Wednesday Walk: Suburban Scars
A car wash that used to be something else, an iconic restaurant now shuttered, and a surprise rainbow!
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As is typical every Wednesday, today I’m bring you a smattering of topics that I hope will make you a bit more curious about the world around you and give you something to think about later. I call these Wednesday Walks, as it’s the type of conversation we might have walking down a path in the woods. Shall we take a stroll?
Dispatches from the Road
As I mentioned in Sunday’s newsletter, my family and I are on the road this week in our RV, seeing some sights here in the Northeast. It’s been an auspicious start to the 2023 camping season and I hope the sign of good things to come this year.
Since most of my time this week has been spent driving and hanging with my family rather than reading, I have less articles to share and more wanted to share some sketches from the road. These are short little vignettes which stood out to me that I hope will delight you in some small way.
Not a Car Wash
The first part of our week was spent visiting the Sesame Place theme park in Langhorne, PA. It’s a bit strange that the neighborhood right around the park is mundanely suburban. The Oxford Valley Mall was at one time the main anchor of this area and it predates the opening of the theme park (the mall opened in 1973 and Sesame Place opened in 1980).
The Oxford Valley Mall, like many suburban malls, has lost two of its anchor tenants and seems to be holding on by a thread. As in most suburbs, there’s quite the sprawl around the mall (and Sesame Place), housing mostly chain restaurants and big box stores like Home Depot, Best Buy, and Barnes and Noble.
With that context, this car wash caught my eye as we were driving by. I immediately recognized the building- do you?
I’ll give you hint: the building was originally bright blue and the two-story glass window mullions were bright yellow. Here’s what it looks like inside, although that doesn’t really provide any clues.
Give up? Here’s the same building just a few years ago:
As I’ve written about in the past, I worked at Toys R Us for about five years during my high school and college years so I have a lot of nostalgia for the (mostly) defunct chain. The former stores near me are being converted to other big box retail like grocery stores, so it’s a bit interesting to see a store mostly gutted to become a car wash.
Of course, a car wash doesn’t have the same parking needs as a toy store, in part because all of the customers are inside the car wash whilst patronizing it. So developers have been investigating ways to add a new business to this site to make use of the now wasted parking lot.
At one time, there were hopes of bringing a hotel to the parking lot. Ironically, it would have been a Hilton Tru hotel, which is an entry level brand competing with Quality Inn and Comfort Inn. Ironic because Toys R Us was often abbreviated to TRU.
Unfortunately, the Middletown Township Board of Supervisors has repeatedly denied plans for the hotel, specifically citing pedestrian safety concerns with patrons possibly crossing the Old Lincoln Highway to reach the mall and Sesame Place.
Don't get me started… (but if you’re curious about how I feel about pedestrian friendly suburbs, I’ve written about it before).
At any rate, I was struck by the interesting reuse of an old big box store here, and by the serendipity of a Tru Hotel replacing a TRU. Although in this case, it wasn’t meant to be.
Dinner at The Ground Round
Also in Langhorne, we had an experience that is getting harder to come by these days. We ate dinner at The Ground Round! I should probably follow that with a major asterisk because we didn’t actually go inside the restaurant or have any food off of their menu prepared in their kitchen.
We simply parked our RV in the parking lot of an abandoned Ground Round location outside of the Oxford Valley Mall and prepared dinner in the RV.
The Ground Round has always fascinated me. We had one near us growing up, but I don’t recall ever eating there. I vaguely remember my sister visiting there with one of her friends and being excited about their kids’ policy of “pay what you weigh in pennies.” (So a 50 pound child would eat for 50 cents back in the day).
If you’re interested in the full history, Mashed has a deeper dive, but I’ll give you the condensed version of the chain’s history.
The Ground Round was actually an offshoot of Howard Johnson’s restaurant business when it was founded in 1969. At the time, HoJo’s main focus was on serving travelers along busy roadside routes, and The Ground Round was an attempt to make a neighborhood restaurant that would cater to local tastes.
The restaurant targeted to kids, families, and young adults with an eclectic mix of offerings. There was a clown that made appearances, bottomless baskets of peanuts, and sometimes, quite the party scene (a death in the parking lot at a Ground Round in Massachusetts led to my state banning all happy hours).
At its peak, The Ground Round had 200 restaurants, some corporate owned, some franchised. The restaurant chain was sold a number of times over the years, before eventually declaring bankruptcy in 2004. 59 corporate owned locations closed, but 72 franchised locations continued to operate. The franchisees eventually banded together and formed a company to run their locations.
The Langhorne Ground Round is actually relatively new, opening in 2012. There’s a letter taped to the inside of the entry door sent by mall management to mall tenants explaining the governor’s emergency order to close at the beginning of the pandemic. The location never reopened. It’s unclear if the pandemic caused the closure or only accelerated what may have already been an inevitability.
The Ground Round is down to only 15 locations, although some of them appear to still be listed as closed due to COVID on the corporate website. I can now claim to have eaten at one of the locations, even if I didn’t eat in that location.
🌈 Rainbows!
We were driving to our campsite after a rainstorm when we noticed a nice little surprise in the sky. There was a rainbow!
When we reached our campsite and setup, we could see that it was a full rainbow that stretched across the entire sky and even seemed to reflect itself in the clouds, giving the effect of a double rainbow! It was a beautiful end to one of our camping days and I share it to hopefully bring a little joy to your Wednesday!
Thank you for reading! Did you get something out of today’s issue? I always love hearing your thoughts, so please drop a line in the comments.
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Other Wednesday Walks
If you’ve missed past issues of this newsletter, they are available to read here.
The demise of big beers at sporting events and happy hours can actually be traced to two other April events - a weekend doubleheader at Fenway where beer was flowing and multiple fights broke out in the right field stands near Pesky’s pole. A State Senator and his family ended up in the middle of it all. Around the same time, a State Rep’s daughter attending Cale Cod Community College was paralyzed when a VW Bug she was a passenger in rolled over exiting the Mill Hill Club in West Yarmouth after a 25¢ beer night. These both happened in April 1981 as I remember and bills were filed shortly after that killed the Happy Hours and drink specials.
Enjoy the family RV adventure !!