WHEN I lived in eastern Flushing from 1993-2007, I didn’t recognize this structure on the Flushing-Auburndale border at Northern Boulevard and 165th Street for the artifact it was. At the time, it hosted an oncological imaging center, and today, it is home to a beauty parlor, a ginseng dispensary, and a rent-a-car center. But it was formerly an icon…
…a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. This was just one of an empire that boasted 1000 restaurants spread out countrywide, expanding from a single location built by Howard Deering Johnson (1897-1972) in 1925 in Quincy, Massachusetts. After building a substantial restaurant empire, Johnson got into the hotel business, opening a motor lounge in 1954 in Savannah, Georgia.
In the 1980s, the empire began to falter and the restaurants and lodges began to shutter, though the one located in the belly of the beast, in Times Square, hung in until 2005. I have photos on this solid gold FNY page from 2006. I never patronized a Howard Johnson, though I remember a few things. Our butcher, on 86th Street in Bay Ridge, had a freezer case full of tubs of Howard Johnson ice cream and sherbet, and I was allowed to pick out the flavor we would be eating for dessert that week. As a matter of fact, Howard Johnson (I never heard it referred to as “Hojo”) had an entire line of frozen food and I recall a radio commercial for them sung by none other than Joey Levine, of “Yummy Yummy Yummy” and “Chewy Chewy” fame. Thirdly, Mad Men‘s Don Draper and his second wife Megan got into a rip roaring argument at an orange-roofed Howard Johnson at Lake Placid upstate (she didn’t finish her huge dish of orange sherbet). That Lake Placid location was actually the last one to close, in 2022, though the Howard Johnson name can still be found on hotels operated by Wyndham.
Above, we see the Howard Johnson in 1940. Its roof turret is still intact and the Spanish Colonial design can still be detected. This location had a sidewalk lamp as many banks once did to deter overnight robberies.
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9/25/24
3 comments
Carol Burnett loved the fried clams at the Times Sq. Howard Johnsons
The very large Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Rego Park/Forest Hills on Queens Boulevard was our “fancy” spot in the early 1970’s just before tit closed. Opened for the 1939-1940 Worlds Fair, the restaurant had seen much better days than when our crowd would descend on it after working all day Saturday at S. Klein’s in Flushing. It was step up from the regular bar and tavern haunts. Both the girls and guys would experiment with such exotic drinks as Grasshoppers or Mudslides. Such sophisticated drinks were not to be found in the usual beer joints.
Famous chef Jacques Pepin was employed at Howard Johnson’s in the 1960’s.
He was what is now referred to as an executive chef.