Ticket To Dine
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #157
This is a Jamaican restaurant in a corner building in downtown Winchester, Virginia:
It’s been a Jamaican restaurant for as long as Google Street View goes back. Obviously it looks like, and at one point or other probably was, a house. It was apparently also office space at one point, which is a common use of buildings like this in downtown locations.
However, it also has a much more interesting use in its history, back in the 1920s.
Take a look at this photo from a neat account on Facebook that traces the history of tons of historic buildings in Winchester:
In the thread some folks remember more recent locations for the bus terminal, but as far as I can tell there isn’t one in Winchester now. And there’s absolutely nothing about the old bus terminal on the internet, at least not that can be easily searched.
Notice the walk-up ticket window in the old photo. The window is still there, but it’s no longer a sliding or opening window. The awning over it makes me wonder if at some point in its restaurant life it was an ordering window. If it ever was, it hasn’t been for a long time.
Between 1920 and 1930 Winchester grew from about 7,000 people to about 10,000. And it was big enough and important enough to have a bus terminal. It’s endlessly interesting to me how much larger a role small cities had in American life a century ago than they do now.
Today, Winchester is sort of accidentally the final frontier in the D.C.-area sprawl, but it’s very much its own place with its own history, and that was even more discernible back then.
Food for thought. And today, just food.
Related Reading:
What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #22
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Several years ago I was conducting research for a YouTube video I was working on about Patsy Cline. I knew that she had worked in a diner in the Greyhound Bus Depot (there's even a photo of her in uniform), unfortunately I couldn't find any record of that Depot having existed. It wasn't until I met with the owners of G&M Music...those were the folks that sold Patsy her first guitar...that I learned the Depot was adjacent to the original store location at 38 W Boscawen. The father opened the music store in the 1930s and his son (who now runs the shop) told me that they used to live above the old store location. He said that all day and night the buses would pull through the alley and the drivers would leave them running. The fumes would waft into his bedroom. Originally that Depot was a gorgeous old Art Deco building but was stuccoed. It's now the Grace Lutheran Preschool at 16th N Braddock. A Google Street view will show you the old drive thru and the bricked over windows of the son's room. It's amazing to me that this is another location completely lost to time but is so obvious when you know what it was originally designed to be.