My hometown has turned into a brand, thanks to a highly successful oyster company. It’s not the worst type of brand, in fact it’s “cool,” and suddenly city people are making trips specifically to my hometown to drink rose and eat oysters on the bay. It’s been complicated watching the changes, but through it all there has been one old coffee shop, tucked behind some other shops, that has not changed at ALL. The linoleum tiles are curling up at the edges, coffee grounds are baked into the soft wooden countertop, and the same 4-5 old men sit and play checkers or read papers all day as if they are part of the decor. They roast their own beans, right on the spot, but don’t make a big deal about it. They make the best muffins of anywhere I have ever had, ever, and they cost $1.50. Cash only. At first when the oyster company got big, and new places were popping up to support, I was excited. This bar feels like it could be in a city! Is this town getting cool!? But now each time I return I find myself gravitationally pushed away from the shiny marble-topped bar and into the beloved sameness that time and trend cannot touch: the cold salty water of the ocean, the sand in the bottom of the crispy old beach bag, and the coffee shop with the heavy wooden door.
“My hometown has turned into a brand.” This line got me thinking, is it possible to have a town or city that isn’t a brand? There are many examples, like your hometown, where a company or event alters or heightens the reputation, sometimes creating a clash between the authentic and the trendy, but when is a town or city not a concept with services and goods that can be distinguished from other “products” and marketed/ a brand?
This is so true and interesting to think about. What is a town’s reputation if not a brand? When I think about it, there is a distinction in my mind between local lore building, as it does, over the decades to create a “brand”/reputation that attracts or repels folks, and a full on paid-for marketing campaign to either attract people to a place (like “what happens in Vegas” or whatever) OR a town being used in a paid marketing campaign to sell a physical product or good (like my town). Over time the local reputation and the paid marketing campaigns inform one another, so where is the line? I guess optimistically people naturally create stories to define places and things, which is basically what marketing is (like without capitalism reputations would still exist), and pessimistically, everything is capitalism and now even our places in all their relative agnosticism are being traded for gain and the reputations as we understand them are tangled inextricably with the capitalist underpinnings of the place. Eek 😬
"So where is the line?" Your thoughts on that are the same as mine. "...now even our places in all their relative agnosticism are being traded for gain and the reputations as we understand them are tangled inextricably with the capitalist underpinnings of the place" is so well said... and kind of a sad truth.
So many thoughts on this... As someone who unexpectedly ended up back in the valley I see and agree with so much of what you wrote. Also, it is sad to think of you no longer having a direct reason to come here anymore, but I am happy for your mom to be moving.. My partner and I have hopes of this too someday, but for now I have a strong obligation to stay. The reasons are many, but mostly include being close to family, our son has one more year of highschool, we can afford our home...but mainly it is because of the small business I own and operate that we're here (for now). This may seem corny, but my goal every day is to make this place better. As awful as so much of Idaho currently is ( I am constantly daydreaming about a home across the river), there are some of us here trying to make a difference. Other places I love here are the small businesses such as the local bakeries, consignment stores and thrift stores. I also will always treasure Pat's Garden Center. And, truth be told, we don't eat at a lot of the restaurants because your mom's description of them all tasting like Sysco is spot on. We do love Hogan's and Fazzaris is for special family dinners always. Bojacks has an incredible happy hour but I also love the Blue Lantern coffee shop. Maybe someday there can be a piece about these small pockets of people and businesses within terribly run states that focuses on the people who hate the politics of where they live and the mindsets of some of the residents, but who are working to make the place they're in more beautiful and accepting. Whether that's through their business, contributions, voting, voice and presence... Just a thought. I am always grateful to read what you wrie. And I love that you're from here and out in the world sharing your voice on such large platforms.
I think about this so much, because I spent so much of my time at BuzzFeed finding the people in Idaho and states like it that were fighting this really hard and essential fight. I thought of you while I was packing, actually, wrapping glasses in old Tribunes and found the full page spread on your school and stopped, sat down, and read it in full. I believe in the work you're doing, I believe in not giving up on places, and I try to reconcile that with my feelings about Lewiston. I think I'm just too close to it — too close to the way it made things so hard for my mom these past three years, but also too close to the stories of people with trans kids who knew they had no choice other than to leave.
Rains department store of Ojai, California. Maybe you know Ojai as a day-trip destination or bedroom community for affluent Los Angelenos. I know it as the once-middle-class hometown where I grew up on an avocado orchard, and where my mom and her friends opened a children's book and clothing store from the 1980s through mid-'90s until high rents in the town's mission-style Arcade shopping strip turned all of the regular-folk shops into galleries and designer boutiques. But Rains lives on. It's a true general store. You can go in there and buy earrings, underwear, potholders, and gardening tools. I can actually leave the store with a new, not-too-pricey blouse folded in a bag in one hand, and a broom or rake in the other. The last time I stopped in there, the older lady at the register said she remembers my big sister from high school and from when my sister worked at Rains in the '90s. I feel pangs of nostalgia and sadness when I return to Ojai, because its main street is choked with traffic and I don't recognize the people or most of the businesses—except for Rains. Thank god, Rains is still there, which means it's still the place I grew up.
OMG Yes! Rains. And Ojai Ice Cream which is, I think, now run by a Nordhoff alum. Also I have to drop an RIP Reuben’s Burritos here too. Somehow Ojai manages to retain some of those places, under all the gloss.
Surprisingly to me, one of my favorite PLACE places in my current home is an ice cream place that just opened up a few years ago. I have spent a long time bemoaning the former places that are no longer in this town, but this new one is just perfect. It's run by a family and the grandma is a realtor and the grandpa is a school janitor and the daughter is the school nurse and the son-in-law used to work at the movie theater so they know E V E R Y O N E who walks in the door. They make everything themselves (including the waffle cones!) and it's tiny and cute and it just feels like home. It's the place you would take people who come to visit from out of town but it's also the place you go on Thursday night with your family and it's also the place the school takes the kids to get ice cream after Field Days. It's so great to see something like this growing in a town that has lost so many of its places.
Yeah, one of the coffee shops in my hometown that feels that way is actually a pretty recent (by my standards) addition, but it definitely aspires to be and I think maybe has really become a community place. A place where you run into people you know because they're there with one of them working on their dissertation while the other knits, that kind of thing.
"Auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1 percent of American earners. Car dealers, gas station owners, and building contractors, it turns out, make up the majority of the country’s 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year.* Crunching numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, data scientist and author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz found that over 20 percent of car dealerships in the U.S. have an owner banking more than $1.5 million per year.
And car dealers are not only one of the richest demographics in the United States. They’re also one of the most organized political factions—a conservative imperium giving millions of dollars to politicians at local, state, and national levels. They lobby through NADA, the organization staging the weekend’s festivities, and donate to Republicans at a rate of 6-to-1. Through those efforts, they’ve managed to write and rewrite laws to protect dealers and sponsor sympathetic politicians in all 50 states."
In addition to the "American Gentry" who make up a significant portion of Republican donors, there is also the "Trades Class"--- who own their own business (often in plumbing, drywall, roofing, etc...) and who may not reach the $1.5million dollar threshold but are living in the mid to high six figures who make up a disproportionate number of the J6 defendants and Trump supporters.
My cousin and I were talking about this the other day (I was partially raised in Canada and he’s from Belgium). We were talking about how a lack or resources forces a country to value ‘intellectual’ jobs over trade jobs. In Canada, most trade workers I know earn way more than people with masters and doctorates, but this is rarely the case in Belgium. And even though Canada and Belgium have some Trump-like politicians, they don’t have the same popularity and the more moderate right-wing politicians.
But do you think placing less value on trade jobs would have an effect on American politics?
When my mom was in commercial financing of RVs, I asked her who bought the $400K bus-like RVS. Retired car dealers, and other small business owners in the auto sector. They're like a whole demographic market.
A place has its best chance of feeling like a place, I think, if the actual owner seems always to be there seeing to things himself- over years and years.
There is a pizza place down the street from me that has always (over 30 years) been run by a guy called Harry. He seems always to be there talking to the customers.
A couple of weeks ago I walked by and saw the forever waitress spraying the outdoor plants. I said, "You're still here?!' She said, 'No, I am not. I just saw these need watering. The boss doesn't even know I am here.'
I'm new to my place (we moved from a medium-sized city in NJ to a small town in rural Montana in March) but there's a fantastic Asian fusion food truck within walking distance, and I've been going there once a week for about five or six weeks now. Last night, the woman who handles the money while her husband does the cooking greeted me by name, which means I have now become a Regular, which makes me very happy.
We have lots of higher-end and medium-end places in Ann Arbor that get written about (yes, I wrote a book about one of them). But the place closest to my heart is Knight’s Steakhouse on Dexter Ave. It looks like your grandparents’ basement (wood paneling and pleather booths). The centerpiece is a bar in the middle of the main dining room. The food is classic American with some international influences every so often. The fabulous servers are the kind to whom understated millionaires leave big legacies. I took a sophisticated designer friend there and he said, “You’ve got to be kidding.” By the end, he said, “I get it.”
So many memories of Knights! Sophomore year homecoming destination, the evening where my mom’s best friend introduced us to her first boyfriend post-divorce, softball team banquet dinner. There’s a special alchemy to the place that is so clearly a milestone marker in peoples’ lives, especially pre-social media. People go there because it’s a Moment That Matters, and somehow the wood-paneled walls and shrimp cocktail bowls absorb that cumulative meaning.
The Italian restaurant in my hometown, which was a staple of my childhood and adolescence — we went there at least twice a month, especially when my mom was on deadline and my dad was working over the mountain and there wasn’t always time to make food for us by dinnertime — was a place. Owned by a family who lived in a house on an adjacent lot, so when the restaurant got busy family members would come over to help out. Dishes named after family members, including a kid in my brother’s elementary school class. Same staff for years and years, so they knew our orders. Same menu for most of it. When I was an adult they removed their good tortellini dish but I could ask for it and they would still make it. No delivery but you could order for takeout over the phone and drive over to get it. I suppose a website might exist? They closed for real during early pandemic and we thought they would stay closed, but they reopened last week.
A surprising number of places have reopened. Maneki in Seattle is open again. They're the oldest restaurant in the city and have been serving home style Japanese food since early last century. I think they also closed during World War II when all the Japanese in the western US were interned. If that didn't stop them, there was no reason COVID would.
Two blocks from our house is an ice cream parlor and candy shop, Aglamesis Bros. It opened in its current location in 1913. They serve ice cream soda in beautiful glasses and ice cream in silver bowls. The store is rough around the edges, the paint is chipping and the heavy door is hard to open. But the space is beautiful and reminiscent of classic ice cream parlor (think marble countertops and floors, pink paint, Tiffany lamps). It’s a favorite place for our family. The son of the founder ran the business until he died in 2021 at the age of 94. His nephew has taken over the business. While we anticipate he’ll make some changes (fixing the door so it opens on the first try) we aren’t eager for a total overhaul. There is something about the eating delicious ice cream from fancy bowls amongst so much history and obvious love.
There is a think piece somewhere about how things used to be PARLORS (ice cream parlors, beauty parlors, pizza parlors) and I wish I had it in me to write it. This place sounds lovely!
I'll put in a vote for Jahn's ice cream parlor in Jackson Heights. It was a neighborhood favorite and old fashioned back in the 1960s. The ice cream was good. The waiters were middle aged guys. The decor was dark wood and banquets with comfy cushions. It was a popular place for birthday parties. The big story was a monster dish called The Kitchen Sink. I just checked. They're still open. They had opened a few branches, but the JH store survives.
Jackson Heights was seriously upmarket for the first half of the 20th century. It's where silent movie stars who worked in Astoria would buy an eight bedroom apartment. There was even a country club. Jahn's opened in that era, so it was something of an anachronism as the neighborhood remained vibrant but moved downmarket.
My Cincinnati-raised fiancé insisted on a trip to Aglamesis Bros for banana ice cream in the silver bowls on my first visit there with him! So authentically charming.
This makes me think a lot about class and class culture, because the places you describe seem to fit into a pretty specific class position, which is, honestly, one that I was aware of growing up but my family were kind of part of the gentrifying class. I grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts, where there was what my family would have called old Northampton and other people would have called Hamp, which had its kind of venerable pizza places and diners, and new Northampton, or Noho (cringe), which was more bougie and artsy and oriented to the colleges. Decades later I think we have our places that feel like places, too, and honestly my friends who grew up old Northampton and still live in the area *also* love La Veracruzana, the Mexican place that started in pretty much the smallest storefront on Main Street and moved to a bigger place while I was still in high school and now has restaurants in two neighboring towns. And I think Herrell's ice cream belongs to and is beloved of every group. There are a couple of coffee shop/cafes that feel like institutions now. As a teenager I went to the Haymarket and I'd get a brownie and a hot chocolate and participate in poetry readings (godawful morbid teen stuff on my part), and now the Haymarket too is like twice as big as it was then and serves a more extensive menu but otherwise is very much the same. I still like their hot chocolate.
But the specifics of your examples definitely make me wonder if rich people have their places that feel like places and what that looks like. Restaurants that are higher-end but still have that lived-in feel? The country club? My uncle (who is not, to be clear, actually wealthy, just a member of the neocon think tank class) is a longtime member of the Cosmos Club, in Washington DC -- following in his father's footsteps -- and to me it's a curiosity to go to this place once every few years for champagne brunch with him, but maybe to him it feels like home in some way. He's getting married there in October!
I think the country club is ABSOLUTELY one of these places (and different in every community of course, but still *the country club,* the place where the American Gentry mix but also, for various reasons, often feels stuck in amber
I grew up in Amherst, MA (15 minutes away for everyone else)! For us, Northampton was the 'big city' that we would get our parents to drop us off in before we could drive so we could go to Faces (an eclectic store that sold clothes, knickknacks, funny socks, books, think like Urban Outfitters before Urban Outfitters).
I lived in Northampton in my 20s and absolutely love La Veracruzanas and Herrels! There was also another place called Elizabeth something (?) that had the best vegetarian croquettes.
Paul and Elizabeth's. Funnily, even though tons of my parents' friends love that place, my parents never did. I've been there maybe three times in my entire life. And actually when I was a kid, Paul and Elizabeth were neighbors of someone or other and I knew them slightly.
I was trying to articulate something similar about my region of nh. There’s the ice cream shop that has forever had a classic car night in the strip. Which is a place for a very specific demo. And rarely do the demos mingle.
There’s a drive-in restaurant in my city that’s open from April - September. No indoor seating - you can either drive up or walk up to outdoor menu boards and push the button to order. The waitstaff wear roller skates (except on rainy days!) and this amazes every child ever to visit. There are picnic tables if you walk up and every child ever delights in feeding French fries to the bold pigeons wandering the entire area. Many choose to drive up and eat in their car, but I have never done so. The flavor-twist cones and root beer floats are hits, but every fried morsel is also deeply beloved. Rudy’s opening date signifies a happier and brighter season in my year and no chain could ever replace its place-ness in my heart!
Café Mueller! It’s been closed for a good while now, after one half of the couple who ran it passed away.
It almost defies description. A German couple in their 60s (I think?) - Karl and Len - ran a restaurant out of an old cottage in Midland. All the rooms were full of thrifted (op shopped) art, and a lot of Karl’s own work. Entirely full. Not a space on any of the walls. Each of the rooms had a variety seating arrangements. Sometimes, half your table would be seated on a couch, but the other side of the same table got chairs. You had to book ahead by leaving a message on the answering machine. The system was - if Karl didn’t call you back to tell you they couldn’t accomodate you that night, you were told to assume you were good to go.
With just Len in the kitchen, and Karl entertaining and serving - it always took the whole night to eat your meal. You also were likely to gain a cat on the lap, if you looked comfortable (god knows how they got away with this, but I’m so glad they did).
The food was a set menu of soup, mains, and dessert (there you did have an option - cheesecake or ice cream). They served tasty and cosy German fare- veggie soup, schnitzel or sausages ... nothing fancy, but the atmosphere was incomparable. It felt like you were at a dinner party Karl was throwing for you as a friend of his own. He seemed to love playing the host, being cheeky and lively and odd in the best way.
It was such a special little cafe, it just felt like it shouldn’t have been able to exist ...and that by going there you were sharing space with people who knew that appearances of “normality” are only a thin veneer lacquered over our wild, warm and strangest selves.
"and will carry their memory with me as I keep trying to find and frequent and fall in love with more"
This is just life in general too, right? Whether we like it or not the people, places, and experiences that shape us are often lost to time and the only thing we are left with is the memories, stories, and maybe an artifact or two. So we have no choice but to keep moving forward and finding new people, places, things to love.
I like it when I travel and I find myself in one of those love-worn places; I seek them out. Diners esspecially, with art drawn in crayon on placements hung on the walls by kids who are probably long married, with the local retirees glued to their usual seats. You know the coffee and french fries are going to be perfect.
I've lost some of those places here in Buffalo over the years. I'm trying to find new ones, but it's not easy. When you have a place like that, it becomes second nature, you don't think twice about whether you want to go there or not. It's probably why I have yet to feel fully settled here. The closest I've managed is this little Greek diner, a Buffalo archetype, called Plaka. It's a little over priced but the coffee is hot and comes in the tiny mugs, the waitress calls you "Hun", and it's so very 70s brown in there. I hope they never remodel, it's perfect.
Hello and thanks for your newsletter this week. Re that Vienna story -- did you notice (I didn't, at first, alas) the story doesn't say anything about the 1934-1968 period, or all the Jews who were forced to abandon their homes, or the many aftershocks of that? Important to reconsider with that context.
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs in the 1990s, the time when a lot of these places got subsumed by chain restaurants. I miss the “places” like what you’ve described, but I will say, my dad has intense anxiety and OCD where one of his main triggers is food, and chains like Panera and Chipotle are often the only places where he’ll eat when we travel. For folks like my dad, the predictability of knowing exactly what you’ll get is what makes you feel safe in new places.
This comment was so interesting. Growing up we went to the same places all the time because my dad liked knowing what we were getting into. Predictability was/is important to him. There is a family story about how we went to Disney World (a huge stretch for our family) and we ate breakfast at the Golden Corral every day. He knew how much it was going to cost and it was all you can eat so why deviate? My brother refused to go in after a few days. To this day we sort of roll our eyes at how much my parents stick to the same stuff. But it’s never occurred to me that the desire for predictability and control is anything other than stubbornness, which feels a little unfair knowing what I know about mental health and how much we don’t discuss that in our family. It may or may not be more, but your comment made me think. Thanks for sharing.
I don’t think it has to be an either/or right? Obvi small businesses are good but I don’t think accessible “chain” restaurants should be fully eradicated either. It’s just complicated!
Sometimes I really do want a Spinach Feta Wrap! I just don't want it to be the only option everywhere I go, which is how, say, a computer would probably populate towns if it looked solely at profitability.
My hometown has turned into a brand, thanks to a highly successful oyster company. It’s not the worst type of brand, in fact it’s “cool,” and suddenly city people are making trips specifically to my hometown to drink rose and eat oysters on the bay. It’s been complicated watching the changes, but through it all there has been one old coffee shop, tucked behind some other shops, that has not changed at ALL. The linoleum tiles are curling up at the edges, coffee grounds are baked into the soft wooden countertop, and the same 4-5 old men sit and play checkers or read papers all day as if they are part of the decor. They roast their own beans, right on the spot, but don’t make a big deal about it. They make the best muffins of anywhere I have ever had, ever, and they cost $1.50. Cash only. At first when the oyster company got big, and new places were popping up to support, I was excited. This bar feels like it could be in a city! Is this town getting cool!? But now each time I return I find myself gravitationally pushed away from the shiny marble-topped bar and into the beloved sameness that time and trend cannot touch: the cold salty water of the ocean, the sand in the bottom of the crispy old beach bag, and the coffee shop with the heavy wooden door.
“My hometown has turned into a brand.” This line got me thinking, is it possible to have a town or city that isn’t a brand? There are many examples, like your hometown, where a company or event alters or heightens the reputation, sometimes creating a clash between the authentic and the trendy, but when is a town or city not a concept with services and goods that can be distinguished from other “products” and marketed/ a brand?
This is so true and interesting to think about. What is a town’s reputation if not a brand? When I think about it, there is a distinction in my mind between local lore building, as it does, over the decades to create a “brand”/reputation that attracts or repels folks, and a full on paid-for marketing campaign to either attract people to a place (like “what happens in Vegas” or whatever) OR a town being used in a paid marketing campaign to sell a physical product or good (like my town). Over time the local reputation and the paid marketing campaigns inform one another, so where is the line? I guess optimistically people naturally create stories to define places and things, which is basically what marketing is (like without capitalism reputations would still exist), and pessimistically, everything is capitalism and now even our places in all their relative agnosticism are being traded for gain and the reputations as we understand them are tangled inextricably with the capitalist underpinnings of the place. Eek 😬
"So where is the line?" Your thoughts on that are the same as mine. "...now even our places in all their relative agnosticism are being traded for gain and the reputations as we understand them are tangled inextricably with the capitalist underpinnings of the place" is so well said... and kind of a sad truth.
So many thoughts on this... As someone who unexpectedly ended up back in the valley I see and agree with so much of what you wrote. Also, it is sad to think of you no longer having a direct reason to come here anymore, but I am happy for your mom to be moving.. My partner and I have hopes of this too someday, but for now I have a strong obligation to stay. The reasons are many, but mostly include being close to family, our son has one more year of highschool, we can afford our home...but mainly it is because of the small business I own and operate that we're here (for now). This may seem corny, but my goal every day is to make this place better. As awful as so much of Idaho currently is ( I am constantly daydreaming about a home across the river), there are some of us here trying to make a difference. Other places I love here are the small businesses such as the local bakeries, consignment stores and thrift stores. I also will always treasure Pat's Garden Center. And, truth be told, we don't eat at a lot of the restaurants because your mom's description of them all tasting like Sysco is spot on. We do love Hogan's and Fazzaris is for special family dinners always. Bojacks has an incredible happy hour but I also love the Blue Lantern coffee shop. Maybe someday there can be a piece about these small pockets of people and businesses within terribly run states that focuses on the people who hate the politics of where they live and the mindsets of some of the residents, but who are working to make the place they're in more beautiful and accepting. Whether that's through their business, contributions, voting, voice and presence... Just a thought. I am always grateful to read what you wrie. And I love that you're from here and out in the world sharing your voice on such large platforms.
I think about this so much, because I spent so much of my time at BuzzFeed finding the people in Idaho and states like it that were fighting this really hard and essential fight. I thought of you while I was packing, actually, wrapping glasses in old Tribunes and found the full page spread on your school and stopped, sat down, and read it in full. I believe in the work you're doing, I believe in not giving up on places, and I try to reconcile that with my feelings about Lewiston. I think I'm just too close to it — too close to the way it made things so hard for my mom these past three years, but also too close to the stories of people with trans kids who knew they had no choice other than to leave.
Rains department store of Ojai, California. Maybe you know Ojai as a day-trip destination or bedroom community for affluent Los Angelenos. I know it as the once-middle-class hometown where I grew up on an avocado orchard, and where my mom and her friends opened a children's book and clothing store from the 1980s through mid-'90s until high rents in the town's mission-style Arcade shopping strip turned all of the regular-folk shops into galleries and designer boutiques. But Rains lives on. It's a true general store. You can go in there and buy earrings, underwear, potholders, and gardening tools. I can actually leave the store with a new, not-too-pricey blouse folded in a bag in one hand, and a broom or rake in the other. The last time I stopped in there, the older lady at the register said she remembers my big sister from high school and from when my sister worked at Rains in the '90s. I feel pangs of nostalgia and sadness when I return to Ojai, because its main street is choked with traffic and I don't recognize the people or most of the businesses—except for Rains. Thank god, Rains is still there, which means it's still the place I grew up.
Wearing my pajamas from Rains right now!
I love that!
OMG Yes! Rains. And Ojai Ice Cream which is, I think, now run by a Nordhoff alum. Also I have to drop an RIP Reuben’s Burritos here too. Somehow Ojai manages to retain some of those places, under all the gloss.
Sounds like you know the place well :-) We should add Bart’s Books to the list.
Surprisingly to me, one of my favorite PLACE places in my current home is an ice cream place that just opened up a few years ago. I have spent a long time bemoaning the former places that are no longer in this town, but this new one is just perfect. It's run by a family and the grandma is a realtor and the grandpa is a school janitor and the daughter is the school nurse and the son-in-law used to work at the movie theater so they know E V E R Y O N E who walks in the door. They make everything themselves (including the waffle cones!) and it's tiny and cute and it just feels like home. It's the place you would take people who come to visit from out of town but it's also the place you go on Thursday night with your family and it's also the place the school takes the kids to get ice cream after Field Days. It's so great to see something like this growing in a town that has lost so many of its places.
Yeah, one of the coffee shops in my hometown that feels that way is actually a pretty recent (by my standards) addition, but it definitely aspires to be and I think maybe has really become a community place. A place where you run into people you know because they're there with one of them working on their dissertation while the other knits, that kind of thing.
Sorry to bring politics into this on a Sunday morning, but your reference to car dealers as the "American Gentry" connects really interestingly to this recent piece published at Slate : https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/05/rich-republicans-party-car-dealers-2024-desantis.html
"Auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1 percent of American earners. Car dealers, gas station owners, and building contractors, it turns out, make up the majority of the country’s 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year.* Crunching numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, data scientist and author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz found that over 20 percent of car dealerships in the U.S. have an owner banking more than $1.5 million per year.
And car dealers are not only one of the richest demographics in the United States. They’re also one of the most organized political factions—a conservative imperium giving millions of dollars to politicians at local, state, and national levels. They lobby through NADA, the organization staging the weekend’s festivities, and donate to Republicans at a rate of 6-to-1. Through those efforts, they’ve managed to write and rewrite laws to protect dealers and sponsor sympathetic politicians in all 50 states."
Which is precisely why they're the Gentry! Thanks for the link; going to include this next week.
In addition to the "American Gentry" who make up a significant portion of Republican donors, there is also the "Trades Class"--- who own their own business (often in plumbing, drywall, roofing, etc...) and who may not reach the $1.5million dollar threshold but are living in the mid to high six figures who make up a disproportionate number of the J6 defendants and Trump supporters.
My cousin and I were talking about this the other day (I was partially raised in Canada and he’s from Belgium). We were talking about how a lack or resources forces a country to value ‘intellectual’ jobs over trade jobs. In Canada, most trade workers I know earn way more than people with masters and doctorates, but this is rarely the case in Belgium. And even though Canada and Belgium have some Trump-like politicians, they don’t have the same popularity and the more moderate right-wing politicians.
But do you think placing less value on trade jobs would have an effect on American politics?
When my mom was in commercial financing of RVs, I asked her who bought the $400K bus-like RVS. Retired car dealers, and other small business owners in the auto sector. They're like a whole demographic market.
Woah! This is striking. Buddy Garrity in Friday Night Lights was no accident
Well no wonder we can’t afford to buy a new car anymore 😞
A place has its best chance of feeling like a place, I think, if the actual owner seems always to be there seeing to things himself- over years and years.
There is a pizza place down the street from me that has always (over 30 years) been run by a guy called Harry. He seems always to be there talking to the customers.
A couple of weeks ago I walked by and saw the forever waitress spraying the outdoor plants. I said, "You're still here?!' She said, 'No, I am not. I just saw these need watering. The boss doesn't even know I am here.'
I'm new to my place (we moved from a medium-sized city in NJ to a small town in rural Montana in March) but there's a fantastic Asian fusion food truck within walking distance, and I've been going there once a week for about five or six weeks now. Last night, the woman who handles the money while her husband does the cooking greeted me by name, which means I have now become a Regular, which makes me very happy.
We have lots of higher-end and medium-end places in Ann Arbor that get written about (yes, I wrote a book about one of them). But the place closest to my heart is Knight’s Steakhouse on Dexter Ave. It looks like your grandparents’ basement (wood paneling and pleather booths). The centerpiece is a bar in the middle of the main dining room. The food is classic American with some international influences every so often. The fabulous servers are the kind to whom understated millionaires leave big legacies. I took a sophisticated designer friend there and he said, “You’ve got to be kidding.” By the end, he said, “I get it.”
So many memories of Knights! Sophomore year homecoming destination, the evening where my mom’s best friend introduced us to her first boyfriend post-divorce, softball team banquet dinner. There’s a special alchemy to the place that is so clearly a milestone marker in peoples’ lives, especially pre-social media. People go there because it’s a Moment That Matters, and somehow the wood-paneled walls and shrimp cocktail bowls absorb that cumulative meaning.
I’m old enough to remember Mr. Knight - Ray Knight - seated at his stool at the end of the bar. His son Donnie is a wonderful host now.
The Italian restaurant in my hometown, which was a staple of my childhood and adolescence — we went there at least twice a month, especially when my mom was on deadline and my dad was working over the mountain and there wasn’t always time to make food for us by dinnertime — was a place. Owned by a family who lived in a house on an adjacent lot, so when the restaurant got busy family members would come over to help out. Dishes named after family members, including a kid in my brother’s elementary school class. Same staff for years and years, so they knew our orders. Same menu for most of it. When I was an adult they removed their good tortellini dish but I could ask for it and they would still make it. No delivery but you could order for takeout over the phone and drive over to get it. I suppose a website might exist? They closed for real during early pandemic and we thought they would stay closed, but they reopened last week.
THEY REOPENED LAST WEEK! Amazing.
A surprising number of places have reopened. Maneki in Seattle is open again. They're the oldest restaurant in the city and have been serving home style Japanese food since early last century. I think they also closed during World War II when all the Japanese in the western US were interned. If that didn't stop them, there was no reason COVID would.
Two blocks from our house is an ice cream parlor and candy shop, Aglamesis Bros. It opened in its current location in 1913. They serve ice cream soda in beautiful glasses and ice cream in silver bowls. The store is rough around the edges, the paint is chipping and the heavy door is hard to open. But the space is beautiful and reminiscent of classic ice cream parlor (think marble countertops and floors, pink paint, Tiffany lamps). It’s a favorite place for our family. The son of the founder ran the business until he died in 2021 at the age of 94. His nephew has taken over the business. While we anticipate he’ll make some changes (fixing the door so it opens on the first try) we aren’t eager for a total overhaul. There is something about the eating delicious ice cream from fancy bowls amongst so much history and obvious love.
There is a think piece somewhere about how things used to be PARLORS (ice cream parlors, beauty parlors, pizza parlors) and I wish I had it in me to write it. This place sounds lovely!
I'll put in a vote for Jahn's ice cream parlor in Jackson Heights. It was a neighborhood favorite and old fashioned back in the 1960s. The ice cream was good. The waiters were middle aged guys. The decor was dark wood and banquets with comfy cushions. It was a popular place for birthday parties. The big story was a monster dish called The Kitchen Sink. I just checked. They're still open. They had opened a few branches, but the JH store survives.
Jackson Heights was seriously upmarket for the first half of the 20th century. It's where silent movie stars who worked in Astoria would buy an eight bedroom apartment. There was even a country club. Jahn's opened in that era, so it was something of an anachronism as the neighborhood remained vibrant but moved downmarket.
My Cincinnati-raised fiancé insisted on a trip to Aglamesis Bros for banana ice cream in the silver bowls on my first visit there with him! So authentically charming.
Here to co-sign how lovely and charming Aglamesis is!
This makes me think a lot about class and class culture, because the places you describe seem to fit into a pretty specific class position, which is, honestly, one that I was aware of growing up but my family were kind of part of the gentrifying class. I grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts, where there was what my family would have called old Northampton and other people would have called Hamp, which had its kind of venerable pizza places and diners, and new Northampton, or Noho (cringe), which was more bougie and artsy and oriented to the colleges. Decades later I think we have our places that feel like places, too, and honestly my friends who grew up old Northampton and still live in the area *also* love La Veracruzana, the Mexican place that started in pretty much the smallest storefront on Main Street and moved to a bigger place while I was still in high school and now has restaurants in two neighboring towns. And I think Herrell's ice cream belongs to and is beloved of every group. There are a couple of coffee shop/cafes that feel like institutions now. As a teenager I went to the Haymarket and I'd get a brownie and a hot chocolate and participate in poetry readings (godawful morbid teen stuff on my part), and now the Haymarket too is like twice as big as it was then and serves a more extensive menu but otherwise is very much the same. I still like their hot chocolate.
But the specifics of your examples definitely make me wonder if rich people have their places that feel like places and what that looks like. Restaurants that are higher-end but still have that lived-in feel? The country club? My uncle (who is not, to be clear, actually wealthy, just a member of the neocon think tank class) is a longtime member of the Cosmos Club, in Washington DC -- following in his father's footsteps -- and to me it's a curiosity to go to this place once every few years for champagne brunch with him, but maybe to him it feels like home in some way. He's getting married there in October!
I think the country club is ABSOLUTELY one of these places (and different in every community of course, but still *the country club,* the place where the American Gentry mix but also, for various reasons, often feels stuck in amber
I grew up in Amherst, MA (15 minutes away for everyone else)! For us, Northampton was the 'big city' that we would get our parents to drop us off in before we could drive so we could go to Faces (an eclectic store that sold clothes, knickknacks, funny socks, books, think like Urban Outfitters before Urban Outfitters).
Loved FACES! Was so sad when it closed down.
Yes, miss it so much.
I lived in Northampton in my 20s and absolutely love La Veracruzanas and Herrels! There was also another place called Elizabeth something (?) that had the best vegetarian croquettes.
Paul and Elizabeth's. Funnily, even though tons of my parents' friends love that place, my parents never did. I've been there maybe three times in my entire life. And actually when I was a kid, Paul and Elizabeth were neighbors of someone or other and I knew them slightly.
I was trying to articulate something similar about my region of nh. There’s the ice cream shop that has forever had a classic car night in the strip. Which is a place for a very specific demo. And rarely do the demos mingle.
There’s a drive-in restaurant in my city that’s open from April - September. No indoor seating - you can either drive up or walk up to outdoor menu boards and push the button to order. The waitstaff wear roller skates (except on rainy days!) and this amazes every child ever to visit. There are picnic tables if you walk up and every child ever delights in feeding French fries to the bold pigeons wandering the entire area. Many choose to drive up and eat in their car, but I have never done so. The flavor-twist cones and root beer floats are hits, but every fried morsel is also deeply beloved. Rudy’s opening date signifies a happier and brighter season in my year and no chain could ever replace its place-ness in my heart!
Café Mueller! It’s been closed for a good while now, after one half of the couple who ran it passed away.
It almost defies description. A German couple in their 60s (I think?) - Karl and Len - ran a restaurant out of an old cottage in Midland. All the rooms were full of thrifted (op shopped) art, and a lot of Karl’s own work. Entirely full. Not a space on any of the walls. Each of the rooms had a variety seating arrangements. Sometimes, half your table would be seated on a couch, but the other side of the same table got chairs. You had to book ahead by leaving a message on the answering machine. The system was - if Karl didn’t call you back to tell you they couldn’t accomodate you that night, you were told to assume you were good to go.
With just Len in the kitchen, and Karl entertaining and serving - it always took the whole night to eat your meal. You also were likely to gain a cat on the lap, if you looked comfortable (god knows how they got away with this, but I’m so glad they did).
The food was a set menu of soup, mains, and dessert (there you did have an option - cheesecake or ice cream). They served tasty and cosy German fare- veggie soup, schnitzel or sausages ... nothing fancy, but the atmosphere was incomparable. It felt like you were at a dinner party Karl was throwing for you as a friend of his own. He seemed to love playing the host, being cheeky and lively and odd in the best way.
It was such a special little cafe, it just felt like it shouldn’t have been able to exist ...and that by going there you were sharing space with people who knew that appearances of “normality” are only a thin veneer lacquered over our wild, warm and strangest selves.
"and will carry their memory with me as I keep trying to find and frequent and fall in love with more"
This is just life in general too, right? Whether we like it or not the people, places, and experiences that shape us are often lost to time and the only thing we are left with is the memories, stories, and maybe an artifact or two. So we have no choice but to keep moving forward and finding new people, places, things to love.
I like it when I travel and I find myself in one of those love-worn places; I seek them out. Diners esspecially, with art drawn in crayon on placements hung on the walls by kids who are probably long married, with the local retirees glued to their usual seats. You know the coffee and french fries are going to be perfect.
I've lost some of those places here in Buffalo over the years. I'm trying to find new ones, but it's not easy. When you have a place like that, it becomes second nature, you don't think twice about whether you want to go there or not. It's probably why I have yet to feel fully settled here. The closest I've managed is this little Greek diner, a Buffalo archetype, called Plaka. It's a little over priced but the coffee is hot and comes in the tiny mugs, the waitress calls you "Hun", and it's so very 70s brown in there. I hope they never remodel, it's perfect.
Hello and thanks for your newsletter this week. Re that Vienna story -- did you notice (I didn't, at first, alas) the story doesn't say anything about the 1934-1968 period, or all the Jews who were forced to abandon their homes, or the many aftershocks of that? Important to reconsider with that context.
That did cross my mind, having recently read the Werner Family Saga by Belva Plain.
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs in the 1990s, the time when a lot of these places got subsumed by chain restaurants. I miss the “places” like what you’ve described, but I will say, my dad has intense anxiety and OCD where one of his main triggers is food, and chains like Panera and Chipotle are often the only places where he’ll eat when we travel. For folks like my dad, the predictability of knowing exactly what you’ll get is what makes you feel safe in new places.
This comment was so interesting. Growing up we went to the same places all the time because my dad liked knowing what we were getting into. Predictability was/is important to him. There is a family story about how we went to Disney World (a huge stretch for our family) and we ate breakfast at the Golden Corral every day. He knew how much it was going to cost and it was all you can eat so why deviate? My brother refused to go in after a few days. To this day we sort of roll our eyes at how much my parents stick to the same stuff. But it’s never occurred to me that the desire for predictability and control is anything other than stubbornness, which feels a little unfair knowing what I know about mental health and how much we don’t discuss that in our family. It may or may not be more, but your comment made me think. Thanks for sharing.
I'm here for this. I feel like I'm the only person in the comments who wants my restaurants to be clean and ADA-accessible!
I don’t think it has to be an either/or right? Obvi small businesses are good but I don’t think accessible “chain” restaurants should be fully eradicated either. It’s just complicated!
Sometimes I really do want a Spinach Feta Wrap! I just don't want it to be the only option everywhere I go, which is how, say, a computer would probably populate towns if it looked solely at profitability.