Ospite Delle Autostrade

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #170

If you know, you know:

It changed colors once—but the current color is more faithful to what this used to be than this old color:

Another view:

The structure has probably been added on to, but it’s the front segment facing the road that’s important:

This is Pistone’s Italian Inn, a classic Falls Church/Fairfax County restaurant that’s been in operation since 1974.

But I hate that phrase “if you know, you know”—you may not know, and one of my pet peeves is someone teasing that they know something that costs them nothing to divulge, but that they’ll refuse to do so because…no reason I guess? Anyway.

So if you don’t know, you’re looking at one of these. From a blog:

And that, if you don’t know, is a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. There were a number of minor revisions of this building over the years. There were the massive colonial palace buildings that rarely survive today, and the later iconic, more angular one, but they all sported the cupola and the orange roof.

The current Pistone’s roof almost looks like the original roof with that blue paint stripped off, and you can see the clock face on the middle segment of the cupola is still there but has been painted over.

Here’s an image from a Facebook post, of this exact location:

That Giant sign is gone, but the building remains almost unaltered. Here it is, now an international grocery store:

The HoJo’s opened in 1950 and closed in 1968. 2025, one year from now, will mark 75 years for this old roadside structure. If that’s not cool to know!

---

Related Reading:

The Howard Johnson’s Sign

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

Neon Killer

---

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 1,000 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this!