https://thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/didnt-used-to-be-a-pizza-hut
"This building outside a strip plaza in Landover, Maryland, has been driving me
crazy for almost a month.
Notice anything unusual about it? I did. For one, it lacks Pizza Hut’s
trademark trapezoidal windows. Secondly, it’s a square, not a rectangle, and
the roof is not quite the trademark Pizza Hut roof. Third, that orange pillar
at the corner looks out of place, suggesting exterior alterations.
In other words, when I drove past this, I immediately suspected that it was not
built to be a Pizza Hut—making it the only freestanding Pizza Hut I’ve ever
seen that occupies a pre-existing building. There’s Used to Be a Pizza Hut, a
blog that documents various and often amusing reuses of vacated Pizza Hut
buildings. Call this Didn’t Used to Be a Pizza Hut.
What follows is the saga of identifying the original builder/tenant of this
structure, and piecing together its history over half a century. It’s every bit
as tricky and puzzling as detective work or archaeology. I love the challenge,
and I also love uncovering bits of very recent, seemingly ordinary, and mostly
forgotten commercial and land-use history. Enjoy."
Via Muse, who wrote:
Via Neatorama who had this insightful thing to say:
“While the story behind the building is quite a ride, the greater story is the
way record-keeping is changing and and how fragile digital records really are.
Digitizing books, photos, historical records, and newspapers seems like a
wonderful idea, because it saves physical storage space and makes searching
easier, but it also relies on changing technology. Think of all the digital
files that are lost when a storage system becomes obsolete. Online digital
files depend on servers, which depend on power, which depends on money. Many
historic document files will only be kept as long as they are profitable.”
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
