Monday, May 31, 2010

Extra Curricular

This post has nothing to do with books or gardens. It's all about Dairy Queen.

Completely unintentionally, I have gotten myself quite involved with the preservation of the Roseville Dairy Queen. Who knew it was Minnesota's first DQ? (Or sort of...) It is an iconic tribute to 1950s car culture -- Roseville, Richfield and St. Louis Park are all totally 1950s suburbs. I have grown to find that first ring suburb stuff quite charming.

The DQ was named to the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota's 10 Most Endangered Buildings list for 2010. I was horrified to see my DQ on the list!

One of my friends built a Facebook page just to see what would happen. It was slow at first, but it has really taken off! We're up well over 400 "fans" and have generated a couple of newspaper articles.

We've got email conversations going with the Preservation Alliance on action steps. Not at all confident we'll be able to save the building, but geez, you gotta try!

2 comments:

julienj said...

Wow, I'm so used to the generic DQs out here that I was really surprised to see the photo on the FB site. Very cool look! I hope that you can help save it.

The skating rink where I took all my lessons in Berkeley went through a similar situation a few years ago. They were on the verge of closing several times (problems with insurance, drug deals going on in the building...) before finally closing for good. Some company bid to buy the lot, planning to tear it down, and then there was a further battle about declaring it a historic site. (It's Art Deco style, built in the 20's, I think.) I don't know what finally happened, but it was still standing last time I was home.

holdenj said...

I saw something in the paper about this, the word is definitely out there!