Today, thoughts about an architecture for hard
times. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
"Where shall we eat?" my
wife asked when she picked me up this evening. We
ran through our usual set of fast food shops. None
was right. Finally, with the unspoken agreement of
two lemmings, we headed for an upscale hamburger
emporium. That made no sense. We seldom eat
hamburgers.
Well, maybe it did make sense. I'd just found a
book on the history of the White Tower chain. We'd
looked at it before we drove away. And if you're
old enough, you know what that meant.
The old White Castle, White Tower chains served up
five-cent hamburgers while we grew up in the 1930s.
Sunday evenings, my father would pick up a bag of
White Castle hamburgers. They were small, fried in
sizzling grease and onions, garnished with pickle
slices. We'd eat them and listen to Jack Benny on
the radio.
The White Castle chain was founded in Wichita in
1921. The White Tower Chain started out in
Milwaukee five years later.
They were exercises in minimalism. A small, radiant
white building with a medieval tower for an
entrance. Gleaming chrome and white tile inside. A
narrow menu. White Tower offered hamburgers,
coffee, ham sandwiches, pie, donuts, and soda pop.
Mustard but no ketchup. It was all served on paper
napkins.
Those tiny buildings spoke the architectural kitsch
of the '20s -- a slightly exotic medieval theme --
simple eye-catching glitz to draw in the new
automobile trade. But if they were creatures of the
'20s boom, they had two qualities that gave them
staying power for the Depression years of my
childhood.
One was Spartan simplicity. They were the least
means for feeding people who had only a nickel. The
other feature was that dreamy veneer of medieval
fantasy. A place to escape the hard reality of
hunger that was all around. If you saw the Susan
Sarandon movie, White Palace, that
dreamlike simplicity was now gone -- lost in a
post-modern version of the White Castle.
As money and hope evaporated in the '30s, the two
chains built and expanded. Cheap food and cheap
entertainment are commodities that survive in the
worst of times. Fifteen-cent movies, five-cent
hamburgers, and Jack Benny on the radio -- that was
the stuff of my childhood, back in America's
hardest days.
Now my wife and I, drawn by those primal memories,
eat our large, thick, post-modern hamburgers with
side servings of garlic couscous. We pay 120 times
what we once paid the White Castle.
We eat and talk about that sweet impoverished world
between two wars -- about wonderful five-cent
pleasures in kitschy little fairy-tale diners. It
has become hard to believe that all that was only
the technology of getting by -- in the worst of
times.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
