I'm not sure memoir is a good title, rather than facts and records, I have hazy recollections. Assuming my memory will not improve at this stage of the game, let me put to print that which I can still recall. In about 1958 my father built Flaggs Drive-In. McDonalds had opened on Lehigh Street, and pretty much proved that people were willing to sit in their cars and eat fast food at bargain prices. For my father, who was in the meat business, this seemed a natural. As a rehearsal he rented space at the Allentown Fair for a food stand, and learned you cannot sell hotdogs near Yocco's. He purchased some land across from a corn field on Hamilton Blvd. and built the fast food stand. In addition to hamburgers, he decided to sell fried chicken. The chicken was cooked in a high pressure fryer called a broaster, which looked somewhat like the Russian satellite Sputnik. The stand did alright, but the business was not to my father's liking, seems he didn't have the personality to smile at the customers. He sold the business several years later to a family which enlarged and enclosed the walk up window. Subsequent owners further enlarged the location several times. The corn field later turned into a Water Park, and you know Flaggs as Ice Cream World.
I'm grateful to a kind reader who sent me this picture of Flaggs
reprinted from March 12, 2009
I find the building in the photo much more attractive than the current structure.
ReplyDeleteOff topic, but I saw the Mayor is going to speed up the process for large scale housing development.
This is the exact opposite of what Allentown actually needs, but the mayor appears desperate to pander to some constituents prior to the primary election.
Apparently Tuerk thinks that he is solving a nationwide supply and demand problem, when all he’s really doing is facilitating more cheap housing for NY and NJ transplants.
This will naturally drive the city’s poverty rate even lower, but I suppose that fast tracking more housing units serves HIM by increasing profits for his campaign donors.
While I’d like to believe this is just a bit of pre-election pandering to a group of voter that doesn’t know any better, I worry more that he doesn’t even realize the long-term harm he is doing.
In addition, perhaps he should let everyone in on how he is preparing for the need for more police, fire, and other needed infrastructure to accommodate the increase in housing units.
He likely hasn’t thought any of that through and Allentown residents will end up receiving an increased tax bill for his incompetence. Taxpayers are already paying more for less because of the deal he struck for sanitation services.
Your comment re 'housing' is reason to encourage more our suburban leaders to fast-track the purchase of 'open space' parcels as a hedge against this chase for low-income housing. In communities across the nation, Yonkers, NY comes to mind, federal judges have become housing czars and 'ordered' new slums of the future to be built in otherwise middle-class neighborhoods.
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