Monday, September 15, 2025

The Most Cursed Business Address In Town

So I came home from exercising tonight/Sunday night.  (Aside: This finished up a long, yet productive day for me.  I filled in for work yesterday/Sunday, then I donated my golf clubs, no questions asked, then I went to an industrial complex to drop off all my old glasses but they were closed because it was an early Sunday evening, then I went to my storage unit to drop off the rest of the stuff I need to hide from my folks, then I ate dinner at Taco Bell, then I exercised for the first time in a while.  I put a hell of a lot of miles on my car, and I was afraid I would be too run down to even do all of this, but I made it.  And frankly, giving away the golf clubs and glasses lifted a burden off my shoulders.  Maybe I'll blog post more about my feelings about that later.)  Oh, yeah ... so I take a left at this intersection to get home from the community center.  But shortly after I finish the left, there are train tracks, and sometimes, and especially around 10 p.m. on a Sunday night, a train comes through, and it'll take a while for it to pass.

That happened, so what I do is drive to the next left, where I pass under the elevated train track.  (Sometimes I wonder it would take less time just to wait, but I am a man in motion, or a shark.)  On my way, I see this business to my left, right next to the gas station at this intersection.  It has signage for a restaurant.  This is different signage from the last time I drove past it.  In fact, this piece of real estate has gone through, and I am not kidding you, at least four different restaurant concepts.  It served hoagies a, long, long time ago; it advertised, so I went there to use a coupon (it was an NFL Playoff weekend, I remember that), and the guy fucked up my change and so I vowed never to go back there again), it went halal, and it was Vietnamese before it became Mexican, which is its current identity.

I am 100% sure that the Mexican restaurant, and no offense to the owners of it, will fail, and this building will undergo yet another transformation.  It will fail because I don't know of a worse place to have a restaurant in my hometown.  We have a couple of main drags in our city, but the street this is on is not one of them.  It's quiet and mainly residential when there isn't a park.  It's really dark.  There is no active business close by beside the gas station (even though there are active businesses up and down the street).  Finally, I don't know how often cars drive down this road, and you need some foot traffic to at least let people know there is a spot here who want to feed you Mexican food.

That footprint should be a small park, or housing, or just a parking lot.  Anything besides a money pit into which people chasing the American Dream throw their hard-earned savings.  And yet people continue to buy the property and try to make it succeed on their terms.  Well, OK -- good luck!

No comments:

Post a Comment