Last surviving Howard Johnson's restaurant closes

The last restaurant of the Howard Johnson’s chain to resist has closed its doors permanently after 70 years in business. The restaurant was located in Lake George, New York.

The restaurant chain was at its peak in the decades of 1960 Y 1970. According to CNN Business, there were about 1,000 Howard Johnson’s locations, recognizable with their orange roofs. It was once the largest restaurant chain in the United States.

“Lake George is officially dead…Cobwebs at the door. Right before Memorial Day comes here… So I think this is it. For rent signs are still on the road. And the real estate listing is still available,” a Howard Johnson fan wrote on Facebook, accompanying his post with several photos of the closed restaurant.

Located along highways, interstates and tourist destinations. Howard Johnson restaurants became popular with families and young people traveling across the country.

“The Howard Johnson restaurant chain in particular has a special place in the memories of many Baby Boomers,” published by New England Today.

In recent decades, beginning in the 1970s, the chain closed most of its restaurants due to rising costs and competition, primarily fast-food businesses such as McDonald’s.

It was in the decade of 1920 when Howard Deering Johnson started his restaurant empire with an ice cream parlor in Quincy, Massachusetts. Restaurant diners could choose from 70 flavors of ice cream.

Eventually Johnson added hotels to his business. CNN notes that Marriott bought a crippled Howard Johnson in 1985, sold hundreds of hotels and a few 200 Restaurants at Prime Motor Inn. Then that company sold the restaurants to other chains and they lost the “HoJo” name.

In the past decade they kept operating the Lake George location, along with one in Lake Placid, New York, and another in Bangor, Maine. The Lake Placid restaurant closed in March 2015; the Bangor location at 2016; and now Lake George is the last to close, the property is for rent.