In my hometown there’s a former McDonald’s (equally recognizable as such) that has been taken over by a teensy-weensy used car dealer. Their lot, AKA the front part of a McDonald’s parking lot, holds ten cars tops. This is the place you go when you want a car for $500 in nickels that will absolutely, positively last the rest of the week before the engine block falls out of the car.
Their motto, permanently affixed in removable letters to the former McDonald’s signboard, is “WHERE JESUS CHRIST IS LORD.” It’s not uncommon for businesses in the area to make a token show of their piety for pretty transparently commercial reasons, but somehow this place gives off the vibe that it’s doing so out of a glum sense of actual religious obligation.
I check it out every time I visit my parents. It’s still there after 20 years, getting shabbier and palpably sadder all the time. I’ve never been inside but I’d bet enough money to buy a rusted-out '98 Toyota Camry that it still smells like fry grease.
tl;dr: my hometown gets a lot of visits from poverty-porn photographers
Something I wish I’d taken a photo of, but for all I know it is still there so maybe next time I’m in East Meadow, Long Island:
There was, in the '60s and maybe very early 70s, a McDonald’s-clone burger chain called Wetson’s in the New York area. AFAIK, there were no McDonald’s on Long Island when I was a kid; there were some in New Jersey, but I recall regarding them with contempt. Wetson’s was the original get-your-burgers-fast chain as far as I was concerned. They had clones of all of McDonald’s products, including the Big W (guess). The restaurants had arches, but with circles embedded in them.
SO: Somewhere around East Meadow, maybe on Jericho Turnpike, is or was a nearly intact Wetson’s burger stand that has or had been repurposed as a record store.
Another staple of Chicagoland that still shows up now and then are former Dog 'n Suds drive-ins. Some of them have ended up as used-car lots, and others are still drive-ins (unaffiliated with any franchise). Rarely, I’ve seen other uses. Locations dating from the early days have an instantly recognizable architecture.
There are three surviving Dog 'n Suds locations that I know about in the Chicago area (Ingleside, Grayslake, and Richmond), but they used to pepper the entire metro area.
I kind of doubt it, mostly because of the vertical posts. Old Dog 'n Suds locations had the slanted posts as seen above, a very shallow V roof, and didn’t have the sign on the building.
That certainly looks like it would have been from that era, though (and it certainly doesn’t look like an old-school A&W, either).
No, the old A&W is over a mile away, and is currently vacant. It’s in a terrible location at the ass end of a signalized tee intersection. Last renters had good food, but access killed them.
