The oldest banya in America, it opened its doors for schvitzing in 1885. If you ask me, that means it’s high time to paint Route 1 red and revel in its curious nooks and crannies before the rest of it falls victim to time.Īnd so, on this particular afternoon, my reconnaissance has brought me to Dillon’s. Yet in recent years, Route 1’s perseverance as a stable home for a wide range of quirky businesses-and as a semi-seedy grownup playground-has come under threat from corporate chains, high-end real estate developers, and crackdowns by town zoning boards. “But you can’t revisit those places in the same way that you can revisit the Kowloon.” “Everyone remembers their friend’s basement, or the party where they made out for the first time,” he says. It’s telling that his niche north-of-the-city account has amassed 10,000 followers and counting. Between the isolating effects of the pandemic and simply getting older, many people are “starting to look back” at Route 1 with fondness and humor, says the 37-year-old hot-tub repairman and meme-maker behind the Instagram account Girard, who goes by his first name only and grew up in Everett, is constantly cranking out irreverent local-color-predicated jokes about nearby malls, restaurants, strip clubs, and more. These and other local rites of passage can leave even the saltiest metro-Boston native feeling nostalgic these days. The Newburyport Turnpike opens as a direct route for horses and buggies to Boston it’s paved and renamed Route 1 in the early 1920s.Ī retired sea captain builds a boat-shaped restaurant on dry land, making the seafood-focused Ship one of the first audaciously themed eateries on the strip. It is also littered with halcyon memories for absolutely everyone I’ve spoken to who grew up nearby and took it all in: from family dinners at the now-razed Hilltop Steakhouse, famed for its 68-foot-tall glowing cactus probably visible from space to after-prom hangouts at the Kowloon, an over-the-top tiki-themed restaurant to bachelor parties at the Golden Banana, where guests can see all-nude dancers at a bar located behind a gas station. Just to the north, though, Route 1 remains the Masshole answer to Old Las Vegas-both amusingly ostentatious (there’s a pizza place with its own scaled-for-suburbia replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa) and coated with a thin layer of suburban-desert dust and grime. The city is cleaner and safer, for sure, but it’s also lost a bit of the peculiar grit and whimsy that is, in my opinion, an important part of what makes urban living worth the rent. Once a working-class crazy quilt of a city, the Hub over the years has ironed out most of its weirder wrinkles and bleached its dirtier seams to become a more palatable place for white-collar types to live, work, and play. It’s part of one of America’s first interstate highways, and with its gaudy themed restaurants, fleabag lodgings, topless bars, and assortment of other vaguely dated diversions, it still feels like a place out of time-especially when compared to Boston, just down the street. For years, whenever I’ve braved the endless stream of speeding souped-up cars on my way to-and-fro the North Shore along Route 1, I’ve found myself fascinated by the piercing stretch of road.
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