Ghost Of The Highways

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #265

I saw this post on Facebook the other day, and since I’m pretty familiar with the Somerville area and the Route 22 corridor, I had to go see if it was still standing. I know I’ve never driven by a building anywhere near that looks like a Howard Johnson’s.

A little bit of searching found me the address, and here it is, a weird stretch of Route 22 where the buildings are in a median, with the east- and west-bound lanes on either side. The building there now is a Buffalo Wild Wings:

I recognized this spot; it was a Lone Star Steakhouse when I was a kid, and we ate there once or twice. (I think there was a sushi restaurant next door or across the way that we also went a couple times.) Luckily, the Lone Star was captured in some of the older Google Maps imagery (2009). And, if I’m not mistaken, that’s an old Howard Johnson’s wearing a western-themed steakhouse costume!

And I’m not mistaken; here’s an entry on it on the Howard Johnson’s fan website highwayhost.org:

And while that building shape is pretty clear, here’s proof, from an April 1995 issue of a local paper (technically the building is in Bridgewater, next to Somerville:

Since it’s identified as the former Howard Johnson’s, it had probably a remained a Howard Johnson’s into the 1990s.

So there you go. But not quite.

I was looking at the Buffalo Wild Wings building on Google Maps rather closely. While it doesn’t look like the Howard Johnson’s building, it…doesn’t not look like it. I was curious.

Here they are again side by side:

Notice the Buffalo Wild Wings has a middle segment with the sign column, and then two segments, one on the left and one on the right, slightly set back. Exactly the same shape/layout as the Lone Star/HoJo.

The roof is completely different, as are the window placements/sizes. I couldn’t pinpoint a detail that made it clear if the Buffalo Wild Wings was really the same building, heavily altered. But the newspaper archive came to the rescue again!

And there you go:

The second paragraph there is the key, you don’t have to read it all: “The local franchise owners, the AntSul Group, bought the restaurant last October and have been remodeling it to double the ceiling heights, open up the interior and make the building resemble other Buffalo Wild Wings restaurants.”

That little three-part segmentation is the only clue that this building did, in fact, begin life as a Howard Johnson’s restaurant.

I think of this phenomenon, of identical or heavily brand-associated buildings remaining there when their companies disappear as the “architectural public domain.”

It’s fascinating to me to see how buildings which share a common origin branch into being so many different, more or less recognizable things. And it’s the coolest thing to piece these little stories back together.

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Related Reading:

Ospite Delle Autostrade

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

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #6

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #9

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