Abandoned places have always fascinated me. How do these places where people once lived, or worked…just become empty? At what point does the owner just give up the ghost? What were they like in their heyday? Whose lives passed in those places and what was it like?
My mother lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I have lived here in South West Georgia since 2002. The easiest way to get to her house from mine is to leave Adel and go over to 82 and then either continue all the way to I-95 and roll northward…or to go through Jesup and come out near Savannah onto I-95 and roll north from there. But, after 15 years, the ride gets monotonous no matter how easy it is to do or how good a time you make on it. So at some point I made it a goal to try and cross over the Savannah River (the natural border of Georgia and South Carolina) in as many different places as possible. To do that, I pulled out a map…not GPS…because GPS wants me to go the fastest way…not necessarily the most interesting.
Which is how I wound up on US HWY 301 one day in a small place called Cooperville…and rolled past the abandoned Paradise Restaurant.
US HWY 301 runs parallel to I-95 just west of that interstate. Originally running from Florida all the way up through Delaware and passing through a thousand small towns two lane black tops like US 301 were really the only way to travel between states. And even the smallest of those towns tried to attract tourists motoring through, either with home cooked food, or strange attractions, or sometimes just a clean well lighted place to rest for the night.
Which is how the Paradise Restaurant came to sit beside another relic of that bygone era, a Motor Lodge also named The Paradise, the remnants of which were still there the day I took this picture of the Paradise sign. The motor lodge and the restaurant itself were built sometime in the 1940’s but the Paradise Sign was erected in 1956 and you can tell it from its “Atomic” look that was all the rage in that decade. It’s a thing of beauty really with its atomic star on top and atomic era color scheme.
The restaurant was closed years ago…and the day I was there in 2015, I could see some of the glass broken on the doors. I also saw signs of a fire in the interior. At some point in the last portion of its life, half of the restaurant had been made into a thrift shop but inside the restaurant part there were still coffee cups on the bar, where the last time it was open someone set up for the next day. A child’s booster seat or two could still be seen in the windows.
Recently I read a story that they’ve taken down the Paradise Restaurant sign and moved it to another location to preserve it, as a Dollar General goes into the location that was once the restaurant. Which seems a little sad to me. I think one of the reasons I’d felt so drawn to the Paradise Restaurant. was because it reminded me of places from when I was a kid. I know things change. I know that as we get older we start lamenting these kinds of losses, but it seems especially different to me here in the South than it used to be. I feel that as a nation we are becoming more homogenized…for better and for worse…as our regional distinctiveness seems to be a little less distinct every year. Small towns like Cooperville, and places like the Paradise keep falling away to progress and our regional identity and some of the good parts are going with them.
I’m glad I at least got to see it before it went completely.