Howard Johnson: The Decline of an Era

In the 1960s and 1970s, there were more than 1,000 combined company owned and franchised Howard Johnson outlets. It was the largest restaurant chain in the U.S. at the time.

Howard Johnson started out owning and operating a small corner pharmacy in Quincy, MA. Little did he know that the food industry would become his legacy. After he installed a soda fountain in his drugstore, he realized that the fountain was quickly becoming the busiest and most profitable part of his store. With the mind of an entrepreneur, Johnson decided to branch out into homemade ice cream, quickly accumulating a large variety of 28 different flavors.

During the summers of the late 1920s, Johnson would opperate concession stands along beachfront property on the coast of Massachusetts. He sold soft drinks, hot dogs, and ice cream. With the growing success of his pop-up concession stands, he was able to convince bankers from the area to lend him enough money to open and operate a sit-down restaurant. Finally, near the end of the decade, the first Howard Johnson's restaurant was opened in Quincy. The menu included fried clams, baked beans, chicken pot pies, hot dogs, ice cream, and soft drinks.

Johnson received a rather lucky break in 1929 when the mayor of Boston prohibited a production of Eugene O'Neill's play, Strange Interlude, from performing. The theater moved the production to Quincy, and the influential Bostonians that came to see the play flocked to the closest restaurant, which happened to be Howard Johnson's.

In the 1930s, Johnson persuaded an acquaintance to open a second restaurant in Orleans, Massachusetts which ended up being on of America's first franchising agreements. By the end of the 1930s, there were 107 restaurants all along American East Coast Highways.

By 1944 though, ravaged by the effects of war rationing, only 12 restaurants remained in business.  Johnson managed to maintain his business by serving commissary food to war workers and United States Army recruits. By 1951 though, the restaurants sales were back up and totaled $115 million.

The first motor lodge for Howard Johnson was opened in 1954 in Savannah, Georgia. Shortly after that, in 1959, the elder Johnson turned the company over to his 26 year old son. He would continue to oversee his son's control of the company until his death in 1972.

When the company went public in 1961 there were 605 restaurants and 88 franchised motor lodges across 32 states. By 1975, the company had more than 1,000 restaurants and more than 500 motor lodges in 42 states and Canada. This would be the peak of the business. By the late 1970s though, the signs of the end were beginning. Between the oil embargo of 1974, the fire of 1971, the day-long siege that former Black Panther Mark Essex used the hotel's roof for as a sniper perch, and the $2.5 million dollar judgement awarded to Connie Francis who sued the motel chain after she was raped at the Howard Johnson's Jericho Turnpike lodge, the company started failing. Along with that, Johnson tried to streamline the company operation and cut costs which proved disastrous because guests were unhappy with the "new" Howard Johnson's after being accustomed to the services that they had known for the previous years.

In 1979, Johnson accepted a bid from Imperial Group PLC who sold the company to G. Michael Hostage for more than $630 million.

This Lake Placid restaurant was one of the only three remaining restaurants. It closed on March 31, 2015.

Stats: Nikon FM-3A / Nikkor 24mm/f2
Agfa RSX II 100 reversal film
Taken July 2014

Ektachrome, Requiescat En Pace

Bathhouse, Coney Island, 

Brooklyn, New York, November 1988

Richoh KR-5 Super / Rikkenon 50mm/f2

Kodak Ektachrome  200 reversal film 

The Eastman Kodak Company, which operates on the business model of leaving their most loyal customers - i.e., film photographers - high and dry, while rolling out slipshod products in their never-ending quest to play catch-up in the digital photography arena, apparently got rid of Ektachrome, it's line of E-6 reversal films, that have been the poor relations to their proprietary process, Kodachrome, which they killed off (amid gnashing of teeth, wailing, and spinning Paul Simon's 45 record of the same name) in 2009.

But, unlike Kodachrome, the demise of which was known to film lovers well in advance, it appears that Ektachrome has gone out not with a bang, but a whimper.

The whimper came - at least to me - when I tried ordering some at B&H Photo and Video, and noticed only a few available rolls, in off-sized (such as hand-spooled 620).  I Googled Ektachrome, and found this on Eastman Kodak's website:

As of March 1, 2012, Eastman Kodak will no longer manufacture Ektachrome reversal film.

Well, then.  I guess that's that.  It looks as though Fuji and Agfa (reorganized after it spun off from Agfa-Gevaert as Agfa Photo) are the last men standing.  And, judging from the "Made in Japan" notation on the box of Agfa CT Precisa 100 I got last month, it appears that Fuji is the only manufacturer left in business.  And, even they have been winnowing down their selection of reversal films.

Thank God my Frigidaire is in good repair.

Vivian Maier and Sins of Omission

Vivian Maier, street photographer, c. 1950s

In all the reading I have done about Vivian Maier, the celebrated photographers (many of whom cannot touch her work - e.g., Mary Ellen Mark) and critics who now fawn over her work, all offer many theories as to why she never put her work out there.  Most are plausible: She was rather private, she lived for the trip of the shutter, not the adulation, and so on.

Yet, what goes unspoken in the thousands of words I've read is this: Vivian Maier was an intelligent, educated woman, yet took menial jobs to finance her own photography.  It would be wrong to say she was not ambitious. However, Maier kept her only work to herself and a few close acquaintances. Perhaps she understood the very nature of the sort of people who run the fine arts photography racket.

Perhaps Maier, living in New York and Chicago, had taken her portfolio around.  And, perhaps after the first couple dozen times being shown the door by the curator-in-black-turtleneck types, she gave up trying. 

Perhaps she got bitterly resentful of seeing lesser talents lauded because they had the social skills she lacked - running the gamut from schmoozing, sycophancy, making Faustian bargains, domineering, to backbiting - to "make it" in the gallery scene and the Museum of Modern Art.

And now, that she is dead, her estate having been purchased for a song by people who are at present living the good life, after she spent the last decade of her life living in penury, scraping by on her Social Security checks. 

The people now making a very comfortable living off her abandoned negatives and prints have brought in all sorts of the hangers-on of the art scene to laud her in death.  How magnanimous they are. Now.

I wonder what kind of experience Maier had when she approached the forebears of these taste-makers and gatekeepers of the art world.  I wonder if she even approached them at all.  Perhaps she was onto them, all along, and knew she would never last a moment among all those social climbers.

As long as this possibility goes unspoken (and it certainly is going unspoken, not even the bread crumbs of hints have been strewn in the wake of her sudden posthumous fame) - from people who know damn well what game they are playing, and who haven't the consciences to care when they crush the aspirations of young artists, and who call people who've already made it "emerging artists," we cannot help but assume that the praise they're heaping on her now is to cover their own asses and assets.

The Shape of Things To Come

 Parachute ride, Coney Island

Brooklyn, New York, November 1988

I don't plan on dying like Eggleston, with more than 1,000 rolls of exposed film still in the icebox.  I developed this roll of Agfapan 100 when I was a student at Hunter College, and quickly contact printed it.  But a project of street photography took over my interest straightaway, and I never got around to printing this one until nearly a quarter-century later.

Better late than never.

Semi-Abandoned Bikes

Bicycles. Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York, April 2003

It is entirely possible that these bicycles are still chained to this signpost, more than seven years after the fact.  There is an off chance their owners returned to reclaim them. It is more probable the New York City Department of Highways sent someone over with a bolt cutter, and released these simple transportation machines back into the wild.

Of all my years in New York, I can never understand why people wrap their bikes in Hulk-proof chains and hasp them with Brinks-grade locks, only to abandon them to time and the elements.

Rediscovered Negatives: Im Augenblick

Flatbush Avenue at night, Brooklyn, New York, 1988

An artist friend emailed me recently, commending my photograph of the tire shop in Pixley, California I had taken with my cell phone camera.  As she is an accomplished artist, I was very pleased to have received the compliment.

The bane of most photographers' existences -- unbeknownst to them -- is that the more advanced they become (either aesthetically, or in the business) the more they let themselves be enslaved to the superior technology of their expensive camera gear.  Over time (and I am not exempting myself from this observation), their work becomes slick, but stale.  All the oomph has been taken out of it as they've progressed from Pentax K-1000 to Nikon FM-2 to whatever the hell digital camera kit with the bells and whistles people use nowadays.

The cameras to which I am most enslaved are the Rolleiflex SL-66 and Nikon FM-3A.  So, when I get into a compositional rut, I head out with the Polaroid Colorpack III, a disposable camera from Walgreen's, or my camera phone.  When one's tools are primitive, the photographer must exercise his creative mind fully to overcome his camera's flaws.

When I took this photograph, in 1988, it was with 110 film on my Kodak Ektralite 10 camera -- a pocket camera that makes photos roughly the size of 16mm movie frames.  My mainstay on a student budget was the Ricoh KR-5 Super 35mm SLR.  But it was the Ektralite that kept me "honest."

This image can be found in much poorer quality on my website, but last year I finally found the negative, hiding in a box of letters.  I was quite pleasantly surprised at the quality of the Verichrome Pan negative exposed on such a cheap camera.