Fill It Up With Half Of The Pepperoni
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #268
This is a pizzeria in the historic old town part of Winchester, Virginia:
It’s not too far from the downtown commercial area, but it sits in the middle of a few mostly residential blocks:
You sometimes see restaurants in residential streets in old towns. However, this did not begin life as a restaurant, as you might guess from the garage bays on the right half of the building!
(Yes, the name Pizzoco is inspired by Conoco.) 1928! That’s 98 years old, which is older than we kind of think of auto garages or gas stations as being. Kind of how World War II is always 50 years ago and Millennials are always 20-somethings. But that’s a long time ago, and it’s so old that this stuff is now part of the history of places. Especially these earlier gas station structures, which were more ornamented than the sleek boxes that came later, which are somewhat less interesting as landmarks or adaptive reuse possibilities.
For this building to still be standing a century on, it must have been made really well. You can see it has barely been altered, though I’m sure some bits and pieces have been updated or replaced.
Someone in the comments, on the restaurant’s Facebook post shown above, said: “I recall how challenging it was back then to get approvals for the use. Change can be hard to envision sometimes. I most appreciate your commitment to that process back then. Lesser folks might have folded.”
Why should that have been so difficult? Maybe environmental cleanup issues arose (buried tanks, etc.). This became a big, expensive issue for a gas-station-to-restaurant-conversion project in my hometown of Flemington, New Jersey. There may have been a zoning issue too with the parcel. This is a Winchester city document about amending a “conditional use permit” which is apparently what they received to operate the restaurant. These were the terms of the original permit:
I guess that’s reasonable, but who knows how much time and back and forth went into those stipulations. And as the commenter suggests, for every business owner who perseveres, there are countless who do not, or who do not even attempt the process. So many people have no avenue for doing a little something with a passion or a good idea.
And yet the thing is, once it’s done, it seems so utterly normal that you’d never believe what it took to get it. We can learn from that, if we want to.
Related Reading:
I like Winchester, it’s the right size if small town and is touristy but not so old timey that it feels like a theme park.