Fast-food Archeology
Abandoned LJS and old Taco Bells seem to be particularly attractive homes for low-budget insurance firms, liquor stores, pawn shops, and other stand-alone, unfranchised local businesses. Much of this is no doubt tied to demographic changes in older middle-class neighborhoods. For example, as this particular neighborhood in Chicago became increasingly settled by immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American nations, the need for basic insurance coverage clearly became a more pressing local concern than access to the nautical fantasy of a New England-like grease emporium. When the older ethnic whites leave, they seem to take the franchised fast-food joints with them. With any luck, a Taco Bell then becomes an actual tacqueria, or failing that, a reasonably priced chiropractor's office.
In the case of Taco Bell, architectural changes are important as well. When TB made its move to be a national player in the fast-food game (after Pepsi-Co purchased the chain in 1978), they embarked on re
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Driving through older neighborhoods and down major urban arteries, you often see these old fast-food huts disguised with varying degrees of success. Sometimes they result in odd ethnic shifts of form and content, as in
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Doubtlessly the overlords at Pepsi-Co see these franchises as efficient and attractive temples of tidy commerce, as evidenced in this hallucinatory architectural model for a "typical" Taco Bell (below).
As is generally well known and accepted, architects have little use for actual people--and so this TB remains pristine and ideal so long as it stands apart from the actual everyday implications of fast-food commerce (even the "kill floor" of an abattoir no doubt looks gleaming in the original blueprint). With its greenery and picnic tables, this model is meant to signify a public park more than a gastro-scenic invader--its balanced rectangles of building, grass, and parking offered as a temple of orderly corporate beauty (perhaps most enjoyable to the cars that will one day fill its lot). It is the type of vision offered to zoning commissions and reluctant neighbors to emphasize Taco Bell's positive contribution to the surrounding community.
Of course, as anyone who has worked in or lived near a fast-food franchise knows, they are disgusting beyond belief--a repressed reality that only occasionally bubbles back to the surface when some high-school punks are caught on the surveillance camera pissing in the sink or flickin' boogers into the special sauce. We should salute these heroes, who have sacrificed saving up for a Wii or making next month's child support just to remind the rest of us that the insanely enthusiastic fast-food worker so often featured in Mickey D.'s advertising is nothing more than a subterfuge to distract us from the fact that the line-cook is actually out back in the parking lot tweeking-up to finish the night shift.
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Now that the FDA is taking control of the cigarette industry, maybe they can move next to fast-food franchising. No warnings labels necessary: all that needs to be done is pass a law requiring that customers have to enter the "restaurant" through the back door, near the dumpster. Stuffed with greasy packaging, greasy half-eaten meals, greasy rats, and grease in general, the typical fast-food dumpster is perhaps the most potent emblem of contemporary alienation imaginable--an alienation of labor, the body, and the community. Certain municipalities attempt to blunt this horror by forcing the chains to reduce the height of their signage out front, as if this makes both the food and the architecture more "tasteful." But as anyone who has ever cleaned the grease trap on a fry machine will agree, a leper colony would make a better neighbor.