Fast-Order Classic
Downtown's Delectable Waffle Shop Soon May Be Toast

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Imagine if the curators at the National Gallery walked their halls without ever noticing the "Ginevra de' Benci," Leonardo da Vinci's only painting in the United States.

That's more or less what's been happening for years now in downtown Washington, every time locals have strolled up 10th Street NW between E and F. There, on a jumbled block of storefronts opposite Ford's Theatre, the Waffle Shop has gone 56 years without attracting more than a glimmer of attention. That's a surprise, considering that the ancient restaurant is a stunningly preserved instance of classic 1950s coffee shop design, now almost extinct in Washington -- and with this last example now facing disappearance, too.

The shop is a masterpiece of the high-tech, high-polish, streamlined style properly known as American Moderne -- or, as it's sometimes called, Doo Wop. It's all swooping stainless steel, gold-and-red abstract mosaics and sexy curves of sleek formica. On its own terms, the Waffle Shop is a Mona Lisa that's gone missing.

This talk of art and masterpieces isn't hyperbole. For at least a century, art museums everywhere have preserved great examples of everyday design. The venerable Philadelphia Museum of Art devotes space to a classic Japanese teahouse. The great Metropolitan Museum in New York preserves the 1820s facade of a bank branch from Wall Street, along with 25 period interiors from archetypally American buildings.

Washingtonians get to see a similar historic treasure, but with its context left intact. Visiting the diner at 522 10th St. NW is like visiting a Renaissance altarpiece still standing in its church.

The Waffle Shop continues to speak of the design ideals that reigned when it was made. Its high plate-glass facade dissolves the gulf between outside and inside, public and private, civic and commercial, at just the time that American ideas on markets and marketing were gaining traction all around the world. The Waffle Shop didn't want to be a place apart or refuge from what went on outside; it proclaimed its place in the urban thick of things.

Its lavish steel-and-neon sign (now sadly left unlit) helps with this trumpeting effect. In classic modern style, the sign doesn't add the serifs and flourishes that had made earlier calligraphy stand out. It gets all its decorative force by working on its letters' fundamental, necessary forms. The sign pretends to be a "machine for selling," with forms reduced to the minimum it takes to do its job -- which, of course, is what gives it such a stylish, period edge.

For the Waffle Shop, selling in the public square is good, honest, American work. Soon after the diner opened in 1950 eminent Washington photographer Theodor Horydczak, who took some of the classic shots of the White House and Washington Monument, was commissioned to document its glories in a lavish suite of pictures now at the Library of Congress. He even shot the cutting-edge air conditioners on the roof: With all that glass, AC would have been both necessary and a major selling point. The same year the restaurant opened, a study pushing the new technology claimed that "families living in air conditioned homes sleep longer in summer, enjoy their food more, and have more leisure time."

Even the diner's steeply raked ceiling helps the place embrace the world outside. It starts at the top of the double-height front windows, then runs down to just above head height at the restaurant's rear wall. The ceiling's slope turns the whole diner into a kind of band shell, Hollywood Bowl-style, with passersby as spectators of the latest, modern way to eat your lunch.

The line of horseshoe counters speaks of similarly neighborly ideas. In the Waffle Shop, there are no tables where you sit secluded with the people you came in with. You find a place at the counter alongside patrons who would have got there first, and you're ushered into close camaraderie with them. To this day, the Waffle Shop's layout generates more buzz and energy inside than the most crowded McDonald's.

This crucial social dimension to the Waffle Shop gives it still more in common with important art. The Waffle Shop's mosaic waves evoke Picasso's 1930s curves; the skew grid of its terrazzo floors speaks of a Mondrian crisscross; the red and chrome of its stools descend from Russian constructivism. Yet the diner's not a freestanding exercise in modern forms. Like all good art, it speaks of and with the world around it.

The diner's crowd of regulars doesn't come because of any special food they're served -- regulation breakfast-joint fare. (The waffles -- still cooked, it's said, in the same line of 56-year-old electric irons -- are a relative standout.)

And not too many patrons seem to notice the old-time decor, though they like it when it's pointed out to them.

It's the atmosphere that really seems to be the draw for all the office workers, cops and construction workers who start arriving as the place opens at 5:30 a.m.

Rosa Reyes, a compact Latina who dresses up to come to work -- she moonlights doing hair -- has waitressed at the Waffle Shop for 12 years. She speaks of patrons who come by cab from Virginia and Maryland, and of one customer "who said he was in his mother's stomach the first time he came -- and now he's 40-something."

Though a D.C. native, Sgt. Andre L. Wright has been coming to the Waffle Shop only since 1994, when he started with the Metropolitan Police. Since then he's been breakfasting there about three times a week. He says he and his colleagues -- the place is often crawling with cops -- treat it "like a substation," a peaceful outpost in Northwest of their Seventh District headquarters in far Southeast. Wright explains that regulars sit at the same horseshoe of counter space each visit, to be near the waitress of their choice. Each server reigns in the center of her particular formica U. "Rosa knows what I want," Wright says, so like most longtime Waffle Shoppers he doesn't bother ordering: Within minutes of sitting down, his hot tea, cold water, bacon, waffle and scrambled eggs with cheese appear in front of him.

It's an old Waffle Shop tradition. Visit Francis Harless in her two-room apartment at 16th and Q, and the tiny 82-year-old volunteers that "the colored guy who was killed over on Capitol Hill used to order two eggs, over, with a rib-eye steak and home fries." The former waitress, who left the diner in 1995, is a little vague on which murder she's talking about, or when it took place -- but that order she still knows for sure. She boasts that she served Mayor Washington and Mayor Barry, too: "He ordered two eggs, over, bacon and home fries. I said, 'You look like Marion Barry,' and he said 'That's 'cause I am.' " When the riots happened in 1968, three years after she started working at the Waffle Shop, Harless says, the restaurant was left untouched. Out on the street, a roving gang accosted her and her boyfriend Ed -- another white employee of the Waffle Shop -- and things started to look bad: "But they said, 'She works for the Waffle Shop,' and left me alone."

Racial mix and harmony now define the restaurant. (The diner was launched, however, in the days when all of Washington was segregated. Plato Cacheris, a prominent Washington lawyer, is the son of a Greek immigrant who once co-owned the Waffle Shop chain, which used to span the city. He speaks of teenage years spent making doughnuts for an all-white clientele in the Adams Morgan branch. His brother James, now a senior judge with the U.S. District Court in Virginia, also recalls working there.)

On the morning before Thanksgiving this year, the 10th Street diner was packed, and pretty much reflected the city's demographics. About two-thirds of the patrons were black, but one corner -- the northwest one, as it happened -- hosted a group of white bureaucrats. Up front, there was also a young Asian office worker with spiky black hair and a few Latino clients.

Sandria Coombs was there as well, dressed in the brightest of bright colors and a denim hat plastered with cheery printed buttons. She's a 61-year-old black churchwoman who has been coming to the Waffle Shop four or five times a week since 1971. "Every day I come up this street, I say, 'Lord, let them be open still.' " If the diner closes, she adds, "I'll probably cry for I don't know how many days. I don't know where I'll go."

It looks likely that Coombs will be crying soon. The diner looks set to be "redeveloped" out of existence, going the way of its former, much-loved neighbors, Whitlow's Restaurant and the original Reeves bakery.

The Waffle Shop's block, recently purchased by developer Douglas Jemal, is slated to become an office complex. Though the District's Historic Preservation Review Board has unanimously ruled that Jemal's plans should include "the salvage of significant features of the old Waffle Shop" -- some of the facade or signage maybe transplanted inside -- it's very unlikely that the business itself, or even any of the building behind the current facade, will survive intact. (The National Park Service recently decided that buildings dating from as late as 1962 could count as historically "significant" to the Pennsylvania Avenue National Historic Site, which protects this block of 10th Street. The review board's staff report argued, however, that the diner isn't old enough to deserve more substantial protection as one of the site's "contributing buildings" -- which, of course, means that it may never get the chance to grow old enough to be more fully preserved later on.)

Hai Ngo, a Vietnamese immigrant who has owned and run the diner for the past 19 years, says his lease expires next year. He is still waiting to hear whether he will be allowed to continue serving customers.

In a three-minute interview, Jemal would only say that he has "no idea" of his upcoming plans, and would not discuss the Waffle Shop's virtues or its place in the downtown mix.

Jemal is known as a hard-nosed developer, but one who also cares about the city's older buildings. "I've never had a client like him -- who will bend over backward to save something that he likes, and thinks is significant," said Shalom Baranes, Jemal's architect for the 10th Street office building, and he can cite plenty of examples to prove it. But he also acknowledges that preserving the whole diner "would probably kill the project."

If only a few fragments of the diner survive, it will be a loss to every Washingtonian. The current diner is a rare vestige of the heyday of waffles -- and Moderne design --in the District. Its last Washington sibling, with the same signage and a similar though much more modest interior, was torn down on Park Road just last year. (If only its stools had been salvaged, they could have been used to replace identical ones that sit broken on 10th Street.) One other Waffle Shop, a latecomer to the chain, remains in Alexandria.

Sally Berk is a local architectural historian and ardent activist for urban preservation. She'd love to see the Waffle Shop live on, both as an artifact and as an eatery. She hopes that Jemal will at least consider a full, working restoration. "What's wrong with a man who has got so much out of the city giving something back to the people of the city? So why not a waffle shop?" she says. "He could come out looking like a good guy."

Though the restaurant has been allowed to go a bit to seed -- there's dirt everywhere, the ceiling is a mess, and the facade's original plate glass is patched and seamed -- its great bones survive unchanged. With not much more than a splash of paint, some elbow grease and a modestly tweaked menu, one of the city's more artistic restaurateurs could restore the Waffle Shop to its former glory.

Other than Jemal's goodwill, however, only community action to have the diner named a historic landmark is likely to save the place. A landmark designation is a long shot, says David Maloney, a preservation officer for the District, noting that it could get in the way of the city's eagerness to have the whole run-down block redeveloped. "But if people feel very strongly about it, it's not too late."

As a Washington native, Berk remembers the glinting coffee shop as an icon of the thriving downtown of her childhood. It was at the heart of a neighborhood that bulged with big department stores as well as mom-and-pop retail and restaurants, with a man dressed as Mr. Peanut walking its buzzing streets.

"If the Waffle Shop is renovated in toto," Berk said, "I volunteer to walk around downtown dressed as Mrs. Peanut."