Here’s a late-night photo from the Lincoln Highway in Illinois. Anyone able to identify the city?
UPDATE: OK, it’s been answered – check the comments section. If you want to guess, don’t look at the map below yet!! The first image is from Google Street Views.
I’ve highlighted the map to show the original Lincoln Highway in Red and the rerouting in Blue, where you’ll find the business.
A bit of warm weather has me thinking “road trip,” through cold weather admittedly has the same effect. Looking through last summer’s photos, one of the best treats along the Lincoln Highway is traveling eastward across Ohio in the evening and arriving in Lisbon after dark. No matter the hour, the corner entrance of the Steel Trolley Diner beckons with neon, stainless, and a warm glow inside — not to mention pies, home fries, coffee, and milk shakes. But for at least 6 years, the other side of town had brought a frown when I pass the abandoned Crosser Diner. It’s a c. 1944 Sterling diner made by J.B. Judkins of Merrimac, Mass., best known for their streamliner models featuring one or both ends rounded. This is a Dinette model, one of only 4 survivors.
Above: Waiting for customers, and a buyer, is the rare Crosser Diner in Lisbon, Ohio.
The diner (127 W. Lincoln Way) and adjacent service station were founded by Jimmy Hanna and later run by John Howard “Wimpy” Crosser and his wife Lorena Arter. It changed hands and struggled in recent decades due to its tiny size and having the main storage and kitchen downstairs, but it still featured solid diner fare and classic decor. One site reports a rumor of it moving but I’ve not seen confirmation or an update. It’s a treasure worth saving and reopening, with a cool little neon sign to match. Any diner fans or Ohio LH roadies know its status?
We’ve mentioned the recreation of Alice Ramsey’s cross country trip set for 2009, but readers can relive the original journey courtesy of author and researcher Gregory Franzwa. Alice recounted her adventures 54 years after her 1909 trip in Veil, Duster, and Tire Iron—problem is, it’s extremely hard to find a copy of that book. Franzwa has not only republished the original text but done us all the favor of unearthing where her travels literally took her, from roads to hotels to restaurants. Much of her route (well, west of Ligonier, Indiana) would become the Lincoln Highway four years later.
Alice Ramsey’s story was once well-known: on June 9, 1909, she and three female companions set off from NYC in a new, dark green Maxwell DA. She reached the Pacific 59 days later, becoming the first woman to drive coast-to-coast. The text and illustrations from her 1963 book are here along with 108 new endnotes that add lots of info as to the route and stops.
But the endnotes, following each chapter, are just part of the amazing supplemental material that’s been added. Almost half of Franzwa’s book consists of Chasing Alice, a conversational guide retracing the author’s research journeys. Filled with vintage ads, photos, and modern maps and pictures, the reader tags along as Franzwa tries to find remnants of the original trip. Along the way, fellow researchers, librarians, web sites, and friends help out, like Van and Bev Becker, who combed Mechanicsville, Iowa, for clues to Alice’s overnight stop there. Not only did they locate the buildings that housed the hotel, the livery stable, and the restaurant, but they dug up the hotel’s gold-embossed registers listing the four women travelers, their rooms, and even the time of their wake-up call!
The book ends with a preview of the work being done by Richard Anderson to rebuild a 1909 Maxwell DA and recreate the trip on its centennial. All parts of the book will have you yearning for the open road.
Alice’s Drive: Republishing Veil, Duster, and Tire Iron
by Alice Ramsey, Annotation and “Chasing Alice” by Gregory M. Franzwa
Patrice Press, 265 pp, 161 illustrations, 108 notes, index, softcover
ISBN 1-880397-56-0
$19.95 plus $4.95 s/h direct from Franzwa’s Patrice Press or contact Amazon sellers.
A yearly week-long bicycle ride through Iowa sponsored by The Des Moines Register will follow much of the Lincoln Highway in 2008. The 36th annual RAGBRAI®, the “Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa,” will take place July 20-26, 2008. It is the longest, largest, and oldest touring bicycle ride in the world.
RAGBRAI was started in 1973 as a 6-day ride (not a race) across Iowa by two Register columnists; it’s still planned and coordinated by the newspaper and is now hosted by the Register’s front-page cartoonist, Brian Duffy.
RAGBRAI always begins near Iowa’s western border and ends along the eastern border at the Mississippi River. The route changes yearly but total mileage averages 472 miles (it’s 471 this year) while the daily mileage averages 68 miles. It is rarely flat; this year includes 22,500 feet of climb.
This year will launch from Missouri Valley but not pick up the LH till Jefferson, hit it from Ogden through Boone, again some of it in Ames, Nevada, Colo, and State Center, cross it at points in Le Grand and Tama, then pick it up in Chelsea through Belle Plaine, and meet is through Lisbon/Mt. Vernon, and finally cross it at Mechanicsville. The bike route will be nearby or parallel the LH for much of the time, though not always along it. Fora map you can zoom in on, visit Brian Duffy’s blog.
A week-long rider fee is $125, daily wristbands are $25, and include wristbands, route marking signage, baggage transportation, camping accommodations, discounts, sag wagon services, emergency medical services, traffic control, souvenir patch, daily route maps, and entries into drawing for a free bike for riders and other prizes for support vehicle drivers.
This clip from July 1989 features a couple (nic & sloy, as nicholsloy studio) visiting three sites in east-central Wyoming: Home Ranch, Dinosaur Graveyard, and Bosler. All are along a stretch bypassed decades ago by I-80, while stole business from them but left a pre-Interstate feel.
Home Ranch, 20 miles west of Medicine Bow, is, as Gregory Franzwa says in his WY LH book, “a ghostly reminder of pre-I-80 days.” The couple captures the long-closed gas station and motel, and a great “No Trespassing” warning. Heading east, they stop at Como Bluff, one of the greatest troves of dino fossils, but they merely read the historic marker. Then comes Bosler, almost completely abandoned then and now. There are great views of a car lot, motel, cafe, and dance hall before they pull over at Doc’s Store.
The clip is part of a larger movie, rock n roll roadtrip, a 7000-mile journey across the US and back.
Daily snow the past few weeks has us dreaming of sunny drives along the Lincoln Highway, so here are a couple summertime photos from western Nebraska and western Wyoming. Can you correctly identify either location?
To see them larger, click on each one for a connection to Flickr. Once there, click “All Sizes” above the each image to see them even larger.
Closed for 12 years, the Colo Motel has reopened, giving Lincoln Highway tourists a new-style, old-fashioned lodging option in central Iowa. It is part of the Reed/Niland corner complex that includes a cafe and gas station, both also restored. The cafe is operating and is a must-stop itself; the 1920s gas station is for display only but is set to house a country-style store.
The motel’s six rooms rent for an affordable $49.99 per night or $175 for five consecutive nights. Scott Berka, Colo city clerk, says that other than “waiting for some of the furniture to arrive,” the rooms are complete with cable TV, wireless internet, central air, pillow-top mattresses, and room service from the café. The Colo is on the forefront of restoring mid-century motels for 2-lane tourists, and also gives locals a lodging option for out-of-town guests.
Above: Stuart Huse, one of the owners of Flat-Top Concrete & Construction, the prime contractor for the project, finishes the woodwork. Above photos courtesy Scott Berka.
The roadside one-stop opened about 1920 at the corner of Lincoln Highway and US 65, the old Jefferson Highway, but declined in recent decades as the old road was bypassed. The restoration is a project of Colo Development Group and the City of Colo; it has cost nearly $1 million including $663,000 in grant funding (from the Iowa DOT’s and Federal Highway Administration’s Transportation Enhancement Funding) and about $270,000 in local donations.The one-stop
An article in the Nevada [Iowa] Journal reported on the opening, and quoted Berka and Sandy Wilfong, manager of Niland’s Café and now the Colo Motel. She praised the retro-stryle rooms and appointments such as wrought iron headboards and curtain rods, and quilts on the beds. Come Spring, Wilfong hopes to have a farmers market at the corner on Saturdays.
The motel is at 18 Lincoln Highway in Colo. Reservations are taken through Nilands Cafe: (641) 377-3663. To learn more about the complex, go to the Colo Iowa web page and click Reed/Niland corner at the bottom of the left-hand column.
The 2008 Lincoln Highway Association conference in Evanston, Wyoming, June 17-21, 2008, will feature a new attraction: the Lincoln Highway Art & Photo Show.
Coordinator Kell Brigan, who is also Secretary/Treasurer of LHA’s California Chapter, says “This exhibition is a chance for artists to share their work with conference-goers who also understand the highway’s appeal, and to meet other Lincoln Highway artists and photographers as well.” Below is a plein air watercolor by Brigan herself showing the Lincoln Highway at Adams & Porter roads in Dixon, California, and the town’s water tower.
Brigan recalls,
While I was working on the painting (about 10:00 AM on a Sunday in the parking lot of a shop that specializes in maintaining & repairing livestock trucks), a fellow came out of a nearby house (next to a great old building from the ’20s), and said, “OK, I give up. Why, of all things, are you painting the Dixon water tower?!” I explained about painting spots along the highway in California. Turns out his mom, who came by later with the family dog, had helped run one of the “Lincoln Highway Garages” on the same spot in the ’30s.
Visit http://www.lincolnhighwayassoc.org/conference/2008/art_show.shtml for more information and an application, which is due by April 10, 2008. Note that this inaugural show is only an exhibition: no judging or prizes.
Here’s a nice chrome card of “Alpine Alpa Restaurant – Cheese Chalet” on US 30 between Massillon and Wooster. It was built by Elmer and Ethel Detweiler in 1961 and opened the next year. Note that the sign differs from the above name, calling it Alpine Alpa Cheese and Coffee Shop. A matching card shows the couple inside.
The additions to the bottom of the sign are funny now – one of them must have said, “We need to point out that we’re a Gourmet Shop.” The other replied, “And tell people we’re air conditioned too.”
A later card shows the building greatly expanded with a landscaped fountain. They announced that all 15 cheese varieties came from their own factories, with Hans and Alice Grossniklaus the cheese specialists. It had become “Ohio’s Show Place of Cheesemaking.”
The business is apparently long gone, but the nearby Alpine Homestead restaurant and Swiss market on US 62 between Wilmot and Winesburg was the inspiration for this one. According to its web site, that restaurant was built in 1935 by the Grossniklaus couple as the Alpine Alpa, 25 years before the above one. (New owners renamed it in 2002.) It’s best known for having the World’s Largest Cuckoo Clock – 23 feet tall. UPDATE: The name was just modified again to Grandma’s Alpine Homestead & Swiss Village: short history here and check the owner’s bios.
Just a block from the official route of the Lincoln Highway in Sacramento, Suzie Burger is a new restaurant in an old gas station (see red circle on map below). The double-canopy station at 29th and P streets was previously an Orbit station, but looks like it was probably built as a Phillips 66 in the 1960s (see the Spring 2005 Society for Commercial Archeology Journal for more on their history).
The above photo from Tom Spaulding, as seen on Flickr, shows the station’s two canopies, somewhat rare. Tom has more than 7,000 images on Flickr, and check out Tom’s blog for tons more great photos and info from that region.)
The station was later converted to Tune-up Masters, then closed and declined into a local eyesore. Locals are thrilled with the rehab, though early reviews on the food are mixed (though in fairness, three months is a normal period of adjustment). The building is not listed in any historical register so the new owners are to be commended for saving, reusing, and reviving architectural details. They have other high-end restaurants in the area. The original Suzie’s drive-in at 24th Street decades ago; Benny Ogata, son of the founders of the original, is an investor and was helping cook opening day.
The Sacramento Bee reports that a basic Suzie Burger is $1.95, cheeseburger $2.95, each one served with dill pickle and carrot sticks. Grilled onions, pickled jalapenos, sauerkraut, pastrami, chili, and a fried egg range from 45 cents to $1.95 each. The menu also includes hot dogs, chili, and cheesesteaks Milkshakes and soft-serve cones also are served. The cafe red-and-white color scheme includes “Suzie” caricatures by Sacramento artist Matt Rallens. The Suzie’s website has nothing yet but the address. The map is from the LHA Driving Maps CD, available through the LH Trading Post.
Click the map above for a full-size view of the Lincoln Highway.
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