Historic Route One is possibly the most lamented object on the North Shore. Talk to anyone, take a ride with somebody that grew up in the last century, and you’ll get the whole mirage tour. They’ll point to a Yankee Candle and a Starbucks along a particularly forested bend in the road and tell you, “that’s where the pirate ship was.” It was a real ship, masts and all that. There used to be this Chinese pagoda castle thing up on a hill. Weylu’s. Oh, and you can’t forget Kowloon! Pure Orientalism, you couldn’t get away with building something like that in 2021.
The dinosaur gets people the most. A statue of an orange T-Rex that stands upright (as dinosaurs did in the olden days) once marked an ice cream and mini golf place. The dinosaur is still there, propped up on the massive grey brick threshold of some mega construction project. Obviously, it’s not the same. You used to be able to, you know, stop and play mini golf. The dinosaur scared the shit out of me personally, but I always looked for it on the drive to Malden.
That’s the thing, the highway magic isn’t totally gone. As you drive along Route One, you’ll notice that the road is a bit funky. Prince Pizzeria has a model Leaning Tower of Pizza coming out the top of it. There’s an Italian restaurant with a mobster hat on the sign. A giant cactus declaring “HILLTOP” used to mark a pretty good steak house. These magical accents are just that–accents, little details that blend into the growing number of Super Walmarts and the plastic outlets. There was probably even more of it before I was born, but the magic is shrinking every year. The sign of the Square One Mall, once brightly colored red and blue, has faded pink and inscrutable.
It’s not like Route One is an unpopular roadway, either. Try to get from Revere to Middleton at 5pm on a weekday and you’ll see what I mean. Killer traffic. People are driving, but I guess they aren’t stopping as much. It’s hard to own an independent business these days, and the big money Super Walmart people are busy buying up land and transforming it into concrete cubes lined with plastic. They might keep the fluorescent dinosaur around as a token with a plaque, but today’s Route One investors have no interest in making something new to match the creativity of the past. That is what irks me the most. If you are going to build something on this stretch of road, why not do something out of the box? The greatest way to uphold the magic of the past is to invest a little magic into the future.
Give our kids something to look at!