Category Archives: Minnesota

Cottage View sign finds a new home

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Maybe this isn’t a full-fledged happy ending, since the drive-in is still going to be replaced by a Walmart, but the Cottage View of Cottage Grove MN will at least be able to preserve its signature marquee sign.

According to a story in the Twin Cities Pioneer Press, the Cottage View’s sign, along with its screen and film projector, will take up residence at the Little Log House Pioneer Village of Hastings. The sign is expected to be moved within a month.

That sign will need extensive repairs, said Cottage Grove city administrator Ryan Schroeder. “It has not had work done on it for some time. You can see right through it in some places, with the rust holes,” Schroeder said.

The former owner, Gerry Herringer, speculated that the Pioneer Village might use the screen and projection equipment to show movies at least occasionally. “He is saving iconic relics that would have been trashed,” Herringer added. “I am more than happy to give him everything.”

The Pioneer Press article has a lot more about the history of the Cottage View, and even a close-up file photo, so go read it!

What will happen to Cottage View’s sign?

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As mentioned earlier, there was a flurry of media activity when the Cottage View Drive-In (Cottage Grove MN) closed last fall, making way for a Walmart. A recent Minneapolis StarTribune story discusses the efforts underway to preserve its iconic sign, somewhere, somehow.

One thing seems to be sure – the sign won’t stay there. The site’s owner has offered the sign to the city, which is looking into options for preserving it. Cottage Grove mayor Myron Bailey said that he would like to see the sign included in the new development, but hasn’t had any formal talks yet.

“We would encourage the city to keep the sign as close to the original location as possible,” said Erin Hanafin Berg, field representative for the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota. Part of its historical significance is the context of its surroundings.

Personally, I hope they keep it like the Boulder CO Holiday drive-in sign, which stayed in place even as a housing development sprouted on its land. Worse would be like the Cinderella in Englewood CO; the condo development that replaced it changed the sign to promote the development. But anyway, go read the StarTribune story, which has more details and quotes about the Cottage View sign and who’s interested in it.

Did DI owners speculate on land? Not all of them

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A few weeks ago when the Cottage Grove DI closed, I included a link to a Minnesota Public Radio interview with a local drive-in historian. If you listened to the interview, you learned that one of this guy’s main points was that the wave of drive-in popularity was really a wave of land speculation. According to him, sharp real estate guys guessed that big tracts of suburban land would be valuable within a decade or two, so they built drive-ins to occupy those spaces to get a trickle of income while they waited for Walmart to be invented.

That’s a really interesting theory that I hadn’t sufficiently considered before hearing it. In retrospect, I’m sure a certain percentage of drive-in landowners had this in mind. (Note that the owner of the land was sometimes different than the operator of the drive-in.) But what was that percentage? Were the majority of late-50s drive-ins on speculators’ land? Or was it just a small fraction? I suspect that quantifying the motives of landowners half a century ago will always be an impossible task.

What got me thinking about this was the quiet announcement halfway down a page in The Daily Record (Baltimore MD) that someone is building a townhouse development on the site of the old North Point DI site in Dundalk MD. As you can see by the Google satellite image above, taken in 2012, nothing of consequence has been done to this site since the drive-in closed. According to the Daily Record story, “(t)he last picture show there was in 1982.”

I’ll grant you that among the thousands of drive-ins that proliferated in the 1950s and 60s, at least some of them were built because of land speculation. But I don’t think that paying property taxes on idle land for 30 years was part of that plan. The North Point is just the most recent example that shows that if speculation was the goal, some of these drive-in landowners didn’t do a very good job of it.