A year ago today, the Weird Wendy’s closed down. It had long sat in the middle of what Northeast D.C. residents had jokingly taken to calling “Dave Thomas Circle,” the famously unnavigable intersection of Florida and New York Avenues and First Street. I was present for its demise, and noted the wistful atmosphere:
. . . what brought people here tonight, then? Aside from a desire for Wendy’s, there seemed to be an ineffable feeling that something more than just a fast-food restaurant was about to be lost. To many, the Weird Wendy’s was a testament to an older Washington, D.C. A place that had not yet so thoroughly benefited from the increasingly ostentatious and unseemly nexus of government and corporate power. A place in which long-extant neighborhoods maintained something of their abiding charm. A place that, despite being the nation’s capital, could seem at times more like a small town than a big city.
You could make all sorts of arguments in favor of the removal of the Weird Wendy’s. But what can’t be denied is that it was a lingering rebuke to the designs of planners who have grand ambitions for what places should look like at the same time that they have contempt for the seemingly haphazard features of neighborhoods to which their residents nonetheless become attached. Evidencing this attachment, Joshua told me he hoped that the park planned for the Wendy’s lot honors its past in some way. “Leave a sign here that says, ‘This was a Wendy’s,” he suggested.
Indeed, it was.
Today, the building that was once the Weird Wendy’s still stands, though long emptied of its franchise. To counter graffiti, it was surrounded by a chain-link fence. When graffiti appeared anyway, the city painted over what others had, ah, “decorated” it with. But there it still sits. Traffic continued its labored journey around the Weird Wendy’s lot as I walked by this afternoon. Two men hawked refreshments to idling motorists on the hot, humid, D.C. September day; they had a few takers.
I spoke to one of the drink-hawkers about the demise of the place. He suggested it should have been turned into a “strip club.” This is not, as far as I know, part of the D.C. government’s plans. But official designs to turn the area into a park and to improve the navigability of one of the city’s most chaotic intersections are still being worked out. So far, the only marginal improvement in traffic flow has come from the fact that cars are no longer entering or leaving the restaurant.
For now, the Weird Wendy’s remains the monument to unplanned oddity that it was when it existed. With one difference. When active, it was at least lively, and quirky. Now, it is just a stark, barren reminder of what used to be. Look on my Works, Ye Mighty, and despair!
There’s not much else to do when you’re waiting for your light.