So I was looking at the town where I grew up on Google Street View, as I imagine many people who are transplants to other states do when they’re feeling nostalgic and bored. And I was a bit surprised to see that this old motel looks pretty much exactly like I remember it. If the embedded Street View image works (It’s not showing up for me right now), although you can’t see much from the street you can tell it’s a very run down motel. The thing is, it’s not like it deteriorated over the decades since I moved away. At least in my memory, it was just as run down in the 1980s and 90s when I was growing up in the area. It’s like the owner has just done the bare minimum of maintenance for the past 40 years. Even that Pepsi machine in front of the office has been there since at least the 1980s. I distinctly remember that detail from driving past the place as a kid.
The only thing I do remember changing is the name. In the 1980s they were called something like the Port City Motor Lodge. Some time in the 1990s they changed it to the current Relax Inn (and quite obviously ripped off the Comfort Inn logo at the same time). The other thing that appears to have changed is that when I lived in the area they were still operating as a regular motel catering to travelers. I remember that sign with the movable letters read “Truckers Welcome” for years (I have no idea where you’d actually park a semi, though). Now it advertises kitchenettes and weekly/monthly rates. Uh oh, that’s never a good sign for a motel. It now appears they’ve pretty much become low income housing at this point.
I have no idea why I’m so fascinated by places like this. But do you have any examples of places like that from your area, places that have maintained a state of perpetual seediness for decades?
There was a barr on the main street running through the neighborhood where I grew up. The eventual owner was a guy a couple of years behind me in grade school. His Grandfather owned in, and my Dad was a regular there. When he passed away, the bar went to his son in law who was the Father of guy I went to school with. It was always pretty shabby and when I was in high school the building owner sold and the bar lost its lease. Bud moved it about three blocks west and a few years later turned it over to the guy I went to school with. Over the years it just got shabbier and shabbier. It was never a quaint and popular “Dive Bar.” It eventually became the kind of place that hard core day drinkers frequent. I stopped in for a beer a couple of years ago and it was just sad. My friend retired and the place in now closed.
I still live in the town I grew up in, and so have been able to watch both the gentrification of certain neighborhoods while simultaneously watching the decline of others.
One place that stands out is the Shamrock Motel in Roseburg, Oregon. Its located behind a genuine (and amazingly still in business) porn arcade. They have no website, not even a Facebook page, the sign looks like it was erected during the Ford administration and has been given no attention since, and clearly has no maintenance budget. Its the kind of place that rents rooms by the week or the month and has never had the Orkin man visit.
I asked a friend of mine if it was a hot sheet motel (she used to work at the porn arcade) and she assured me it wasn’t, it was just a trashy motel that mostly served as semi-permanent housing for people otherwise unable to secure a lease with a traditional landlord.
The same goes for the Relax Inn in the OP. They have no website, nor do they show up on Tripadvisor or any of the other typical travel sites. There are a couple of reviews on Google including one that includes a couple of pictures of a very nasty looking bathroom (Why would you post pictures of an unflushed toilet?!) that besides poor maintenance also looks like it hasn’t been updated since the 1950s.
Now that place actually looks reasonably well maintained, at least from the outside. I do like a nice, well kept, mid-century motel. And that place looks like a total time capsule.
A large part of the clientele of this last remaining piece of a local chain are day laborers, who congregate under a pavilion across the street to the left.
The original owner was professional billiard player Bill “Weenie Beenie” Slaton. Bill’s home parlor is long gone but his second home was around for a long time.
For a two-star motel, it’s in good condition. It also has a reputation for catering to hookers but I’m not sure how deserved that reputation is.
Come to think of it, I know someone whose landlord put him up in the Highlander for several weeks while county PD was conducting an investigation in his apartment.
This used to be an Ollie’s Trolley, a mostly East Coast burger chain which got its start in Louisville about 45 years ago. While the name above the old trolley changed several times since it was an Ollie’s, the trolley itself hasn’t; no matter who occupies the place, they always seem to have trouble with the health department.
I’ve lived in 4 places equally long and the only example that pops into mind for any of them is Dancers Royale in Orlando which has been there for at least 25 years and looked run down when I first saw it. It used to have an entrance on the main street but now all you can see is the tired-looking neon sign. It used to be next to a pawn shop and a detective equipment shop so I called it the “noir block”.
The Korner Pub in semi-rural North Carolina looks like it’s actually been spruced up a bit, although I’m not sure I’d call it gentrified. It used to just be a dumpy looking cinder block building (which you can see if you rewind the Street View back to 2008); now they’ve put up siding and added an actually rather inviting looking outdoor seating area. When I lived in the area it had a reputation as being basically a redneck hangout.
Now home to perhaps the best barbecue in Northern Virginia, the “EAT” sign is a holdover from when this was Whitey’s, a biker bar which had been around for decades.
This dive bar is still around, looks like Google drove through in late of June 2017. I used to live a couple of blocks from here and stopped by a few times.
Well I just had to look and see if “The Pitt” was still in business, also known as the Pittsburgh Motel just outside of Pittsburgh. Looks like it hasn’t changed in about 30 years. Half the hotel was/is freely run over with prostitutes, drug addicts and the pusher pimps. There is a bar in the middle and the other side is the “safe” side where weekly renters stay. I stayed there for 3 months on a short term contract and a dozen of us contractors stayed there, brought our own bedding and policed the parking lot ourselves. The bar in the middle was quite a mix, no prostitutes allowed inside (because the owners knew them by name) but it was a rough crowd.
A new victim of the pandemic. I haven’t been there in several years but word is this sports bar had been on the decline for a long time. I remember really liking their New England clam chowder.
