The Rise and Fall of the Orange Roof: Howard Johnson's

Howard Johnson's was not a restaurant chain that happened to sit beside American highways. It was a company built on the bet that Americans would stop. It began in 1925 with a failing drugstore in Quincy, Massachusetts, and an ice cream recipe carrying twice the butterfat the law required. Within fifteen years Howard Deering Johnson had a hundred and seven locations, twenty-seven architects on staff, his own clam bed off Ipswich, and an exclusive contract to feed every driver on the newly opened Pennsylvania Turnpike. By 1975 the orange roof was one of the most recognised objects in America and the company was the largest restaurant chain in the country — more than a thousand restaurants, five hundred motor lodges, forty-two states. This is the full story of how it disappeared. It covers the war that cut the chain from two hundred restaurants to twelve, the forty-year turnpike monopolies that made the company and then quietly expired, the two Le Pavillon chefs — Pierre Franey and Jacques Pépin — who spent a decade making highway food in a Brockton commissary, and the September in 1979 when the founder's son sold his father's life's work to a British tobacco conglomerate for six hundred and thirty million dollars. Six years later it sold again for half that. The buyer wanted the parking lots. The last one closed in Lake George, New York in 2022. The lease price on the listing was ten dollars. The building is still standing, and so is the roof. This is the story of how Howard Johnson's kept every building it ever built and lost every reason anyone stopped at them. Sources: Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission — official history and service plaza archive Curtis Miner, "The Pennsylvania Turnpike, From Tollbooths to Tunnels," Pennsylvania Heritage, Fall 2015 (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission) Anthony Mitchell Sammarco, A History of Howard Johnson's: How a Massachusetts Soda Fountain Became an American Icon, The History Press, 2013 International Directory of Company Histories — Howard Johnson International, Inc. N.R. Kleinfield, "Can HoJo's Regain Its Luster?", The New York Times, 21 April 1985 Albany Times Union — reporting on the Lake George closure, June 2022 Digital Commonwealth, Boston Public Library — Tichnor postcard collection, published by the Howard Johnson Publishing Department, Bedford, PA