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Hamburgers 5 Cents: 1941

October 1941. An exterior view of the White Tower (called "White Tavern" in the LOC captions) restaurant in Amsterdam, New York. View full size. Medium format nitrate negative by John Collier for the Farm Security Administration.

October 1941. An exterior view of the White Tower (called "White Tavern" in the LOC captions) restaurant in Amsterdam, New York. View full size. Medium format nitrate negative by John Collier for the Farm Security Administration.

 

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What a coinkydink

You can actually buy one of these buildings for a dollar (limited time offer - exp 7/31/08): Ohio Preservation Alliance.

Amsterdam NY

Most of downtown Amsterdam's a ghost town. A good size chunk of it was demolished to build a big mall, which is now 90% empty. Sad, really...

Urban renewal at its worst.

Art Deco

Please tell me that beautiful Art Deco building is still there. By the way, Amsterdam is Kirk Douglas's home town.

25 Cent Lunch

The White Tower was one of my favorite restaurants in the early 50s in Baltimore.

The good news was one could get two burgers and a coke for the sum of 25 cents while on the flip side was that it only took two or three bites per burger however I felt like a big shot as I would sit at the picture window and watch the passing parade on Erdman Avenue.

These restaurants were all over Baltimore and were also quite popular as a 2 a.m. stop after the bars closed and the munchies were on you.

White Tower

Another copycat chain was the Little Tavern Shops, a number of which were located in the Baltimore-Washington area. When I was a little boy, my grandfather frequently took me to the one in Laurel, Maryland. See it here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/earlg/369898420/
The one in College Park, Maryland, just off the main campus of the University of Maryland, is still there, although it's a different business now. Amsterdam was another sad victim of urban renewal. Its downtown was almost entirely destroyed by a limited access road connecting it with the New York State Thruway, and a massive redesign of the inner city streetscape. The block pictured here was probably demolished.

White Tower

Was this the forerunner of White Castle?

[According to Wikipedia, White Tower was a copycat competitor established a few years after White Castle. Another article here. - Dave]

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