A scoop of history with HoJo’s site
Quincy officials have agreed to buy a 7-acre site along Interstate 93 that once housed a popular Howard Johnson’s roadside restaurant when the highway opened 50 years ago.
The site would be kept as open space and protected from development, serving as a buffer between the busy roadway and its residential neighbors. City officials say there are no plans for recreational use of the area.
The local HoJo’s was a regional landmark and a convenient meeting place for 25 years before federal highway officials forced it to shut down in 1985 because of safety concerns. It typified the success of the company founded by Quincy businessman Howard Johnson, who took advantage of the highway’s opening on June 15, 1959, to lease space from the state for his franchise restaurant.
But the high-speed, limited-access roadway, dubbed the Southeast Expressway, ultimately was also the restaurant’s undoing. The expressway was so successful in bringing commuters to Boston and opening up the South Shore for development that state officials closed the eatery on the eve of a reconstruction project in 1985, after deciding that heavy traffic made the location too dangerous for cars entering and leaving the highway.
“I will vouch for it completely,’’ Ed Fitzgerald, director of the Quincy Historical Society, said of the hazard. “As a fledgling driver, it was a scary thing.’’
The site has been vacant ever since. After a couple of years of negotiations with the state, the City Council recently agreed to buy it for $95,000, using Community Preservation Act funds.
Backers said acquiring the property was the best way to protect the adjacent West Quincy neighborhood from development, given the state’s dire financial circumstances. The CPA allows communities to use a surtax on local property tax bills to raise money for open space, recreation, historical preservation, and affordable housing projects, boosted by state matching funds.
“If we leave it in the state’s hands, they may get tight for money and sell it,’’ said Steve Perdios, chairman of the city’s Community Preservation Committee. While the site is zoned for open space, Perdios said, “you can always change the zoning status.’’
A new owner, for example, could file plans for a housing development under the state’s Chapter 40B affordable housing law, which exempts developers from local zoning rules, and “override everything,’’ he said.
Purchasing land for open space through the CPA requires a deed restriction covering development rights, Perdios said. “It’s another layer of protection.’’
Located off the southbound lanes of the expressway just north of the I-93/Route 3 junction known as the Braintree Split, the site buffers residents of West, Thurston, Rosemary, and Trask streets from the highway.
“The neighbors had concerns that something might come in there, and they had concerns about trash,’’ said Ward 4 Councilor James H. Davis III, who represents West Quincy. He called the purchase “a good use of public funds to protect open space and buffer a neighborhood.’’
The city plans to leave the site as open space. But 25 years ago, the site attracted both local and highway traffic to a restaurant that customers and workers praised for its family atmosphere. Quincy residents and business owners lobbied state officials to fight the restaurant’s closing, pointing to its 70 full- and part-time employees. The site’s service station employed another 12.
It closed on Memorial Day as the construction of new ramps on the southbound expressway and bridge work drew near.
Local affection for the Howard Johnson’s ran deep in part because Johnson, who pioneered the franchise restaurant model by evolving a single store into a formula restaurant that would serve a standard menu plus his company’s signature ice cream, was a Quincy native.
Johnson, whose first enterprise was a Wollaston variety store with a soda fountain, “branded’’ ice cream as a retail product, Fitzgerald said. Since the soda fountain made most of the money, Johnson developed the ice cream side of his business, opening stands in other locations, popularizing his then unusual range of 28 flavors, and opening his first restaurant in Quincy in the late 1920s.
He also saw the potential of the nation’s developing highway system as a business opportunity, providing a captive market of customers along limited-access roadways. Howard Johnson’s restaurants obtained contracts nationally to open roadside sites to feed them.
By the time the Southeast Expressway was built, highway restaurants were a well-established part of the company’s strategy.
“He took advantage of the car,’’ Fitzgerald said. “He was a marketing genius.’’
Robert Knox can be reached at rc.knox@gmail.com. 