Well, I remember going into the Club Paris with my dad when I was probably 12, the first summer I came up here, and I was fascinated by this fake hedge that went around the front of it. And when you look through the window behind the bar, there is this kind of fake mural of city streets of Paris behind there. And it was kind of like it when a kid sees a puppet, you know, they really take it on for real. And I was fascinated by this. You know, I knew that was kind of a classy place. But everything about the Club Paris is pretty much stayed the, the same, you know, over 50, 70 years or whatever.

And in my experience posting some of these older, photographs of restaurants especially, people have incredibly sensitive memory about, you know, old Chinese restaurants or it doesn’t matter where, you just get this overwhelming response from people like, “I remember that place when I was just first starting out,” and “It was like my first date,” or “This is where I would go after dancing all night and having my fourth meal,” or whatever. And so restaurants I think hold a very special place in people’s memory and that whole connection with not just with the food but with the people you’re sitting next to. 

So this husband and wife who were in the military, bought I think five acres. And they bought this Quonset hut, which there were a lot of in surplus at the time. And, the museum had a show about it[RB1] , like, I think it was like 16,000 Quonset hut that came up for surplus one year. And so I'm sure they got a really good price on this, and they put it up and they tried to grow vegetables. And either the soil was acidic or they just had very bad luck growing vegetables, so they decided to sell the tractor and open up a restaurant. 

And so they were doing some high-end French cuisine and some things that were not common for restaurants to serve. And it didn't take long for the word to get out that it was a very popular place. And this is in the late 40s. And there was, you know, late 40s I bet that there were 30,000 people in town. As well as that if you took the distance from the park strip, that would be the edge of town at the moment. You know, when you got to drive, drive, drive, drive, drive. And you know, it's only 3 or 4 miles, but you're out in the sticks. 

And I imagined it, before the restaurant, a place where they have like Sunday potlucks. It was like the biggest structure around. So the neighbors from around the neighborhood would come with their covered dish and, you know, get together for a meal. And I just love the fantasy of that. I live around the corner from this very place. My cabin was built in 47, and I could imagine that those folks that lived there would go to the Garden of Eatin’ for such a potluck. And I just love the idea of this kind of close-knit urban homestead community getting together. And it's so symbolic of kind of like my ultimate picture of community. 

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