Garry Klein has bought ice cream in a lot of places, but until a recent muggy Tuesday evening, he had never taken a picture of a soft serve stand.
There he was, posing his college friends and their families in front of The Cone, a West Chester landmark.
The Cone is a 30-foot high fiberglass building molded and painted to look like a golden-brown sugar cone topped by a swirl of vanilla ice cream. The twist spirals elegantly above the strip malls and gas stations near Tylersville and Cincinnati-Dayton roads.
"This building is a piece of Americana," Mr. Klein, 38, said later as he worked on a large chocolate-vanilla swirl cone ($1.59). Sitting beside the building at a table, he ate furiously to prevent meltdown in the 90-degree heat.
"Everything (lick) just tastes better at a place like this," he said. "But the thing (bite) is (napkin to right corner of mouth) they've all but disappeared."
The appeal of The Cone lies in its novelty. In West Chester - and the Tristate - there's nothing quite like it. In two years, The Cone has become a summer hot spot in southern Butler County.
And while proprietor Kenneth Wren insists his soft serve is a cut above the competition, he concedes the building has a lot to do with his booming business.
"Coming here's like stepping back in time," said customer Bill Johnson, 39, of West Chester, one of Mr. Klein's friends and Wright State University classmates. "Everything else around here is boring."
Another West Chester resident, John Barlow, reached down to wipe off the melted raspberry-vanilla swirl that covered his 2-year-old daughter's face from nose to chin.
"It's all subdivisions and franchises out here," he said. His wife, Ann, and children, Jacob, 4, and Katherine are regular customers. "The Cone is a break from that."
Many residents of Butler County's fast-growing Union Township like the building.
"It has a lot of appeal," Joel Benzing, 32, said. "Once you see it, you have to come in."
His wife, Laura, 34, is a North Carolina native. They moved from Raleigh 18 months ago.
"It reminds me of one of the sleepy places down South when I was a kid," she said.
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If you go
Where: 6855 Tylersville Road, West Chester.
Hours: 11 a.m.-11 p.m., Monday through Saturday and 12:30-11 p.m. Sunday through November.
Owners: Kenneth Wren family.
Specialties of the house: Orange-and-vanilla swirl cone; the "zebra" (vanilla and chocolate swirl); and soft-serve ice cream that is free of fat, sugar and cholesterol.
Information: 779-7040.
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The Cone stop was the Benzings' first with their 1950s-sized family - Benjamin, 4; Samuel, 3; Jacob, 1; and Joseph, 6 weeks.
"Whenever we drove by, once the kids saw the building, they wanted to stop," Mrs. Benzing said.
But while The Cone's design gets rave reviews from customers, it's not without controversy. Owners had to fight for zoning approval.
A loophole in Union Township's zoning laws allowed Mr. Wren to build The Cone, he said. The Pisgah businessman and former owner of the K&W (now BB Creamy Whip) in Lockland purchased the building from a bankrupt Florida franchise while vacationing there in 1993. He tried to put the building up in front of his self-storage - packaging business in 1994.
Mr. Wren had shipped the nine, 1,000-pound pieces from Florida, but they sat - unassembled - in the parking lot for a year.
Design was the problem. The Cone was considered 100 percent sign, but an unwritten rule said a sign could be only 8 percent of the size of the building front. Because the rule was unwritten, zoning officials finally let him build, Mr. Wren said.
So workers bolted the pieces together, and a crane lifted the ice cream piece atop the cone base. A small air-conditioned dining room - which looks more like an oil change-lube shop, was built alongside. "Nobody eats inside, except us, even when it's blazing hot," Mr. Wren said. "They want to sit outside."
Yes, business is brisk. Even a small slice of Americana pie is enough to satisfy nostalgia-starved suburbanites. The Cone's customers are not the only ones hungry for buildings that some historic preservationists now consider delicacies.
Gary Klien of Corpus Christi, Texas, snaps a photo of family and friends.
(Michael Snyder photo)
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In the 1950s and '60s, however, they were widely looked upon as junk food. Older structures similar to The Cone - some not even 40 years old - are the subjects of preservation debates nationwide. The question: Do buildings of historic cultural importance - gas stations and some of the earliest McDonald's restaurants, for example - belong on the National Register of Historic Places alongside classical monuments such as Cincinnati's Union Terminal and Netherland Plaza?
"The issue is aesthetic preferences," said Robert Bruegmann, an architectural historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "The 1950s Main Street used to embody everything that was fine and good. And places like The Cone were the antithesis and represented the strip mall."
The Highway Beautification Act (1965), a shift in national architectural tastes and strict local zoning ordinances doomed thousands of these buildings.
"But all symbols are forever churning in meaning," Mr. Bruegmann said. "What becomes too common (the uniformly flat strip mall) is not desired. As they've grown increasingly rare, buildings like The Cone are more popular."
The Cone is popular with visitors and employees alike. The curved interior serving area is referred to as "the tugboat."
The space inside the ice cream lid is empty, except for a few air conditioning ducts. It's too hot - about 120 on a 90-degree day - to use. A pair of flood lights hitting the ice cream from the outside make the building even more striking at night.
The twilight scene caught the attention of the camera-toting Mr. Klein. The Dayton, Ohio, native who now lives in Corpus Christi, Texas, positioned his friends in front of The Cone for a night-time shot. Almost an hour had passed since his first photo.
"All the way on the drive from Texas I was looking for places like this."
BY MARK CURNUTTE
