Since all of these newsgroups have recently discussed various
aspects of what most Bostonians call "Route 1 in Saugus"
(though it really spans several neighboring towns as well),
I'm posting this in hopes of starting a new thread on the subject.
From yesterday's Boston Globe Sunday Magazine (June 14, 1998).
Schlock around the clock
Why we'll always love Route One
By Joseph P. Kahn, Globe Staff
On one day in May, along the stretch of Route 1 between Saugus and
Peabody, there is more than enough action to occupy an urban
anthropologist. At the Circle Bowl, in Lynnfield, Cecelia Latorella, a
77-year-old, legally blind bowler, is smoking up the lanes alongside
45 other members of the Our Lady of the Assumption Church bowling
league. Says Latorella, who rolled a 111 candlepin game recently,
''Most of us come for the social aspect. The competition around here
is not exactly cutthroat.''
Down the road, at Sunline Inc., among the wide selection of lawn
ornaments is a ''Standing Pedro'' Mexican-style lawn jockey, marked
down from $180 to a more reasonable, if no less politically incorrect,
$79.95.
A Revere couple are moving into the Pine Grove Mobile Home Park, in
Peabody - motto: ''Luxury living between high-speed commuter lanes!''
- and are happy to show off their new digs to a stranger. Trailer-park
living is a ''good way to save money, and convenient'' to Route 1's
shops and restaurants, explains Mary Byrne. ''You don't hear about
many robberies, either.''
An Elvis impersonator is wiggling his pelvis upstairs at the Kowloon
Restaurant, crooning ''That's All Right, Mama'' to a roomful of
mai-tai-sipping, middle-aged mamas and papas.
Batman is greeting attendees at an industrial-security trade show -
Holy datacard, Robin! - at Caruso's Diplomat, once a 1950s-era
cocktail lounge. Down the road, at the Hilltop Steak House, in Saugus,
where the neon always shines and the plastic cows ruminate on the
front lawn, the wait for dinner is up to two hours.
At the Hockeytown USA complex, former Boston Bruins Brad Park and
Terry O'Reilly are playing a lunchtime pickup hockey game, during
which a 68-year-old goalie slumps to the ice after suffering a heart
attack. Says one skater, shaking his head, ''If Chickie has to go,
there are worse ways, I suppose.'' (Chickie didn't have to go.)
Is this a great American roadway, or what?
In New England, where modesty still masquerades as a virtue and
independence as a retailing strategy, the 10-mile stretch of Route 1
that snakes its way through Boston's northern suburbs from the Tobin
Bridge to Interstate 95 is an enduring monument to wretched excess.
It's an immovable (and, to some, preferably removable) feast of
tackiness, tawdriness, weirdness, and exuberant tastelessness: a
swatch of real estate that was actually improved four years ago by the
addition of a million-square-foot mall, and one that remains without
peer locally for sheer commercial variety and visual clutter - even as
its loopiest features are being Starbuck-ed and Staple-ed onto the
endangered species list.
''I grew up along Route 1,'' says Al ''You Can Call Me Alvis''
Fortucci, 43, of Peabody, who plays the older, Vegas-era Elvis in a
''Legendary Voices'' nightclub act. ''There is nothing else quite like
it around here. And not a lot left of what was here.''
Michael Stern is a syndicated columnist and the coauthor (with his
wife, Jane) of such seminal guides to pop culture as The Encyclopedia
of Bad Taste, Roadfood, and Elvis World. Stern perceives a widespread
nostalgia among Americans of a certain age for ''what used to be,''
even if what used to be was considered schlock when it first appeared.
''I'm not a Luddite when it comes to national chains,'' says Stern,
who admits that he seeks out Holiday Inns when he hits the road. ''But
as a professional traveler, I'm always looking for signs of character,
especially quirky character. I don't like things that are all the
same. I like some crazy entrepreneur's vision of how to attract
Route 1. wrote:
Stern. ''There's a wonderful cultural, if not aesthetic, charm
there.''
Leaving aside the obvious fact that there is no accounting for taste,
why do we love Route 1 so? Let us count the ways.
You can get anything you want. Within reason.
A meat loaf special at an authentic 1950s roadside diner. A striptease
show straight out of Shanghai in the 1920s. A palm reading. A Palm
Pilot. A round of miniature golf in the shadow of a toothy orange
tyrannosaur. Figure skating lessons for 3-year-olds. A dinette set, a
wedding dress, and a Corvette convertible to carry them in. Dinner for
1,500 at a Chinese restaurant only slightly smaller than Rhode Island.
A little kitsch, a little skin, a little something for everyone. At
its heavily franchised heart, Route 1 is pure retro heaven. A
four-lane river of red meat, rum drinks, pool parlors, pu-pu platters,
trailer parks, parking lots, and neon signage. The glorious sum of a
hundred garish parts.
For athletic types, consider the Route 1 modern pentathlon: candlepin
bowling at the Circle Bowl; roller skating at Roller World Skating
Center; putting and batting at Route 1 Miniature Golf and Baseball
Park (dual event); the Golftown Driving Range accuracy and distance
contest (heated tees available); and, finally, the Christmas Tree Shop
discount patio-furniture pull.
For the cholesterol-challenged, how about the Route 1 all-artery
dining tour? Santoro's Sub-Villa's steak and cheese sub; Hilltop Steak
House's 24-ounce bone-in sirloin; Weylu's sake drunken shrimp; the
Full of Bull's fried clam dinner; the Kowloon's special lung har guy
poo lo main; the Weathervane (formerly the Ship) Seafood Restaurant's
famous lobster roll; and Russo's Candy House's 1-pound box of
hand-dipped chocolate-covered cherries.
Arthur Krim, a Cambridge-based geographer and preservationist - he
helped save the Citgo sign in Kenmore Square in 1983 - once compiled
an oral history of Route 1 businesses dating from the 1950s and '60s.
According to Krim, Route 1 achieved its popularity by selling families
on the notion of the ''open highway as an adventure in eating.''
Says Krim, ''You had this powerful sense of discovery, coupled with a
sense of Hollywood set design, that built all those larger-than-life
restaurants in Los Angeles in the '20s and '30s. It's an old tradition
that didn't need the automobile, but it was the automobile that helped
generate this wave of oversized structuring and proportion.''
Right.
Beauty, like road dust, is in the eye of the beholder.
Love it or loathe it, this road is about as good an example of the Las
Vegas school of aesthetics as we have.
You cruise past a seven-story saguaro cactus that points the way north
to another international symbol of gluttony, the 40-foot-tall leaning
tower of pizza. You come upon a landlocked, two-masted schooner with
its bowsprit stuck in a 40,000-square-foot shopping mall and its hull
opened to the water line by a hideously quaint Yankee Candle shop. You
browse among a succession of eponymous roadside motels (Dean's,
Fern's, Chisholm's) that look like wholly owned subsidiaries of Bates
Motel International.
Don't think Newton. Think Wayne Newton.
You are not alone in worrying that you missed the Revere exit and
wound up in Reno. No less an authority than the 1998 Zagat guide to
Boston restaurants decribes the Kowloon - with its massive tiki-carved
entranceway, its bubbling Volcano Bay Room, its birdbath-sized
cocktails - as a ''plumber's conception of Kublai Khan's pleasure
palace'' that caters to the ''puffy hair set.''
Zap!
In 1988, a New York Times restaurant critic ate his way along Route 1
in Saugus - who says the media elite are out of touch with the common
folk? - and panned the surroundings as a ''commercial badlands of
mini-malls, muffler shops, and mark-down liquor marts.'' Not content
to slight the land that fed him, he dismissed the Hilltop's $11
sirloin entree as ''acceptable though not particularly flavorful,'' an
insult to any carnivore venturing north of Chelsea without an expense
account.
In the 1974 novel God Save the Child, Robert B. Parker's detective
hero Spenser, a gumshoe who can put on airs with the best of them,
likened Route 1's overpasses to ''culverts over a sewer of commerce.''
Although scores of businesses have shut down since, Spenser's analogy
still holds water with many. Including some who own sewerage rights
there.
''The Route 1 corridor may be lucrative, but it will never be
pretty,'' concedes Arthur Castraberti, 73, the semiretired owner of
the Prince Restaurant, one of the strip's signature family
restaurants. ''Actually, it's ugly. Every time someone takes a
photograph of Route 1, I cringe.''
Mind you, Castraberti is one of the visionary entrepreneurs who built
Route 1 as we know and love it. Imagine if Lady Bird Johnson, the
matriarch of American highway beautification, rode over the ridge and
saw a 70-foot fake cactus poking above a tangle of power lines. There
aren't enough bluebonnets in Texas to bury that sucker.
To those with more offbeat tastes, however, Route 1 is a campy trip
down memory lane, an eye-pleasing journey through time and space
(often at a high rate of speed) to a roadside America that is
disappearing faster than cooked-to-order hamburgers and poodle skirts.
Are we with them? You bet your puffy hair we are.
Krim, 55, finds the road's true magic in its link to childhood
impressions - impressions shaped by everything from postwar driving
habits to the Programmatic architecture craze that started in
California more than half a century ago.
''Every generation has memories flavored by the landscape it grew up
with,'' says Krim, conducting a motor tour of Route 1 from Weylu's to
the Route 129 turnaround. ''Baby boomers have begun to recognize that
some elements, like Howard Johnson's, are disappearing. Whether it's
the Citgo sign or an early McDonald's, these landmarks are part of our
culture. People see their passing as a legitimate loss to the cultural
memory.''
The Route 1 we know was built on two foundations, says Krim. One was
the modernization of the roadway over the past century, culminating
with the opening of the Tobin Bridge, over the Mystic River, in 1952.
Motorists were able to access the resort regions of southern Maine and
New Hampshire more conveniently than ever before. The other was the
road not built - the planned construction of I-95 north from Canton
through Boston to Route 128 in Lynnfield, which was halted by
community opposition in 1972. The highway project's demise preserved a
steady flow of traffic along Route 1, which is now used by more than
100,000 vehicles daily.
With the opening of the bridge, Krim notes, came a wave of ethnic
urban restaurateurs, migrating to Boston's booming suburbs. Land was
relatively cheap in the '50s and '60s, just as tires and gasoline
were. While many owners started out modestly, says Krim, their
competitive juices took over. The race was soon on to see who could
build the biggest Polynesian-style tiki hut, the wildest Western
steakhouse, the traffic-stoppingest burger joint or pizza shack.
If you build it, they will come. Or so the thinking went. And if you
build it bigger, more will come.
Thus Frank Giuffrida, the Italian-American meat vendor who took over
the Hilltop in 1961, parlayed his love of John Wayne movies into an
outsized version of the roadside steakhouse; portraits of the Duke
still line the main stairway of the Hilltop, which Giuffrida no longer
owns. The Ship's Haven opened in 1920 as a small refreshment stand run
by a retired sea captain; by 1963, the restaurant had grown into a
replica of the USS Constitution, adrift on an asphalt ocean.
Similarly, Hawaii Five-0 and Trader Vic's, a restaurant serving
Polynesian fare with a Bali Hai backdrop, were popular when the
Kowloon and Diamond Head restaurants expanded to atoll-sized
dimensions in the late '60s.
''Kids are naturally drawn to things like volcanoes and ships, and
we've always been a family-oriented place,'' explains Stanley Wong,
41, one of five second-generation Wongs who now run the 1,200-seat
Kowloon. ''They come in here, and it looks like Disneyland to them.''
The Leaning Tower of Pizza was already tilting when Arthur Castraberti
assumed ownership of the tiny drive-in restaurant in 1961. Customers
sat outdoors at picnic tables and ordered what was then considered
exotic fare: pizza pie and pasta. Ten years and several expansions
later, the Prince sat 700 - all indoors - and was selling 10,000
pizzas a week.
''At one point, this was more a biker place than a family place,''
recalls Paul Castraberti, 43, another of Route 1's second-generation
owners. Then the legal drinking age went up, from 18 to 21, and the
traffic light outside the Prince came down. The restaurant returned to
its roots as a family drive-in - in one instance, literally. In 1981,
a southbound station wagon plowed through the front of the Prince,
injuring eight but leaving the tower more or less upright.
You don't know what you've got till it's gone.
''Since I bought this place, I can't believe not only how many
businesses have gone but come and gone,'' says Richard Riemer, owner
of Weddings Inc., a venerable Saugus bridal shop. Riemer purchased the
store in 1992. It now outfits 1,200 to 1,500 wedding parties a year,
although business has slumped lately, Riemer concedes.
''Generation X-ers are not big on pomp and circumstance,'' he says.
''They're also cheap.'' It would be ''devastating,'' Riemer adds, if a
limited-access superhighway were ever built to carry the traffic now
handled by Route 1. The drive-up trade, he suggests, would dry up.
Harry Kallas runs the Bel-Aire diner, in Peabody. Custom-built for
Kallas's father in the 1950s, the Bel-Aire is the last of a half-dozen
roadside diners that once graced this stretch of Route 1. It serves
home-style food at reasonable prices to a loyal clientele of families,
truck drivers, traveling salespeople, and itinerant yuppies inside a
gleaming, stainless-steel shell.
In the late '80s, a new connector linking Route 1 and I-95 went in, a
mile south of the Bel-Aire. ''We lost 40 percent of the business
overnight,'' says Kallas. ''It took us a good four to five years to
come back.''
The '70s and '80s brought other changes, good and bad. Gone were the
sleazy massage parlors that mushroomed along Route 1 in the
anything-goes '70s. Most were replaced by furniture stores and
restaurants, leaving only the Golden Banana and Cabaret dance clubs as
players in the skin game. (Gone, too, was former Peabody mayor turned
US representative Nicholas Mavroules, to a federal penitentiary.
Mavroules pleaded guilty to taking kickbacks from many of these
establishments.)
Hockeytown USA opened in 1972, coinciding with the peak of Bobby
Orr-inspired hockey mania across New England. Paradoxically, the boom
almost killed the rink as communities rushed to cash in on the craze
by building publicly financed rinks. ''What saved us,'' says rink
owner Larry Abbott, ''was the real estate boom. That and street
hockey.''
In came the multistory office parks, too, built cheek by jowl with the
trailer parks. In came the mini-malls and the mega-franchise stores.
Arthur Castraberti found himself going to planning board meetings and
Chamber of Commerce affairs and not recognizing anyone. The advent of
the national chains, he says, ''has made the strip less personal.
Franchises are accountable to financial gurus who judge performance on
percentages, not emotions.''
After Frank Giuffrida sold the Hilltop Steak House to a partner in
1988 - it has since been bought by a Denver-based outfit - the
enterprise floundered, according to Hilltop's current general manager,
Lenny DeRosa. Still one of the five biggest-volume restaurants in
America, it has shut down its flagging mail-order trade, boosted its
private-function business, and expanded its menu to include items like
buffalo wings and strawberry shortcake. The Hilltop even has its own
Web page. For a long time, Giuffrida refused to take credit cards.
''What's amazing is not how many of these places have disappeared,''
says Arthur Krim, ticking off a list of Route 1 landmarks -
Augustine's, the Wigwam, Jolly Jorge's Drive-In - that have gone the
way of the New Frontier. ''It's how many of them are still around.''
Krim pulls over to admire the Kowloon sign. Below a working, analog
clock rests a pair of pink neon cocktail glasses right out of a Rat
Pack movie. If anything makes a cultural archeologist's heart beat
faster, it's a 40-year-old neon road sign in perfect working order,
like the one outside Fern's (Air-Conditioned) Motel.
For a time in the '50s and '60s, Caruso's Diplomat was the swingingest
nightclub along the strip. Politicians from John F. Kennedy to Jimmy
Carter held fund-raising dinners there. Bobby Orr celebrated his 21st
birthday at the Diplomat.
''Back then, this was the boonies,'' John Caruso remembers. ''I used
to run across Route 1 to Dunkin' Donuts. Now I don't like to drive
over there.''
Caruso, 53, went to medical school before dropping out to manage the
Diplomat, which his father and uncle started and which hasn't changed
much since Dean Martin ruled the pop charts. ''I wasn't forced into
this,'' he says. ''I just liked it better.'' Except for a weekend
comedy club, the Diplomat is closed to the public; in the '70s, it got
out of the lounge business and into the wedding-banquet and
special-function trade.
''Everybody thought my dad was nuts to go into the banquet business,''
says Caruso. ''But it worked out pretty good.''
Paul Castraberti graduated from Yale. He had other career options. Yet
he came back to Saugus to help manage a family restaurant whose
customers drop by to swap stories about Paul's father and grandfather.
''Look, this place never will be fancy,'' he says, smiling. ''It's a
pizzeria on Route 1 with a gaudy tower on the roof. But it's who we
are. And I'm comfortable with that.''
To which we can only say, Danke schoen.Boston, MA