Vintage roadside

[Fading Fast]

2Jakes - that hardware store is a gem - the wood everywhere is incredible. Hollywood could film period movies there. Also, I love that the ghost sign of the store can be seen behind the updated one.

1Match1 - great sign and from my favorite "chain" doughnut store.

 

[2jakes]

When I ride my 1920s Iver Johnson bicycle, I make it a point to go here.
The King Williams District.
Nothing but these beauties on every block.
These are just a sample of the many located here.

 

[QuirkyQueen]

I just purchased a 1960's restored high nelly bike (an early Xmas Present) cant wait to take her out for a few vintage runs in a vintage outfit......

http://a1.amlimg.com/ODEwMWEzNDlkOD...0cy5pZS9zdGF0aWMvaS93YXRlcm1hcmsucG5nfHx8.jpg

 

[1mach1]

Hyattsville, MD

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ I am not proud if it (nor much about myself), but I have an affinity for kitsch - put a giant lobster on the roof of a lobster shack or an oversized hen out front of a dairy and I'm smiling away. Or even better, make a hamburger restaurant in the shape of a hamburger and I'm guaranteed to be a customer (right now, literally, right now, my father is spinning in his grave with disappointment).

 

[BobHufford]

...or an oversized hen out front of a dairy

This was a result of the "Chicken Shack" closing and the "Dairy Dell" adopting the mascot. That one would really make me smile.

 

[dh66]

⇧ I am not proud if it (nor much about myself), but I have an affinity for kitsch - put a giant lobster on the roof of a lobster shack or an oversized hen out front of a dairy and I'm smiling away. Or even better, make a hamburger restaurant in the shape of a hamburger and I'm guaranteed to be a customer (right now, literally, right now, my father is spinning in his grave with disappointment).

Say it loud and say it proud! There's no shame in it. Perhaps my affinity for the roadside kitsch - unique buildings, flashing signs, and giant fiberglass critters - stems from my own parents lack of appreciation of, and subsequent reluctance to stop at, such fantastical places, but I started this thread because I like such things and wanted to see more of 'em. When I look at some of these posts from other parts of the road, I feel like that little boy staring longingly out the backseat window wishing he could go there.

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk

 

[Fading Fast]

Say it loud and say it proud! There's no shame in it. Perhaps my affinity for the roadside kitsch - unique buildings, flashing signs, and giant fiberglass critters - stems from my own parents lack of appreciation of, and subsequent reluctance to stop at, such fantastical places, but I started this thread because I like such things and wanted to see more of 'em. When I look at some of these posts from other parts of the road, I feel like that little boy staring longingly out the backseat window wishing he could go there.

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk

Sounds like your and my parents were the same - mine brooked no enthusiasm for roadside kitsch. I learned early on that life went much better agreeing or being quiet in my house (or car), so that's what I did.

But like you, I did pine to go into the teepee shaped store, the steakhouse with the cow on the roof or the miniature golf course whose "clubhouse" looked like a golf club.

Fortunately, my girlfriend shares this whimsy, so on the rare times we are on road trips, we have pulled over to have a look-see at the giant dinosaur or coffeeshop with a five-foot-tall steam kettle on its roof (with real steam coming out) or doughnut store with a giant doughnut out front.

We do have pictures of both of us standing in front of the giant Bean boot outside the Bean mothership in Maine.
This boot ⇩

 

[1mach1]

Old Ice House. Alexandria, VA

 

[BlueTrain]

I've lived in and near Alexandria, Virginia, for over 40 years and I've never noticed that ice house. When I saw the name, though, I immediately thought of another building on South Lee Street in Alexandria, just off Duke Street, but I guess it wasn't an ice house. It was some kind of small, old, commercial building with a dock, though. Now I'm curious. Most old commercial buildings (especially ice houses) don't look that nice now. There was an ice house in my home town and I expect most towns had them into the 1940s. I remember when we still had an icebox.

 

[BlueTrain]

I was just trying to learn more about the building I was thinking of in Alexandria but came up with nothing. I guess this calls for fieldwork and I'm not sure I'm that dedicated.

But while I was thinking about that, I remembered that near where we used to live about 30 years ago, in Merrifield, Virginia, there lived a man who had a collection of very large objects like circus wagons. There was also an oversized, maybe fifteen feet tall, of the Victrola and the dog. Very striking when seen from the road. But the whole area has been developed, or rather, re-developed, and all of that stuff is gone.

 

[1mach1]

I was just trying to learn more about the building I was thinking of in Alexandria but came up with nothing. I guess this calls for fieldwork and I'm not sure I'm that dedicated.

But while I was thinking about that, I remembered that near where we used to live about 30 years ago, in Merrifield, Virginia, there lived a man who had a collection of very large objects like circus wagons. There was also an oversized, maybe fifteen feet tall, of the Victrola and the dog. Very striking when seen from the road. But the whole area has been developed, or rather, re-developed, and all of that stuff is gone.

Yeah, that place was super cool. Merrifield now looks like Anywhere, USA.

 

[BlueTrain]

If you know that area then, you probably remember the drive-in movie theater about two blocks up Rt. 29 (I think it is) towards Falls Church.

 

[BlueTrain]

This is something I ran across on another blog. It doesn't come with pictures but it does have to do with vintage roadside. It is dedicated to Miss Lizzie, because it's about Maine. The other Maine.

"There is a backcountry Maine that painters do not paint, writers do not describe and visitors do not mention. People in backcountry Maine say a house is a house, but a house with a shed is a village." Charles E. Clark. However, one writer wrote of living in the backcountry, literally, when there was still a logging industry in Maine, and titled her book "My neck of the woods." But she didn't describe it as being particularly charming, to be truthful.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Yep, go an hour and a half's drive inland from the coast, and you're in The Other Maine. Keep going and you'll end up in Yet Another Maine, full of potato fields and generic townships called "T5-R9." There is no particular "roadside" up there -- it's just road and trees.

It was a rough way of life that produced rough people. And yet in 1882 Oscar Wilde -- the king of Aesthetes himself -- visited Bangor, then the capital of the logging industry, and delivered a lecture on "The Decorative Arts." When I get my time machine working that will be one of my first stops, not only to hear the lecture but to record the response.

 

[BlueTrain]

You should see the place I'm from. Not the small town that I've often mentioned but the other place where I lived for a year when my folks moved. It was in the next county and the previous century and only 35 miles away. But it isn't what it was then, not that anything is.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Yep, go an hour and a half's drive inland from the coast, and you're in The Other Maine. Keep going and you'll end up in Yet Another Maine, full of potato fields and generic townships called "T5-R9." There is no particular "roadside" up there -- it's just road and trees.

It was a rough way of life that produced rough people. And yet in 1882 Oscar Wilde -- the king of Aesthetes himself -- visited Bangor, then the capital of the logging industry, and delivered a lecture on "The Decorative Arts." When I get my time machine working that will be one of my first stops, not only to hear the lecture but to record the response.

It can't beat the one he got from the miners in Leadville, CO.

 

[1mach1]

Passed on by a fellow lounger

 

[Frunobulax]

Passed on by a fellow lounger

"Always trust your car..."


Sent directly from my mind to yours.

 

[BlueTrain]

I think there was usually an element in the rough frontier towns, the river towns, the logging camps, smoky factory towns, cow towns and mining camps that craved a certain amount of sophistication and which produced (relatively) elegant opera houses, contemporary and decidedly permanent churches and other surprisingly grand, if not large, public buildings. We have trouble doing the same thing today. Of course, some bustling centers of commerce and industry were absent of such things. I couldn't tell you anything about how those things came to be but they're still there in many places, including ghost towns. We visited Red Wing, Minnesota, which has a small and fairly elegant opera house. Even Leadville, Colorado, has a big, fancy opera house built in 1879. I'd say the main thing that enabled such things was a prosperous local economy, same as now, especially if there was a boom period that produced some very wealthy individuals who liked to spread their money around.