Having donned her poufy, pink chiffon dress, her silvery sequined shoes, her sapphire and diamond earrings and her sparking rhinestone choker, Mary Ludgin–a Northwestern Ph.D. who in real life wears sensible suits in her job at a big Chicago real estate firm–looks ready for a high school prom, circa 1955, or an Annette Funicello wannabe contest.
She isn’t.
She is about to lead what she winkingly calls the “tacky tour,” a bus ride that takes in such showcases of schlock as a replica of Ray Kroc’s first McDonald’s hamburger joint and the Superdawg hot dog stand, where a giant frankfurter–with blinking red eyes, no less–flexes his biceps atop a roof on Chicago’s Northwest Side.
On this day, the passengers don’t not wear black leather jackets or slicked-back pompadour hairdos, as they sometimes do. In fact, there is hardly a hint of polyester among the few dozen tourists. They are, instead, the natural-fiber crowd, Brooks Brothers and Ann Taylor types, who have journeyed to Chicago for last week’s convention of that quintessentially tasteful group, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which began more than a century ago when some high-minded Southern ladies rallied to save George Washington’s white-columned mansion at Mt. Vernon.
To some, of course, the very idea of blowing off high-style architecture by Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Burnham, John Wellborn Root, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Helmut Jahn for the High Tack Superdawg–designed by its owner, Maurie Berman–is ludicrous.
But not to these finely tailored folks.
The climax of their pilgrimage will come at that shrine of the American commercial strip, the replica of Kroc’s first McDonald’s in Des Plaines, where they whip out their Nikons and Kodaks and shoot so much film so fast that you’d have thought they’d arrived at Chartres.
“Just like I remember as a kid,” one of them says, gazing reverently at the red-and-white-tiled facade and the swooping golden arches. “It was a big deal when they opened one in town.”
Are these people:
A. Incredibly forward looking?
B. Hopelessly nostalgic?
C. Nuts?
Perhaps more important (if the word “important” can rightly be used for this seemingly insignificant subject), should Americans be putting fast-food joints and gas stations on their lists of the nation’s most venerated places?
And regardless of whether they should be official landmarks, should society do what it can to prevent them from disappearing into a neon-lit sunset?
A victory in California
It’s not an idle issue. With wacky roadside architecture disappearing from America’s highways and byways faster than you can say “George Jetson,” preservationists around the country are battling to save it–and, in some cases, winning.
On Oct. 10, Oak Brook-based McDonald’s Corp. announced that it would reverse an earlier decision and reopen the nation’s oldest surviving McDonald’s, 43 years old and located in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, as a walk-up hamburger stand, where milkshakes will be individually mixed rather than being dispensed from a huge machine.
After a 1994 earthquake, the company closed the restaurant, a red-and-white-tiled building like the one in Des Plaines, claiming that it was structurally unsound. But that was before McDonald’s was swamped by a wave of protests, including one from California Gov. Pete Wilson, who likened the golden arches in Downey to Sutter’s Mill, where the California gold rush began in 1848. The National Trust even put the Downey McDonald’s on its list of the nation’s 11 most endangered landmarks, declaring the hamburger stand “an authentic icon of contemporary American life.”
Yet experts disagree whether buildings designed for a short shelf life should remain a part of the landscape. The naysayers, ironically, include the very figures who pioneered pulsating neon signs and garishly decorated buildings as a subject of serious academic inquiry.
“Here and there, it’s worth preserving them,” says Philadelphia architect Steven Izenour, co-author of the groundbreaking 1972 book “Learning From Las Vegas,” which codified the casino architecture of the Las Vegas Strip. “But the essence of this stuff is that it’s not permanent. It seems terribly misguided (to apply) preservationist standards from Frank Lloyd Wright, or Louis Sullivan, or whatever, to the ultimate ephemeral architectural form.”
On the other hand, there is the view that roadside buildings reflect the influence of two of the great shaping forces of the 20th Century American landscape: the consumer society and the automobile. That gospel has been spread by the Washington, D.C.-based Society for Commercial Archaeology. One of its members, Jim Peters, the deputy director of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, compares the current distaste for roadside buildings to the way people looked down upon Victorian architecture in the ’50s.
“Before you knew it,” Peters says, “all the Victorians were gone. You need to look ahead to see what will be representative of a generation, architecturally and culturally.”
`History in the making’
That’s what draws this group to the roadside architecture tour–although some confess that they got bumped from other tours and went on this one only as a last resort.
“It’s history in the making,” says Don Perryman, an urban planner for Austin, Texas, who bemoans the recent loss of that city’s last drive-in movie theater while waiting for the bus to pull out from the downtown Palmer House Hilton. “A lot of people think it’s tacky, but in its time, it was in vogue.”
As Mid-America bus No. 918 nears Superdawg, at Milwaukee and Devon Avenues, tour leader Ludgin grasps her microphone and explains how large, colorful signs project from building fronts to command the driver’s attention in the wide-open spaces of the commercial strip. The arrangement contrasts to more subdued signs, set flush to the fronts of downtown buildings to catch the eye of passing pedestrians.
Superdawg, in fact, is a building that has been transformed into a sign. The low-slung, concrete-block box is painted black, and is wrapped in elongated blue and white diamonds. At the top are its visual trademarks–the red-eyeballed “male” hot dog, wearing what appears to be a leopard-skin suit, and his “female” counterpart, attired in a frilly dress like Ludgin’s. Scrawled in white script, on a black background, is the word “Superdawg,” with its distinctively exuberant “S.”
It is high camp–and a huge hit with the preservationists. “Don’t miss the blinking eyeballs,” one squeals.
Berman explains how it all came to be in 1948. He wanted to finance an accounting degree and decided to compete with ex-GIs selling hot dogs on street corners. At his seasonally open drive-in stand, young women served patrons in the cars. It was only after walk-up McDonald’s hamburger stands opened in the mid-1950s, he points out, that most restaurants did away with car hops. His place, which still has drive-in callboxes and car hops, is distinctly a product of the `40s.
There’s more: Berman decided upon the name “Superdawg” to play on the familiarity of the comic book character Superman, who was particularly popular at the time. Broad at the top and narrow at the bottom, the “S” in the Superdawg script echoed the “S” on Superman’s chest. The blue and white diamonds imitated the decorative medallions on garage doors and helped “gussy up” the concrete-block walls, the owner says.
Why was there a “female” hot dog? “Because there was a Maurie and Florrie,” Berman says, referring to himself and his wife, Florence.
Leaning towers and McDonald’s
The bus soon passes the 96-foot Leaning Tower of Niles, a half-sized version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, built of concrete in 1934. The idea was to hide a water tower inside. The tower was designed, Ludgin relates, by an architect named Albert Farr. Instantly, one of the passengers brands it “Farr’s Folly.”
“Stop, stop,” other preservationists yell to the driver, eager to snap pictures.
After more film has been spent, the bus heads to the Des Plaines McDonald’s, and Ludgin spins the tale of Dick and Mac McDonald, two brothers from New Hampshire. They moved to California in the 1920s and ran orange juice and barbecue stands before opening their first hamburger joint in the early 1950s.
Designed by fast-food architecture specialist Stanley Clark Meston, it had red-and-white tiles that not only were visually distinctive but also were easily hosed down, Ludgin points out. The parabolic golden arches provided a Space Age version of the unique visual identity Berman achieved with his Superdawg characters. Similarly, the slanting glass under the roof projected a dynamic image, as well as providing more room in the cooking area. Emblazoned in neon on the big sign out front, the character Speedee the Chef reminded patrons of McDonald’s speedy service.
Kroc, a former milkshake machine salesman, used a similar design when he opened his first McDonald’s franchise in Des Plaines in 1955. He bought out the brothers in 1961 and after his death, McDonald’s in 1985 built a museum replica of the Des Plaines restaurant as a memorial to Kroc. The sign in front, however, is original.
As the bus rounds a bend, the golden arches appear, but they seem tiny, almost lost in the trees and thus hardly up to their mythic stature.
A chatty preservationist from Birmingham, Ala., expresses disappointment.
What was she expecting, the towers of Notre Dame?
Still, no one wants to miss this photo opportunity, and soon, the tour group presses its cameras up to the glass window, recording the wooden root-beer barrels in the cooking area and the prices on the display: 15 cents for a hamburger, 10 cents for fries, and 20 cents for a milkshake.
The last stop, a 32-year-old Par-King miniature golf course in Morton Grove, is, like the Superdawg, an example of architecture without architects.
It was designed, Ludgin says, by owner Nick Bosnos–a man who clearly has a sense of humor. The course’s big sign, a king’s crown flanked by the words “Par” and “King,” wittily suggests both high and mighty royalty and down and dirty parking, the latter being the key to doing business on the strip.
A highlight of the golf course itself is a miniature version of One Prudential Plaza, Chicago’s tallest skyscraper when it was completed in 1955. Ludgin tells the preservationists that the teeny tower reminds her of the days when she would go to the Prudential’s Top of the Rock restaurant and observation deck for a Shirley Temple.
Then, it’s back to Chicago, and time to rest up for the next day’s tours. One of them ventures to the tweedy territory of the North Shore, where there is precious little neon.
