Vanishing Fast Food Joints

Everything I have read recently tells me that the majority of Americans are still not eating nourishing foods. Baseline: we eat too much junk food, including fast food. Before I go any further, I shall confess that I am one of those fast food junkies. I’ll not go into detail, but given the choice between (1) fried fish and broiled fish, I’ll take the former; (2) a pizza or a salad, again I’ll select the former. Need I go on? I think you have a snapshot of my preferred eating habits.

Still, in the last few weeks I have noticed a phenomenon taking place not too far from where I live. I first became aware of it a few days ago when I was on my way home from an appointment at the VA hospital and decided it was much too hot in my house to cook. (Good excuse, huh?) I’ll admit that I was also influenced by those Arby’s TV commercials that offer “5 for $5.95” and my mind swirled with possible combinations of roast beef sandwiches, curly fries, milk shakes, and apple (& cherry) turnovers.

Therefore, I turned left rather than right onto Shelbyville Road and drove to the Arby’s where my Uncle Otto and Aunt Lill and I had eaten so many times. Can you understand the jolt I felt when I arrived at the spot where that Arby’s had sat for more than forty years and found a vacant lot? What surprised me most was that I had been by that corner only a few days before and the Arby’s had been there, with folks inside it purchasing beef sandwiches, curly fries, milk shakes, and apple (& cherry) turnovers. What happened?

Even before that Arby’s had been torn down, the second oldest White Castle (a few blocks away on the same thoroughfare) had been demolished. The oldest had been torn down a decade or so before. Now, the loss of an Arby’s is one thing, but the loss of those two White Castles removed from the landscape two landmarks of gastronomic memories.

The oldest White Castle in Louisville had been located at the corner of Eastern Parkway and Bardstown Road. It was the first “hamburger joint” (as my father called them) that my taste buds had ever, uh, experienced.

When I was a very young kid, my parents, little sister, and I would pile into out 1950 Ford “woody” station wagon and trek across town to that White Castle. My father would leave us in the car (there was no “eat in dining” at White Castle in those days), go into the white building, and return with a bag filled with five cent hamburgers. The four of us would devour those small, onion drenched burgers (I’d have my mom remove the pickles from mine) in the car while we sat in the parking lot.

Even as a social worker in the 1970s, if my itinerary brought me close to that White Castle at lunch time, that’s where I’d “dine.” When I returned to Louisville in 1997 and found this first hamburger joint of my childhood had disappeared in favor of a small strip mall, I was devastated.

The other now defunct White Castle was located near where I now live:

The White Caste at Shelbyville Road & Breckinridge Lane (posted in memoriam on a local Louisville website)

That White Castle, too, has special memories for me. During the summers when I was a teenager, I “worked” for my Uncle Otto in his sheet metal business. Actually, I don’t know how much “work” I actually did: it was more as if I was Otto’s sidekick. His employees did most of the work.

I often stayed at the home of Uncle Ott and Aunt Lill most of those summers. And, many mornings, on the way into his shop, Otto and I stopped at that White Castle on the corner of Breckinridge Lane and Shelbyville Road for breakfast.Otto claimed that White Castle had the best coffee anywhere; I didn’t mind breakfasting on doughnuts and hot chocolate. And, of course, sometimes if we were in the vicinity at lunch time, we’d make a second trip and share a dozen hamburgers. (By that age I was eating the pickles, too).

This morning I took a picture of the corner where the White Castle Uncle Ott and I frequented had once stood:

I have no idea what in being built here, but it sure ain’t no White Castle!

So what’s going on? Why are all of the fast food joints disappearing? I am sure that it isn’t because we are giving up on fast food. But something must be behind the vanishing fast food joints!

Since I can’t answer that question, I offer this eulogy to the White Castles I have known:

Gutbusters, gluies, stomach bombs, sliders:
Let us name the little square things
with their five stigmata inexplicable.
Not respectfully.
Their sanctum is no cardinal's cathedral
but a stainless porcelain & shining steel temple
where pure spirit meets impure food
and martyrdom is a matter of digestion.
Only street-corner bodhisattvas can swear
to the holiness of this liturgy
It's the idea of the thing, the form,
so mysterious to snobs and dilettantes
that is sacred to these fast-food militants.
They choose by act of faith, of will
by bun and burger to take their sacraments.
And in the glow of a greasy fluorescence,
in the giddy gothic modernism
of drive-in battlements and streamlined sandwiches,
they give themselves over to steamy ecstasy.

~ Author Unknown

Yes, there are still White Castle hamburger joints in Louisville. However, for the most part, they are now all located in suburbia, which discounts the gastronomic desires of city dwellers such as me. Come to think of it, one is open 24/7 and even though it is midnight, I just might…