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Berlin Conn.

John Margolies Photographs Roadside America

John Margolies in 1970 caused a stir, and not a good one, in highbrow architectural citcles. He did it by putting on an exhibit about Morris Lapidus at the venerable Architectural League. Lapidus designed flamboyant Florida hotels, and seven years earlier the architectural establishment had denounced him as cheap, vulgar and incompetent.

Lapidus, it turned out, was ahead of his time, and so was Margolies. Margolies became the foremost photographer of what is now known as vernacular architecture. He photographed roadside architecture in 28 states. His subjects included dairy bars shaped like milk bottles, giant Mr. Peanut signs, Howard Johnson’s, Holiday Inns, tourist cabins, Chinese restaurants, diners and hundreds of miniature golf courses.

Hilltop Steakhouse sign in Saugus, Mass.

He began lecturing, writing books and exhibiting his photographs around the world. Prestigious organizations like the Guggenheim Foundation supported his work with fellowships. The Library of Congress, which now maintains an archive of his work, credits him with influencing the post-modern movement in architecture.

“I liked places where everything was screaming for attention: ‘Look at me. Look at me’,” he told the Washington Post.

John Margolies

He was born on May 16, 1940, in New Canaan, Conn., the son of Ethel Polacheck Margolies, a painter, and Asher Margolies, a Macy’s executive. As a child, his parents took him on road trips but refused to let him stop at the roadside attractions that beckoned to him.

“My parents’ generation thought it was the ugliest stuff in the world,” Margolies later said.

Toy Sun restaurant, Berlin, Conn.

He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, and then went to work as an editor at Architectural Record magazine. He also promoted Andy Warhol’s work and appeared as a cameo in Warhol’s 1965 film, Camp.And then he got a job at the Architectural League, where he mounted the exhibit on Lapidus. It featured such Florida hotels as the Americana and the Eden Roc. Margolies called it “the Architecture of Joy.”

Others called it kitsch. The show, wrote New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, “is accompanied by the strains of Muzak and the outraged cries of those league members who feel that the show is an unpardonable breach of standards,”

John Margolies On the Road

Fed up with New York, he moved to California. He started down the road in 1972 taking pictures of novelty architecture. Margolies wanted to capture them before they disappeared and, in some cases, they fell to the wrecking ball days after he recorded them.

Miss Bellows Fall diner.

According to the Library of Congress, “in many instances, the only remaining record of these buildings is on Margolies’ film, because tourist architecture was endangered by the expansion of the interstate system and changing travel desires.”

He drove for as long as eight weeks, usually in a rented Cadillac. He liked to travel in early spring or fall, when tourists didn’t crowd the roads. Margolies stayed in motels, always bringing clothespins to secure the draperies and a Fred Flintstone night light.

Modern Diner, Pawtucket, R.I.

He shot in color with a 35 mm Canon FT. Margolies almost never photographed people; instead, he snapped buildings in isolation under clear blue skies. He generally did his shooting in the early morning, when the light, he said, was like golden syrup. Sometimes he had to wait quite a while for the skies to clear.

Chief Passamaquoddy, Freeport, Maine

He drove to places like Route 1 in Massachusetts, the Berlin Turnpike in Connecticut, Weirs Beach in Laconia, N.H., and Trenton, Maine.

What’s Important

“People generally have thought that what’s important are the large, unique architectural monuments,” he told a Canadian newspaper in 1987. “They think Toronto’s City Hall is important, but not those wonderful gnome’s-castle gas stations in Toronto.”

Half Dollar Bar, Peabody, Mass.

Just 11 years after the controversial exhibit on Morris Lapidus, another New York Times architecture critic had high praise for John Margolies. “[He] led dozens of his colleagues toward an appreciation of those buildings that might be called the exclamation points of the landscape,” wrote Goldberger.

Sweetwood Cottages, Weirs Beach, N.H.

Margolies is also credited with recognizing buildings added to the National Register of Historic Places.

John Margolies died on May 26, 2016.

All images from the John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive at the Library of Congress.

This story updated in 2023.

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The New York Coffee Cup, From Connecticut to Greek Diners to TV Stardom

The red, white and blue New York coffee cup with the Greek lettering started life in Berlin, Conn., and made its way to countless Greek diners, into world-class museums and in the hands of Leonardo diCaprio, Tommy Lee Jones and John Hamm.

For decades hundreds of millions of New York coffee cups were manufactured in a huge brick factory along the Mattabesset River in the Kensington section of Berlin. Generations of Berliners worked for Sherwood Industries, known as the Sherri Cup Company.

The New York coffee cup was designed by a Holocaust survivor who had no art training. It became an icon of New York City and then it disappeared – a victim of Starbucks’ success, some said.

And now it’s back.

New York Coffee Cup

Sherwood Industries was built on a site that had been used for industry since 1830, when a mill was built there. In 1963, the company hired a salesman named Leslie Buck.

Buck was born Laszlo Buch on Sept. 20, 1922, in Khust, Czechoslovakia, now part of Ukraine. His family was Jewish. His parents died in the Holocaust, but he survived captivity in Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Leslie Buck

After the war he moved to New York City, where he and his brother started several small companies. He Americanized his name to Leslie Buck and left the family business to work for Sherri, then starting up a paper cup business.

He saw an opportunity to sell paper cups to the Greek diners ubiquitous in the Northeast. Buck hit upon the idea of a Greek-themed cup. He did considerable research into Greek culture before settling on the look. It was blue-and-white, the colors of the Greek flag. It had a Greek key, or meander, along the rim. The sides had images of a Greek amphora, a tall wine vessel, and three golden coffee cups with the motto “We are happy to serve you.”

He called it the Anthora Cup, the way he pronounced ‘amphora’ in his heavy Eastern European accent.

Rise and Fall

Sales of the New York coffee cup took off from its start in 1965. By the 1990s, the company sold hundreds of millions a year. When Leslie Buck retired in 1992, Sherri Cup made 10,000 cups for him with the words, “It was our pleasure to serve you.”

cup

In 1994, Sherri sold 500 million of the New York coffee cup. The company grew to occupy a 100,000-square foot, four-story brick building with its own power plant.

Then the Solo Cup Company absorbed Sherri and the factory shut down in 2004. Sales of the New York coffee cup fell to 200 million a year by 2005. A developer bought the Berlin factory and turned it into trendy lofts, selling the first unit in the fall of 2010.

Trendy lofts

And then the company discontinued the iconic New York coffee cup in 2012. It survived, though, in popular culture. Television producers put it in the hands of characters in NYPD Blue, Law and Order and Mad Men. The New York Historical Society included it in an exhibit called “A Brief History of New York: Selections from A History of New York in 101 Objects.” Art museums began selling ceramic mug versions of the cup, and its likeness was licensed for coin purses, cufflinks and watches.

The cup’s new owner, the Dart Container Corp., came to understand the public’s affinity for Leslie Buck’s creation.

In 2015, Dart brought back the New York coffee cup. It is now made in Federalsburg, a poor community on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

This story about the New York coffee cup was updated in 2023.

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Emma Willard: Inventor of the Modern Woman (in 1821)

Emma Willard was one of the first people – if not the first— to believe women could have it all: career, family and happiness. Then, in 1838 at age 51, she almost proved herself wrong.

In September of that year, Willard made the biggest mistake of an otherwise remarkable life. She married Dr. Christopher Yates. It was a second marriage for both. And it was a disaster.

Despite her failed marriage, Emma Willard founded the first school of higher education for women. She also promoted the cause of women’s education in travels around the United States.

Emma Willard from The Life of Emma Willard by John Lord

Emma Willard

She was born in Berlin, Conn., on Feb. 23, 1787. She had 15 older siblings and one younger. Her father, Samuel Hart, had a successful farm, but he was far from wealthy. The Hart children had no illusions that they would inherit an easy life. Emma’s father had progressive views (to the point of unpopularity) and he encouraged his children to read and think.

Constantly reading and engaging in the dinner table debates her father encouraged, Emma advanced through grammar school. She then spent several years at academies for older children in Connecticut – not unheard of for girls, though not routine. By 17 she had started a summer school in Berlin. By the age of 20, the town of Middlebury, Vt., recruited her to set up school. Here she married her first husband, Dr. John Willard, and had a son.

Her husband’s nephew stayed with them while he attended Middlebury College, and he helped galvanize Willard’s views on education. Willard learned her nephew took classes in sciences, but girls couldn’t.

With her husband short of cash, Willard restarted her school. She also approached the president of Middlebury College and asked if she could take the science and math classes at the college. She wanted to add those subjects to the curriculum at her school for girls. His answer: No.

The Emma Willard House at Middlebury.

Undeterred, Willard taught herself advanced math and science so she could add these to her curriculum. It was hard work, but hard work was not off-putting to Emma Willard. She believed in a life of hard work. In a letter to her sister she cautioned her against being too happy. One of her sisters was falling in love, and Emma feared excess happiness would make her soft in mind and body.

“A degree of cold that would but brace the nerves of the hardy peasant, would bring distress or death to him who had been pampered by ease and indulgence,” she wrote. “This life is a life of vicissitude. A period of happiness, by softening and enervating the soul, by raising a thousand blissful images of the future, naturally prepares the mind for a greater or less degree of disappointment, and unfits us to bear it; while on the contrary, a period of adversity often strengthens the mind, and by destroying inordinate anticipation of the future gives relish to whatever pleasures may be thrown in our way.”

Willard soon began relentlessly writing to governors, congressmen and the president about a proposed plan for the “improvement of the education of females.” She would inform any who would listen about the terrible cost to society of giving a robust education to boys but steering girls toward finishing schools. While schools that educated girls were common, none offered the college level, sophisticated classes that Willard wanted.

By 1821, her efforts were rewarded. New York agreed with her point of view. In 1814, she created the Troy Female Seminary, and after some growing pains it was up and fully running by 1821. Dr. Willard encouraged his wife’s ambition, and moved with her to Troy, N.Y.

The Emma Willard School today.

But the doctor was 28 years older than Willard, and in 1825, with the school growing by leaps and bounds, he passed away. Dr. Willard handled the administration and finances for the school, and his death left Emma shorthanded. But she never missed a beat.

A prolific writer, Willard wrote more than 10 books in her life on topics as wide ranging as history, medicine and geography. It was after Dr. Willard’s death that Emma truly came into her fame.

On Her Own

She would welcome the Marquis de Lafayette when his tour of America came to Troy, and would visit him in France when she traveled there, hearing his firsthand account of the French Revolution.

All the while, she schooled her students in her vision of the perfect woman: learned and serious, not given to flighty thoughts. Though religious, Emma Willard never pushed her Episcopalian beliefs on her students. She was modest in dress and disciplined in purpose. An able administrator for her home and perfectly capable of earning her own way in the world.

Though Willard strongly believed in women’s education, she declined to put her fame behind the women’s suffrage movement. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of Willard’s students, asked her to add her voice to support women’s suffrage, she declined. She wanted nothing to detract from her ability to promote education for girls, and she feared the hot-button issue of voting rights would do that.

Plus, Willard believed a strong man should, and could, shape a good home through sensible leadership. Her father had accomplished this, as had John Willard, her first husband.

Big Mistake

It’s not clear what attracted Willard to her second husband, Christopher Yates, a physician in the Albany, N.Y. area. She enjoyed the company of men and liked to socialize and attend dances. But whatever the attraction, she consented to marry him.

Friends warned her off. He was not what he seemed, they said. For a time she broke off the engagement. But in 1838, her qualms resolved, the two married. Willard turned the school and its funds over to her son before the wedding. The newlyweds then moved to Boston—fashionable Louisburg Square— to make a home.

The two stayed together less than a year, but it took a bitter five-year battle for Willard extricate herself from the unhappy marriage. In the process, she destroyed Yates’ reputation. He only wanted her money, she said. The newspapers reported on his refusal to leave the house they had bought and about him giving Willard’s jewelry to his daughter. They also reported that he gambled away thousands of her dollars.

Narrow Escape

Willard petitioned the Connecticut Legislature for a divorce, and in 1843 she got it. Yates would die just five years later. Willard, meanwhile, returned to her school, somewhat chastened but not depressed. She considered herself fortunate to have escaped the marriage and retain family, friends and her reputation.

Later in life, still independent

Willard continued to write and teach at the seminary. Her travels again took her to Europe, and she supported a school for girls in Greece with the royalties from her work. And her legacy remains alive today in the form of her school, renamed the Emma Willard School, and in the lives of many of the girls who graduated there.

Indeed, Willard’s views on womanhood took strong hold on her students. A 1979 analysis of her early students found them far more independent than the population in general. They had fewer children, less likelihood of getting married and far more likely to have a job outside the home. Graduates include Jane Fonda, U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Much thanks to The Life of Emma Willard by John Lord. The Willard House in Middlebury By PenelopeIsMe – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4363690. The Emma Willard School By UpstateNYer – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7029000. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Glory Days of the Berlin Turnpike

In the early 1950s, the king of Connecticut’s roads was the Berlin Turnpike, lined with colorful kitschy roadside architecture. It was the main route from Hartford toward New Haven between 1942 and 1965.

The Berlin Turnpike also ranked as one of the great neon strips of the Northeast, featuring 20 traffic signals and at least 200 businesses. It had diners, dairy bars, hot dog stands, motels, drinking places, bowling alleys, dance halls, petting zoos and 32 gas stations.

People called it ‘Gasoline Alley.’

A typical Berlin Turnpike motel. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library postcard collection.

The road began as a turnpike in October 1798, when the Hartford and New Haven Turnpike Company formed. Then opened the next year, it was one of the first turnpikes to be built on as straight a line as feasible instead of on roads that already existed.

The state paved the turnpike in 1909 after bicyclists and automobile enthusiasts lobbied for better roads. In 1920 it was then upgraded as part of a continuous paved road between the borders of New York and Massachusetts. The Hartford Courant emphasized the benefit to fans of Harvard-Yale football: “Berlin Turnpike Officially Open, Splendid Stretch of Concrete Ready for Football Crowd,” read the headline. In 1942, the state added two lanes to the turnpike.

Makris Diner. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library postcard collection.

The Berlin Turnpike, A Model Road

During the 1950s, 40,000 people a day traveled between Hartford and Meriden.

”When it was going full blast, it was a model of what was happening on highways everywhere in the country,” George (Larry) Larned, a State Transporation Department historian, told the New York Times in 1987. ”It was bumper to bumper.”

Freda Farms dairy bar. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

On Oct. 27, 1965, Interstate 91 opened a few miles to the east. Traffic on the Berlin Turnpike dropped 75 percent.

The Wonder Bar. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library poscard collection.

The Wonder Bar. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library postcard collection.

Business dried up. Motels that once catered to middle-class tourists became hot-sheet shops. The Wonder Bar mysteriously burned down.

Olympia Diner postcard

By the 1970s, Gasoline Alley had turned into Death Valley or Torch Alley.

The turnpike since bounced back, now featuring big box stores amid the relics of its past glories like the Olympia Diner.

Hartford Courant writer Dennis Barone argued the Berlin Turnpike deserves designation as an official scenic road.

The Berlin Turnpike (1942) is our Via Sacra, and the Olympia Diner (1952) is our Triumphal Arch. Whereas covered bridges evoke the horrors of so many headless horsemen, eyes light up with fond memory or present-day joy at so much as a mention of the Pike.

This story was updated in 2023.

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New England Has an Ice Cream Love Affair

New Englanders eat more ice cream than people in any other part of the United States, according to some statistics. The reasons for that ice cream love affair are many.

Ice cream sign in Quechee, Vt. Photo by John Margolies.

Some say New England simply has better ice cream than other places. Some say it has to do with the region’s long tradition of producing good ice cream — better than, say, in the South. But it may also have to do with the Yankee ingenuity that brought more ice cream to more people. And cows.

New England’s long love affair with ice cream burst into full flower with the soda fountain, where it was served, and the automobile, which ushered in a whole new kind of retail commerce.

Ice Cream Love Affair

The soda fountain owes its American existence to a Yale chemistry professor named Benjamin Silliman. In 1806 he bought from England newly invented equipment that impregnated water with carbon dioxide. He called it soda water. Silliman then began selling it in New Haven, Conn. Sales were brisk, so he invented a bigger machine. He took in three partners and opened soda fountains along the East Coast.

Dairy Twirl ice cream sign on the Midway at Salisbury Beach, Mass. Photo by John Margolies, Library of Congress Roadside America collection

The year before Silliman bought his soda equipment, another New Englander began making ice cream possible for people who lived in the tropics. A wealthy Boston Brahmin, Frederic Tudor knew the joys of ice cream and cold drinks in the summer. He began shipping ice around the world. At first people thought him crazy. He proved them wrong by making a fortune.

The automobile also owes much to New England, where the Duryea brothers and Stanley twins pioneered early automobile designs.

HoJo’s

Howard Deering Johnson famously started his empire in 1925 as a small soda fountain. He wanted to improve sales, and he hit upon better ice cream as the answers. So with his own hands he began making ice cream with more butterfat and better ingredients. The results were a hit.

Soon he had to wrestle with the challenge of long lines at his Wollaston store. He began dreaming of an empire. Eventually, Howard Johnson’s grew to a chain of a thousand restaurants – partly on the strength of its 28 flavors of butterfat-rich ice cream.

The Howard Johnson’s restaurant chain has dwindled to one.

Howard Johnson’s, Route 7, Burlington, Vt. Photo by John Margolies, John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Carvel, Friendly’s, Schrafft’s

Others eventually followed Howard Johnson’s success by capitalizing on New England’s ice cream love affair.

Tom Carvel, a Greek immigrant, started his ice cream business by borrowing $15 from his future wife Agnes. With it, he bought an ice cream truck, which had a flat tire one hot day in Hartsdale, N.Y. His ice cream partially melted, but he sold out in two days.

Carvel realized he’d do better with soft ice cream in a stationary location, and so the Carvel frozen custard shop was born. It thrived mostly in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York, where it had its headquarters. Later company headquarters moved to Farmington, Conn.

Carvel sign in Darien, Conn. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Carvel ran the business for 60 years, micromanaging the advertising and requiring new franchisees to take an 18-day course at the “Carvel College of Ice Cream Knowledge.” He sold the company in 1989 to an investment firm. Carvel stores have since dwindled to a little over 400 from a peak of 865, and the company emphasizes supermarket sales rather than the standalone shops.

Friendly’s sign by Mike Mozart via Flickr.

The Friendly’s restaurant chain also grew out of New England’s ice cream love affair. Brothers Prestley and Curtis Blake opened an ice cream shop in 1935, in Springfield, Mass. Five years later they opened another, with an expanded menu, in West Springfield. After World War II the company expanded rapidly, luring customers with its signature ice cream sundae. The brothers sold Friendly’s to Hershey Foods in 1979, the first of several transactions. The company has struggled but still survives in the Northeast, Florida and South Carolina.

Another once-successful restaurant chain also has roots in New England. Schrafft’s began as a way for the Boston-based candy store to sell more candy, and the restaurants did well in New York City. Prominent on the menu was “Schrafft’s world-famous ice cream.”

Hoodsie

Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

The Boston Herald’s indomitable photographer Leslie Jones took this photo of a wrecked H.P. Hood & Sons ice cream wagon in August 1921. The horse ran wild down Beacon Street in Boston, according to the caption.

Here’s another look at a Hood wagon. It’s on display at the Owls Head Museum in Owls Head, Maine.

Hood had already been around for a long time. Harvey Perley Hood started the HP Hood dairy in 1846 in Charlestown, Mass. It took 101 years for Hood to introduce the iconic Hoodsie, a waxed cardboard cup containing half chocolate, half vanilla ice cream. It comes with a wooden spoon, which kids often sucked until they got splinters on their tongues. People who grew up in the Boston area hold a special reverence for the Hoodsie.

Dairy Bars

After the privations of the Great Depression, dairy farmers realized they could make money selling ice cream at roadside stands. With encouragement from the Dairy Council and trade publications like Home Farmer they built dairy bars along the highways.

Charles P. and Fredericka Hayward opened Hayward Farms’ first dairy bar in Milford, N.H., in 1940. Later a second store opened in Nashua. Milk from the couple’s 150 cows was originally used to make ice cream. (Now the cows are gone.) During World War II, Hayward farms sometimes only opened for three days a week because of the sugar scarcity.

Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

The Shady Glen Dairy Farm Ice Cream Bar in Manchester, Conn., started when John and Bernice Rieg decided to diversify their farm. They bought a small cottage in 1948 and built it into an ice cream store with 47 seats. It was so successful they then opened another.

Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

As commercial clutter proliferated along highways, businesses began to rely on eye-catching architecture and signage to attract the motorist’s attention.

Kelbees Ice Cream, East Winthrop, Maine. Photo by John Margolies, Library of Congress Roadside America Collection.

The ice cream stand pictured below probably sprang up along the Berlin Turnpike, one of the great neon strips of the Northeast. The ice cream stand would have had to compete with 20 traffic signals and at least 200 businesses, including diners, hot dog stands, motels, drinking places, bowling alleys, dance halls, petting zoos and 32 gas stations.

Photo courtesy Library of Congress. Photo by Russell Lee of the Farm Security Administration, October 1939.

By the time John Margolies took this photo of the Milk Can in 1978, that kind of vernacular architecture was disappearing. Located on a busy highway, Route 146 in Lincoln, R.I., it

The Milk Can. Photo by John Margolies, John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Premium Ice Cream

New Englanders also claim they started the premium ice cream trend. If you’re thinking Ben and Jerry founded the crazy, you probably don’t live in Somerville, Mass. That’s where Steve Herrell started selling super-premium ice cream in 1973 at Steve’s Ice Cream shop. He created an extreme low-air ice cream and mixed, or “smooshed,” in crumbled candy like Heath Bars. Like most successful ice cream entrepreneurs, he eventually sold the business to a corporation.

Five years after Steve’s Ice Cream opened its doors, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield completed a correspondence course on making ice cream. They then opened a Ben & Jerry’s store in Burlington, Vt.

You pretty much know the rest.

This story was updated in 2023. Images: Hood Wagon By NellsWiki (talk) – I (NellsWiki (talk)) created this work entirely by myself., CC BY 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27143083. Friendly’s sign by Mike Mozart via Flickr CC by 2.0.

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