Serving Up Nostalgia
The last Howard Johnson’s Restaurant has been 86’d.
I traveled to Lake George to visit the final orange-roofed outpost of what was once America’s largest restaurant chain. The result was a front-page story — called an A-Hed — in Friday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal.
When the Lake George location closed its doors last month, Bonnie Corso saw opportunity. The 51-year-old Massachusetts market owner is floating a hot take: opening a restaurant with the taste and feel of a HoJo’s in one of the original locations. She has spent the last five years gathering materials, from an ice cream bar to the original recipes.
For Corso and other HoJo’s superfans, the restaurant is more than the sum of its menu. It represents a simpler time in America and evokes memories of road trips to visit grandparents or the beach.
“It was always: the world had chaos, and here was order,” says Richard Kummerlowe, a 57-year-old banker from Louisiana.
Or as Corso put it: “We don’t need another Applebee’s. We don’t need another McDonald’s. We want things that were familiar to us, that were our generation’s comfort.”
The Lake George Howard Johnson’s was opened in 1953 by Carl DeSantis. Sitting in the swivel chairs of the restaurant’s dairy bar, the 95-year-old restaurateur told me how people poured in for the 28 flavors of ice cream and fried clam strips.
It fit perfectly into the scene at Lake George, a mountain resort which bills itself as “America’s family playground,” according to longtime mayor Bob Blais. On the main drag, Canada Street, pedestrians dip in and out of the wax museum, video arcades and shops selling ice cream and T-shirts. Along the southern shore at Million Dollar Beach, the steam calliope from the paddleboat Minne-Ha-Ha pierces the afternoon to announce another cruise north.
So, can it be revived? The DeSantis family is looking to get the greatest return it can for the site. Corso talked about taking it over a few years back, but the figures didn’t work out. Walter Mann, a former broadcaster who operates HoJoLand.com, is skeptical the brand can be brought alive without a significant infusion of capital. He’s hopeful all the same.
“What we need,” he said, “is an Orange Knight to come forward and rescue this dying icon.”
REMEMBER TO VOTE: New York’s primary election for statewide offices and the state Assembly finishes up on Tuesday. I highlighted the Democratic primary contest for lieutenant governor, which progressives say is their best shot this year to win a statewide office.
Ana María Archila is a community organizer who drew national attention for an in-your-face protest during a Supreme Court nomination fight. She has the backing of the state’s institutional left, including the Working Families Party. She hopes to unseat Antonio Delgado, a former corporate lawyer and Rhodes scholar who represented a moderate district in Congress before Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed him lieutenant governor last month.
Contenders for the No. 2 job run separately in the June primary but as a ticket with the gubernatorial candidate in November’s general election. If Archila wins, it would put Hochul in the awkward position of sharing the ballot with a woman who has protested against administration policies.
“For the progressives, it’s a litmus test of whether they can win a Democratic primary without trying to build bridges to nonprogressive primary voters,” political consultant Bruce Gyory said of Archila’s campaign.
GUN ACTION: Hochul has called a special session of the state Legislature for Thursday to consider changes to New York’s gun laws after the Supreme Court last week struck down the state’s permitting regime for concealed weapons.
While detailed proposals have to be worked out, the governor and state lawmakers said they would focus future rules on restricting firearms in sensitive places including the subway and private businesses that don’t want weapons on their premises.
Thursday’s ruling could give gun-rights advocates a stronger hand in future cases beyond the issue of concealed carry. That is because the Supreme Court said lower court judges have been using the wrong standard for evaluating gun regulations. What matters, the high court said, is whether a gun regulation “is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
Adam Winkler, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, said a host of modern gun-control laws—including red-flag laws that allow firearms to be taken from people who are mentally ill—might be challenged because they don’t have pre-Civil War roots. “Many of the top agenda items of the gun-safety reform movement are novel, innovative laws that don’t have any pedigree in the gun laws of the 1700s and 1800s,” Winkler told me.
The ruling raises more questions than it answers, he said, which will be tested by any new laws passed in New York and elsewhere.
THE QUESTION: Who do you think will win the GOP gubernatorial primary: Rob Astorino, Andrew Giuliani, Harry Wilson or Lee Zeldin?
Have an answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: The last district attorney removed from office by a New York governor was Asa Bird Gardiner in 1900.