when I visit New Jersey.

The restaurant I remember was a seafood restaurant called Fin and Claw, in an old diner building. We passed it many times; my dad ate there once coming home late from work. We never went as a family; I guess it was just okay. It had a fire at one point, and reopened, but by 2007 it was boarded up, and it was demolished and replaced by a bank not long after.

That makes this a rare “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?” entry for a building that is no longer standing, but I find the story it tells interesting enough to feature it anyway.

I tried looking this restaurant up on Google, and…nothing. All the results are for a different Fin and Claw Restaurant, in Washington Township, New Jersey. There is nothing about this restaurant that was in North Plainfield, and the two are not related.

And it was Fin and Claw—not Fin & Claw. But for the heck of it, I tried googling “Fin & Claw,” and I found one result: a barebones entry on the diner history and documentation site Dinerville, identifying “Fin & Claw” as the old Carousel Diner; manufacturer unknown.

As far as I can tell, that is all that exists on the direct, searchable internet about this restaurant, which was open for several years on one of New Jersey’s major commercial highway stretches. I find that notable in and of itself; the internet is very, very far from being a general repository of everything that has happened or been recorded somewhere.

However, the Carousel Diner clue pulled up this postcard, for sale on eBay at the time of this writing:

That’s even older than Fin and Claw, yet it exists on the internet. But only because someone is selling the postcard on an e-commerce site! The randomness and serendipity in what gets recorded and what doesn’t is kind of humbling and disquieting. It’s possible there’s no other image of this restaurant still extant, and that it wouldn’t be possible to know what it looked like without this one guy with a vintage postcard. It makes you wonder how much simply never was recorded at all.

Here is Fin and Claw in 2007, the only time it was captured on Google Maps, because that is the earliest year the street-level imagery goes back to:

You can see it’s the same sign as the Carousel!

That is about all you could do with Google searches. One way to unearth obscure local information like this is to ask on Facebook groups, like an “I grew up in North Plainfield” group. Another way, which I’ve written about a lot since I got a newspapers.com subscription, is searching for newspaper ads or articles. If you had a busy local or regional paper in the relevant area, and it has been digitized, and its digitized archives are on a newspaper service—all ifs—then you can often trace a building and/or business all the way back either to its construction/opening or to the “mists of time.”1

Sometimes a particular person—and nobody else—will have documented one of these bits of local histories. Once again New Jersey-based historian Greg Gillette, who I am sure uses archival material for these histories, has assembled a brief but comprehensive history of the diner:

The $200,000 Golden Dream Diner-Restaurant opened on the westbound side of Route 22 in North Plainfield in 1965. It was located east of the Wilson Avenue intersection, across the highway from the North Plainfield High School athletic fields. Around 1968, the Siliverdis brothers purchased it and renamed it West End Diner. They sold the diner in 1973, after which it operated under various names, including Renaissance Diner, Midnight Diner, and the Carousel Diner. Around 1999, the proprietor of Bridgewater’s Time to Eat Diner acquired the business and renamed it Time to Eat Diner, Too. In more recent years, it was a seafood place and a doggie daycare. Today, there is a bank on the site.

So that’s the basic outline: a mid-1960s opening, and a series of basically similar diners under different owners, ending with an attempt at a refresh into a seafood restaurant, and then the end of an era. (I don’t recall the doggie daycare, but it might have been that too!)

A full descent through the newspaper archives reveals this history. But more interestingly, it tells a whole condensed story about America, about the roadside landscape, and about the immigrant experience.

I found these articles by basically searching each name of the establishment until I found a reference to its previous name, which can often be done all the way to the beginning, or simply to where the paper trail ends. This corridor is extensively documented, mostly thanks to the Plainfield Courier-News, which featured a great deal of granular local coverage over the years.

I’m going to start in the middle of the timeline, with Carousel, because the same person was involved in it from that period to—I think—the end. And then we’ll look at the period before Carousel.

In late 1991, we have a review of the Carousel Diner: “The Carousel diner is a friendly home away from home.” Here is the head chef Christopher Mitchel. Despite the typically massive diner menu, Mitchel is quoted as saying, “I’ll make anything they want, if we’ve got the ingredients.”

This article also mentions the former names of Midnight Diner and before that Renaissance Diner—names which can now be searched to further complete the timeline.

Mitchell offered, in 1991, a one-and-a-quarter-pound lobster with soup, salad, potato, and vegetable, for $11.95. We’ll come back to this later.

In 1999 the Carousel Diner became the “Time to Eat Too Diner,” a second location of the Time to Eat Diner on the Somerville Circle. It apparently had a unique aesthetic which it shared with the original location: “With its plants and a variety of clocks, customers enjoy the familiar relaxed atmosphere.” It’s identified as “once the location of the Carousel Diner.”

From the article: “‘There was a need for good food in this town, and when the place became available, we bought it,’ said owner Chris Mitchel.’” Apparently Mitchel was asked by customers at the original location to buy the second one, which he eventually did. The food options in North Plainfield in the 1990s really must have been minimal.

Time to Eat Too had real chefs, a fairly sophisticated menu, and served relatively high-end coffee from Lacas Coffee, a Philadelphia- and now New Jersey-based company founded by Greek immigrants.

Another review/write-up from 1999 includes a fascinating quote from Mitchel, who was a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America: “I’m part of the new generation of Greek diner owners.” I think he meant that he had a higher view of the diner as a restaurant, with a more refined menu and better overall quality.

You see this phenomenon with immigrant groups and their cuisines all the time: the quest to elevate or innovate in a way that does something more interesting (and profitable) with familiar cuisine. The specialty pizza boom versus the old-school pizza parlor with the standard topping list is a good example. You’re seeing one little hyper-specific example, captured in that 1999 article, of a universal process and sentiment.

I was reading about another restaurant, a kind of “fast food with a modern twist” concept, also from the 1990s, and one of their partners came from an old-school German meat shop closer in to the city. Same kind of thing.

But Mitchel was not new to the diner scene. In fact, we saw his photo above, from 1991, when he ran the Carousel kitchen! “Mitchel cooked at this North Plainfield location when it was the Carousel Diner, right before opening his Somerville diner. He left the partnership of the Carousel Diner in North Plainfield and opened Time to Eat with partner Henry Rybak, who also opened the North Plainfield establishment with Mitchel.”

The menu is worth spending a little time on: A combo of a 16-ounce sirloin steak and two stuffed shrimp was $14.95; believe it or not that is basically double with inflation, $29.66 today. A broiled stuffed lobster tail, seafood fra diavolo with lobster, shrimp and scallop linguine, and broiled veal chops sat in the same price range. Of course much of the menu was cheaper than that.

On the one hand, you aren’t going to find lobster dishes for $29 nowadays. On the other hand, that seems pricey for a diner in 1999. How much does this tell us about how we remember restaurant prices from years or decades ago, and how we feel about inflation today? I’m not sure.

Time to Eat Too didn’t last long, despite reviewing well and looking pretty nice. In 2002 it was converted to Fin and Claw, the final restaurant at the site. Only a few months into opening, there was a fire in the basement—I wonder what the basement consisted of, and what it was used for?—though this didn’t damage the building much.

Here’s an ad for Fin and Claw, not long after it opened. That lobster dinner is $21.32 in today’s dollars—now that strikes me as an unusually good deal, though maybe it was a kind of grand-opening special.2

It also sounds suspiciously like the Carousel’s one-and-a-quarter-pound lobster with soup, salad, potato, and vegetable, for $11.95. So we don’t get soup and salad anymore, but it’s 45 cents cheaper 11 years later, without counting inflation.

First, how is it possible that this lobster dinner cost less in 2002 than in 1991? Second, Mitchel, who one of the Carousel Diner reviews says once owned a seafood restaurant, was probably the owner of Fin and Claw as well, which he likely converted from the Time to Eat Too concept.

Fin and Claw never got a proper review or write-up, so I don’t think its owner was ever recorded in a newspaper article. This is why reading and documenting all of this in concert is worth more than the sum of its parts; it’s doing history.

Now Mitchel’s involvement appears to have begun in 1991, so everything before that is a different period which I’ll give you now. Directly before Carousel, it was the Midnight Diner.

The Midnight Diner name only goes back to 1991—in February of that year there was a hiring ad for the “new Midnight Diner.” Most of the hits for that name, in fact, are recurrences of this ad across newspaper issues. It opened in early March of 1991, converted from the Renaissance Diner; owner, Evan Carzis (along with other Greek-American partners, and a different chef with a fine background; this one studied at New York’s French Culinary Institute).

But other than ads and crime reports, Midnight Diner is not mentioned much, never fully reviewed, and by November 1991 is already the Carousel. That didn’t last long!

The earliest reference to the preceding Renaissance Diner is November 1980, for a hiring ad ahead of the grand opening. The first reference that is not a hiring ad is a strange July 1981 story about two long-separated sisters, one of whom was spotted at the Renaissance Diner. The story says this happened three years ago—before the Renaissance Diner existed. Local papers often also miss small details.

Most of the hits for Renaissance are also ads. In 1987, its operators, brothers Peter and Sergio Scrollini, along with two other partners, proposed a two-story, 71-room hotel adjacent to the diner, which the plan also called for modernizing and enlarging. This never happened.

In late 1990, when the Renaissance closed for remodeling into the short-lived Midnight, the owners were identified as Effie Carzis and her husband. That must be Evan Carzis, the owner of Midnight. So Renaissance in its final couple of years and Midnight were also the same owners, as Time to Eat Too and Fin and Claw probably were.

However, using this method of finding the previous iteration from an article on the new iteration, this is where paper trail ends. Nothing much was ever written about the Renaissance Diner, so no article said anything about what preceded it.

We have Greg Gillette’s summary, however, and he says it began life as Golden Dream.

Now, to convey the whole history of this little building would take up too much space. So next week, we’re going to do a part two, including some looking into an apparent contradiction in the timeline, based on contradictory newspaper articles.

And now I want to go sit in a diner at midnight.

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I presented that argument in 2023:

I’ve begun to think about the land-use changes of the 20th century, taken together—mass car ownership, Interstate Highways, urban freeways, and “urban renewal,” suburbs, strip plazas, and box stores—as a revolution….I think another appropriate word would be schism. That’s the term used to refer to a split within the church, most famously the Catholic-Orthodox split in 1054, known as the Great Schism.

I think of what happened to this country in the 20th century as a sort of schism with ourselves, a period of revolutionary change that separated us from our heritage, that broke our continuity with how we had built and inhabited our places. That somehow made us imagine that the last 70 years of city-building and place-making were more of a status quo than the last 5,000.

And more recently, writing about Old Town Alexandria:

The housing crisis is largely our very slow process of trying to undo the winnowing moment that old urbanism went through. To heal, as I think of it, a schism with ourselves.

As I often do, I’m going to spell this out and then question it a bit.

The aforementioned Great Schism—the split in 1054 between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy—is conceptually very interesting. It’s more interesting, I think, than Catholic-Protestant arguments. Protestantism is sort of like an 18-year-old rebelling against his parents; maybe they both have a point.

But Catholicism versus Orthodoxy is more like you cloned that 18-year-old, and he grew into two extremely similar but also pointedly distinct adults, and then the two versions of him met some decades later and each one argued they were the real version of that 18-year-old in his adulthood.

Now I don’t care which side you’d pick, or even if you think religion is nonsense; it’s an analogy. And the question is, how do you know whether a given moment or state is continuous with a previous one? That is—in the context of this argument about urbanism and land use—can America today understand itself as legitimately continuing its heritage before this land-use schism? Or are we now the version of us that split from a main trunk that should have been what we would be now?

First, I suppose you’d have to establish that such a schism or break actually did occur, as a matter of history. 1054 is easy; the two churches excommunicated each other, and that was that. But locating the exact point, or even the exact way, in which America abandoned its historic cities is tricky.

Such a break would almost certainly have occurred between 1920 and 1960, and more narrowly between 1930 and 1950. There are points, or waypoints, we could identify, which show how over this period the old towns and cities morphed from unselfconscious, unremarkable places into something like artifacts or bits of obsolete technology.

It might be 1929, when a majority of American households first owned a car. The establishment of the first historic district in 1931—Charleston, South Carolina—is another. A more dramatic one is 1949, the genesis of the federal urban renewal programs. A more obscure moment: the construction of the last identifiable traditional small town in the United States—which I made an educated guess as having taken place in North Dakota between 1950 and 1953. The end of streetcar service and new line construction is another. There are probably more.

The publishing of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in 1961, strikes me as the last possible moment before we left the old order behind. Probably, we already had. Jacobs, in that book, writes with a slightly elegiac, backward-looking tone, which suggests to me that by 1961, traditional urbanism and pre-car life, and even the memory of it, had already fallen out of general circulation.

If someone could write as early as 1961 about traditional urbanism as a curious, disappearing thing to be studied and understood, then despite its continued existence, the urban world Jacobs lived in and wrote about had long since ceased to be an obvious, unremarkable normal.

If there is not one single moment at which a break occurred, it is clear that during this 1920-ish to 1960-ish period, we remade the way we traveled, lived, and built our settlements, in a manner which simply cannot be seen as evolving from or continuous with what came before. While much of the legacy built environment did survive, the way we thought about it, and the way we expanded on it, changed greatly.

Yes, the New England village was different from the railroad town was different from the big city was different from the streetcar suburb. But all of these, even the last, share a pattern and design language and are identifiable as variations of more or less the same thing. Suburbia—particularly in separating homes from everything else, and in effectively demanding a private vehicle for mobility or access—is a difference in kind. The moment at which suburbia first became the normal or default mode of building a new settlement is when our Great Land-Use Schism was complete.

The other question—harder, and also more tenuous and more conceptual—is,

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This piece is about memory, nostalgia, place, the character of a place. All that stuff. And I think it’s about as good an expression of the general sentiment as is possible.

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Observant nerd that I am, however, one of the most striking things I saw there ended up being this wing of the dining room:

“I’ve seen this room before,” I instantly said to myself. It reminded me—again, that deja-vu feeling—of an old-school American family restaurant or pancake house.

On some level there isn’t much to it—exposed wood ceiling, homey tables and chairs, old-fashioned lighting fixtures and carpeting. Anybody could set up a dining room like this. But it’s a particular style that evokes an era of American family-oriented middle-class restaurants that are a vanishing breed, at least in the places I’ve lived. The sort of place I’m thinking of is distinct from a diner or just a breakfast-oriented restaurant. I’m specifically thinking about “pancake houses” (itself a sort of old-fashioned phrase).

And in the old Austro-Hungarian lands, pancakes are ubiquitous. We had them on our breakfast buffet here; the shredded pancake called kaiserschmarrn is very popular. American pancakes are said to be directly descended from British and Dutch pancakes. But there are continental European influences too, and Alpine and Nordic Europeans started or worked in American restaurants back in those days and brought recipes with them.

I’m thinking about this, in particular, because that dining room sparked an old idea for an essay. I remember reading some years ago, when I first started this newsletter, about a small local pancake restaurant chain in Northern Virginia called Three Chefs.

It’s nostalgic for older people who grew up here, and I saw comments like “Those were the best pancakes I ever had” and “No other pancakes are quite like those were.” Of course there’s nothing unique about pancakes in this respect; I came across another example of this, about frozen custard, having to do with the fact the older machines supposedly worked differently and produced a denser, creamier product.

Some people think this entire “Nothing tastes like that ice cream I had 60 years ago” sentiment is just nostalgia. Maybe it’s because your tastebuds have changed. Perhaps there could be subtle changes in theoretically fungible ingredients—milk produced today might just not taste 100% identical to milk from 70 or 80 years ago. Even with an identical recipe, there might just be some je ne sais quois that can never be entirely replicated.

But I remember one comment in particular—though it may have been about something other than Three Chefs—about a pancake recipe from a European chef, which included a number of different flours in a specific ratio to get just the right pancake.

This raises the possibility that

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Well, I didn’t quite recognize this! To the right is a Vietnamese restaurant, Pho Xe Lua, which I’ve gone to since I was a kid. They were famous for a neon train sign, which unfortunately is no longer there. But it looked like this:

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Lancaster is not a foreign or special sort of place; it is a place we can learn from in thinking about regional development and land use here in the Washi…

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Walk through the oldest parts of almost any American city and you can still see the evidence — the odd storefront embedded in a block of houses, usually grandfathered in decades ago, and often the most beloved building on the street. Or if not an active storefron…

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Tho…

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Littler is extremely well-curated. The local chef/owner, Gray Brooks, is well-known (He also owns Pizzeria Toro). He creates short and simple menus; everything is good, and nothing isn’t. The interior ambiance is composed of rich wood, brick walls, and string lights. There is no design noise here, but there is …

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One is the friction of distance, and how much of what makes college years a special time is the minimal distance between things.

Another is that it’s very easy to tell a narrative or story about a thing we’re looking at, and then without even realizing it impose that story on the actual thing we’re looking at, interpret it through our own made-up frame, and then think that we are seeing confirmation of our story when in reality we’re not even looking at what’s in front of us.

And the third one, kind of an instance of the second, is that to some extent, the “spread-out-ness” of suburbia that I’m always on about is a story. Yes, the raw distances between homes, jobs, and points of interest are real. But by imagining that we live in a chopped up, separated environment where nothing coheres or fits together, on some level we make that perception true. We act as if it’s true. At some subtle point it can stop becoming an explanation or description and start becoming a limiting perception.

Thinking about college, my “story” of college was pretty aligned with what it was (at least in terms of the physical place; not unfortunately in terms of some other things). My mental map of the campus was, basically, the actual map of the campus. Looking back, it took probably only a couple of months for 90 or 95 of the campus and the surrounding town to become “connected” in my mind; not just a disparate series of destinations, but an overall place.

I used to think of it kind of like the overworld in a video game. “Campus” was its own place, with the individual buildings and functions slotting into that sense of place-ness and order. Being “on campus” meant you could, with minimal effort, be at any of those sub-destinations in a matter of minutes. It meant that in real life, but it also meant that in our understanding of the place. None of them were really distinct in the sense that you ever thought “Oh that’s too far away, some other time.”

What has really struck me recently is that my tendency to see suburbia as hopelessly sprawling, stretched apart, and centerless—to tell that story about it, and see the actual, real-world space I traverse filtered through that story—probably intensifies that perception and causes me to miss some of what’s really there.

As a kind of thought experiment, I tried to imagine the square (roughly speaking) of space where we do the majority of errands, work, dining out, etc. (An obvious missing piece is socializing, because you rarely end up near your close friends from earlier periods in your life.) I have no idea what that land area is precisely, but a rough look at Google Maps with the measuring tool suggests somewhere in the ballpark of 100 square miles.

Now the majority of that square of space is residential-only areas which have no real reason to exist on the mental map unless you know someone who lives there. So seeing it in terms of square miles overstates the distances/spaces involved. In reality, the “overworld” of my normal activities is really the highway corridors and towns where I tend to go.

And the point is that, really—in terms of driving time, because this exercise is hopeless without assuming a car for nearly everything—the times and distances are not that great. They’re not that much more, and often the same or less, than the longest possible walk on my college or grad school campuses.

So why not do the work of forming more of a cohesive mental map of the area I live in, and imagine my day a bit like traversing this “campus,” trying to see what feel like completely random, unrelated tasks taking you here there and everywhere as little strolls within the bounds of a single “place”? Could that mental re-perception leaven or enlighten the daily grind?

For example, there’s an

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