By: Gregg Eshelman

Gregg Eshelman — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 06:21:01 +0000

There used to be a restaurant in the small town I live in. It was called The Beehive. The interior was all dark wood and paneling, with antique farm stuff all over the walls. Old photos, lots of cowboy hats. The place was almost always busy.
Then on January 1st, 1997 there was a flood. It went right through the restaurant (and several other buildings). It only reached about halfway up the walls so most of the antiques and other stuff wasn’t ruined.
But when The Beehive reopened all of that was *gone* and the interior was painted a stark white. Instead of repairing and restoring the exterior to the same style, the owners applied a hideous multi-colored fake flagstone siding. If they’d *painted* that it wouldn’t have been so bad.
The Beehive didn’t stay in business very much longer due to patrons staying away. In addition to wiping away all of the vintage ambiance accumulated over a few decades, they also changed and removed several popular menu items.
Cleaning, repairing, restoring, updating as needed, should have been the thing to do. Then put back all the decor that survived the flood and treat the space opened up by the destroyed items as opportunity to add newer old things. What would have been too new to go on the walls in the 70’s would’ve been perfect for it in the late 90’s and 2000’s.

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By: Gregg Eshelman