Another Pulled Thread: The Passing of a Restaurant

“Hey Dad – I heard the .”  My middle-school-age daughter announced this fact to the family as we sat down in our kitchen for dinner.

“Really?  When?”

“I think it’s closed already.” 

The Plymouth restaurant. Our family rarely ate meals there, but it was our ritual location for celebratory desserts after evening school functions.  Over the past few years, my family, often accompanied by my parents, would stop there on the way home for desserts and coffee. Somehow, eating ice cream or drinking milkshakes had, over time, become connected with orchestra performances and dance recitals.

Unlike many other Big Boy restaurants, the Plymouth version was a tired, well-worn throwback to mid-1980s decorating, with dark terra-cotta floors and paneling that, if you looked carefully, was starting to warp and split in places.  Its best days were certainly in the past.  Tiny bathrooms that were not cleaned frequently enough. Local causes like the “Support Mayberry Farm” coin canister on the counter.  Windows everywhere, yet somehow the sunshine never really seemed to fully illuminate the place.

Yet, it was ours.  We almost always stopped in during the evenings, and it was rare to see more than a dozen other customers there.  Mostly, the place felt weary, with empty booths and hanging silk flower pots illuminated in the half-light of fake Tiffany lamps.  Our kids’ laughter and loud conversations chased the latent gloominess of the place away, and for that reason I’d found myself resistant to ever stopping there without them. In any event, long visits were almost instinctively avoided; the outdated décor seemed to evoke more melancholia than nostalgia.

At night, eating there was almost like sitting in Hopper’s Nighthawks painting… everything present and real, yet somehow disassociated with the world outside.

The food was not great, but edible. Desserts were better. Whatever you ordered, the waitresses who brought it to you were always kind. Most of the wait staff were neither young nor old, quick to laugh, could answer a joke with one of their own, and generally made you feel like you were being “taken care of” rather than merely served. Over time, as the waitresses got to know my family better, our desserts seemed to be increasingly generous in size, approaching huge portions which my daughters (and my father) loved.

It was our place, in spite of the shabby surroundings. 

And, without a warning, it was gone.

                                                    * * *

“WHY?” my youngest daughter shouted, eyes going round and anger spreading across her face.  “WHY are they closing our Big Boy?”

Her nine-year-old anger, while not unusual, was still a bit of a surprise to the rest of us.  Not fully realizing what was soon to be a typical nine-year-old’s emotional meltdown, I asked why it closed.

“They’re going to expand the grocery store next door, and they want to put in a gas station, I think.” 

Progress. A good thing, most of the time. Perhaps this is one of those times.  There’s little logical reason to keep a struggling, dilapidated restaurant open when someone else wants to create something more vital, more necessary for our town. 

I learned that the grocery store next door plans to expand and build a gas station there.  I suppose that’s progress, though there are two other gas stations within a few hundred feet of the site.  Somehow, “progress” in the form of yet another gas station rings hollow. Couldn’t someone build something else there?  Is yet another gas station really necessary?  Part of me wishes that “progress” would mean allowing the site to return to a natural state, free of pavement, and neon lights, and noise.  But that kind of progress doesn’t seem popular these days, and my rational mind knows that you can’t create profits from an empty lot, or jobs, or more tax revenue. 

So, we make way for progress.  But in some cases, like this one, the price is just another small thread of our local fabric, another unique location that contributes to our local flavor.  As faded and sad as it may have been, it was ours, it was unique, it was a destination with a distinct character and identity.  In itself, it’s not that big a loss, but when you have many losses like it, replaced with the generic strip malls, and fast food chains, and – yes – gas stations, it surrenders yet a little more of our collective identity. 

                                                    * * *

A few days ago, I drove past the place, and decided to stop.  It was striking how, after only being closed a few days, the place had changed.  Details once overlooked had somehow come together to create a forlorn mosaic: a dead shrub, a cracked and littered parking lot, vacant windows with hastily scrawled “Closed” signs facing the road. 

The Plymouth Big Boy has only been closed for a couple of weeks, but a stranger might think it had been closed for months.  Brown weeds grow through the cracks in the pavement.  Crumbling parking blocks still sit in jagged rows, the faded paint of the parking lines barely discernible.  In back, a heaping garbage area where the building’s interior was already ripped out and piled high.  Together with the dreary ambience of a cold, cloudy Michigan February afternoon, the scene could have easily been mistaken for the blighted areas of Detroit.  What had been our "place” only a couple of weeks ago was gone.

Out front, the familiar sign, still featuring the famous checkerboard pants-wearing Big Boy statue, remains.  The front doors — chained shut — bears another “Sorry, We’re Closed” sign just inches below a large sticker of a bright, waving American flag. 

It’s hard to ignore the irony.

                                                    * * *

Restaurants come and go, and while the Big Boy chain lives on in other places, its days in Plymouth are over. We shrug, move on, call it progress. But progress often comes at a price – the loss of a job, the end of a small family tradition, the passing of yesterday’s icon.  Life continues, and most people probably won’t care too much about a flagging restaurant whose end had finally come. 

But there’s at least one person who remembers.

As my family realized that our youngest was genuinely upset about the news, we tried to provide some solace.

“Well, that’s a shame,” I said.  “We’ll have to find another place to celebrate.”

An angry tear slipped down her cheek, her eyes staring down. 

“I hate gas stations.” 

Until next time… :|