A Towering Achievement

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #158

Here’s a hibachi restaurant on U.S. 22 in Green Brook, New Jersey:

Here’s the aerial view in present form (the roof is angled back, it isn’t really a second floor on top):

Here it is in the 1970s, not the same but the same size and spot on the lot:

You may possibly have actually seen building, in its earlier life, before. It was the Tower of Pizza:

Curiously enough, what appears to be the same structure is there as early as 1956, without the iconic tower:

But the official property record gives a build date of 1970. And the tower is there in the 1960s. So the official entry is wrong, and as far as I can tell the structure dates to the mid-1950s (it’s not there in the 1953 aerial). I wasn’t able to figure out what it was before it was a pizza restaurant.

The current building was majorly remodeled, with the semi-second floor added, and the entrance was also moved at some point. The similarities are obscured and I’m not sure how much of the original structure is really still in there. But it sure looks like the two big diner-style windows on the left are the same. And I’m pretty sure the original mansard roof also remains:

One more clue: see that door right where the mansard line ends? (also, the actual building does have an upward slope: the latest tenant added a false wall to the back so it looks like it’s two floors from the road):

Compare the roofline, two windows, and narrow door to this better photo of the original building:

I’m not sure whether any of those angled elements in the original roof were extended to form the current angled roof, or if it’s just the same general motif. And the windows on the side wall were apparently covered over, but they’re still there on the opposite side wall, as is another door right where the mansard ends. (One of the images of the pizza restaurant above shows no windows in this spot, but does show the little narrow door. I don’t know at what point the windows were added or when all of the historic images are from.)

The hibachi/Japanese restaurant actually occupied the structure as it was, with the exception of the tower, which was removed in the mid-80s when they took over. Here’s a 1985 New York Times review of the restaurant when it opened! It’s a different name today, but still basically the same menu. It was later, in the late 1990s that it was remodeled to look as it does now.

I read somewhere that the paper placemats had a pronunciation guide for the word “pizza,” supposedly because Americans in the 1960s were unfamiliar with that exotic word. The structure, in its pizza-tower incarnation, was also shown on a postcard in National Lampoon’s Vacation (but the state was misidentified as New York).

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I have this thought every time I write about some old idiosyncratic business like this: does NIMBYism and the sense that the past is constantly being chipped away at arise in part from the bigness and blandness of what gets built today? Would Americans in general be more pro-development and pro-growth if we used more neon and glass blocks and put huge models of ducks and hotdogs and ice cream cones and famous buildings on top of buildings? What are we building today that captures this same sense of delight and whimsy?

That feels convincing. But on the other hand, at the time a lot of this stuff was considered commercial junk, little better than an eyesore. Route 22 was famously lined with odd buildings and huge signs, neon and otherwise: a paint store with giant paint cans on top; a giant man at a lumberyard; an anthropomorphic bowling ball. Here’s a hint of what it looked like.

Are we doomed to always want what we lose, and project that desire back in time, thinking we loved it all along? Likewise, are we doomed to be blinded to whatever this stuff might be in the here and now, able to appreciate it only as it disappears?

There’s a NIMBYism that is actually bad: exclusionary, snobbish, selfish. But there’s the far more common NIMBYism that is just an attachment to what exists, and a lack of faith that whatever replaces it will be superior. And while this may not be correct, it’s not unreasonable.

On Twitter, a fellow distilled this better than I ever have, and I’ll probably come back to this insight here. But I’ll leave you with it: Historic preservation preserves outcomes, but not the processes by which we got the outcomes.

And check out these early “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?” entries: they’re all neat old buildings like today’s!

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Related Reading:

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #5

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #6

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #8

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