Howard Johnson by Wyndham, still commonly referred to as Howard Johnson's, is an American hotel brand with roughly 300 hotels in 15 countries. It was also formerly a restaurant chain, which at one time was the largest in the U.S., with more than 1,000 locations. Since 2006, all hotels and company trademarks, including those of the defunct restaurant chain, have been owned by Wyndham Hotels and Resorts.
Howard Johnson's restaurants originally started as a single location opened by Howard Deering Johnson in 1925 and grew into a substantial restaurant chain in the decades that followed. By the 1950s, the company expanded operations by opening hotels, then known as Howard Johnson's Motor Lodges, which were often located next to restaurants. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, it had become the largest restaurant chain in the U.S., with its combined company-owned and franchised outlets. Howard Johnson's served more meals outside the home during the 1960s than any other company or organization except for the United States Army.
Howard Johnson's restaurants were franchised separately from the hotel brand beginning in 1986 but, in the years that followed, severely dwindled in number until eventually disappearing altogether. The last restaurant, in Lake George, New York, closed in 2022. The line of branded supermarket frozen foods, as well as its famous ice cream, are no longer manufactured.
Paul Freedman wrote that "Howard Johnson's influence is most apparent in two innovations: its pioneering use of franchising and its adaptation to the American highway." He explained that fast food chains "trimmed and improved on Howard Johnson's highway restaurant model by specializing in one or two items and putting into effect a system that allowed patrons to get their food quickly and eat it in a minimally decorated restaurant environment, or even in their cars." Another major Howard Johnson's innovation was sending out frozen foods to branches from regional commissaries, a system which reduced cost, assured uniformity, and was later utilized further by fast food chains.
History Early years In 1925, Howard Deering Johnson borrowed $2,000 to buy and operate a small corner pharmacy in Wollaston, a neighborhood in Quincy, Massachusetts. Johnson was surprised to find it easy to repay the loan after discovering his recently installed soda fountain had become the busiest part of his drugstore. He doubled the amount of butterfat content in his ice cream compared to what was on the market, and this recipe made it creamier. A 1940 Fortune article noted that Johnson's ice cream had a butterfat content of 18 or 19 percent while the law in most states required at least 10 percent.Sammarco, Chapter 4: The Father of the Franchise Industry and the "Tendersweet" Clam Some sources said the recipe was based on his mother's homemade ice creams and desserts, while other sources said that it was from German American immigrant William Hallbauer, who owned an ice cream shop in Nahant, Massachusetts. Sammarco, Chapter 2: Quincy in the Age of Howard Johnson Johnson developed 28 flavors of ice cream using syrup flavoring. Quoting Johnson, "I thought I had every flavor in the world. That '28' [flavors] became my trademark."
Throughout the summers of the late 1920s, Johnson opened beachfront concession stands along the coast of Massachusetts. They sold soft drinks, hot dogs, and ice cream. The first stand, opened in 1926, had done more ice cream business by the end of the summer than the pharmacy had done in two years. With a loan from Granite Trust Bank, the first Howard Johnson's restaurant opened in June 1929 in Quincy. They served traditional New England foods, such as roast turkey, steaks and chops, chicken pot pies, baked macaroni and cheese, baked beans, and his 28 flavors of ice cream.
The first Howard Johnson's restaurant received a tremendous boost in 1929, owing to an unusual set of circumstances: Malcolm Nichols, the mayor of nearby Boston, banned the production of Eugene O'Neill's play, Strange Interlude in Boston. Rather than fight the mayor, the Theatre Guild moved the production to the Wollaston Theatre in Quincy. The five-hour play was presented in two parts with a dinner break. The first Howard Johnson's restaurant was near the theater, and hundreds of influential Bostonians flocked to the restaurant. Through word of mouth, more Americans became familiar with the Howard Johnson Company.
The 1930s and 1940s
Johnson wanted to expand his company, but the stock market crash of 1929 prevented this. After waiting a few years and maintaining his business, Johnson persuaded an acquaintance in 1935 to open a second Howard Johnson's restaurant in Orleans, Massachusetts. The second restaurant was franchised and not company-owned. This was one of America's first franchising agreements.
By the end of 1936, there were 39 more franchised restaurants, creating a total of 41 Howard Johnson's restaurants. By 1939, there were 107 Howard Johnson's restaurants along American East Coast highways, generating revenues of $10.5 million. In less than 14 years, Johnson directed a franchise network of over 10,000 employees with 170 restaurants, many serving 1.5 million people a year. In the 1930s, Howard Deering Johnson bought the Red Coach Grill in Wayland, Massachusetts, and used it as the model for a more upscale steakhouse restaurant chain called Red Coach Grill.While they had some success, they were not sufficiently profitable.
Johnson’s success gave him the added opportunity to capitalize on getting his name around. When wealthy socialite Dorothy May Kinnicutt Parish (known as Sister Parish) began her decorating business in the 1930s, Johnson hired her to decorate the restaurant he built in Somerville, New Jersey. She told a reporter from The New York Times, “I dressed the waitresses in aqua, did the walls in aqua, I made the placemats in aqua. I guess I must have thought it was quite chic, but I haven’t done a thing in aqua since.” (quoted in A History of Howard Johnson’s by Anthony Mitchell Sammarco).
The unique icons of orange roofs, cupolas, and weather vanes on Howard Johnson properties helped patrons identify the chain's restaurants and motels. The restaurant's trademark Simple Simon and the Pieman logo was created by artist John Alcott in the 1930s while the fiberglass signs were sculptured by Charles Pizzano.
There were 200 Howard Johnson's restaurants when America entered World War II.
By 1944, only 12 Howard Johnson's restaurants remained in business. The effects of war rationing crippled the company. Johnson managed to maintain his business by serving commissary food to war workers and U.S. Army recruits. When the Pennsylvania Turnpike (1940), and later the Ohio Turnpike, New Jersey Turnpike and Connecticut Turnpike were built, Johnson bid for and won exclusive rights to serve drivers at service station turnoffs through the turnpike systems.
In the process of recovering from these losses, in 1947 the Howard Johnson Company began construction of 200 new restaurants throughout the American Southeast and Midwest. By 1951, the sales of the Howard Johnson Company totaled $115 million.
Entering the hotel business
By 1954, there were 400 Howard Johnson's restaurants in 32 states, about 10% of which were extremely profitable company-owned turnpike restaurants; the rest were franchises. This was one of the first nationwide restaurant chains.
While many places sold "fried clams", they were whole, which was not universally accepted by the American dining public. Howard Johnson popularized Soffron Brothers Clam Company's fried clam strips, the "foot" of hard-shelled sea clams. They became popular to eat in this fashion throughout the country.
In 1954, the company opened the first Howard Johnson's motor lodge in Savannah, Georgia. The company employed architects Rufus Nims and Karl Koch to oversee the design of the rooms and gate lodge. Nims had previously worked with the company, designing restaurants. The restaurant's trademark Simple Simon and the Pieman was now joined by a lamplighter character in the firm's marketing of its motels. According to cultural historians, the chain became synonymous with travel among American motorists and vacationers in part because of Johnson's ubiquitous outdoor advertising displays.
In 1959, Howard Deering Johnson, who had founded and managed the company since 1925, turned control over to his son, then 26-year-old Howard Brennan Johnson. The elder Johnson observed his son's running of the company until his death in 1972 at the age of 75.
Howard Johnson Company went public in 1961; there were 605 restaurants, 265 company-owned and 340 franchised, as well as 88 franchised Howard Johnson's motor lodges in 32 states and The Bahamas.
In 1961, Johnson hired New York chefs Pierre Franey and Jacques Pépin to oversee food development at the company's main commissary in Brockton, Massachusetts. Franey and Pépin developed recipes for the company's signature dishes that could be flash frozen and delivered across the country, guaranteeing a consistent product.
Civil rights While the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1954 struck down segregation in public schools, the segregation, and maintenance of whites-only public facilities continued in other domains, including the Howard Johnson chain. Segregation in Howard Johnson's restaurants provoked an international crisis in 1957, when a Howard Johnson eatery in Dover, Delaware, refused service to Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, the finance minister of Ghana, prompting a public apology from President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, was instrumental in organizing protests and sit-ins at Howard Johnson locations in multiple states.
The city of Durham, North Carolina, became notable as a focus for action against segregated restaurants and hotels, including Howard Johnson's. On 12 August 1962, attorney and civil rights activist Floyd McKissick initiated the first of multiple rallies and demonstrations against segregated establishments in Durham, including the Howard Johnson's restaurant on Chapel Hill Boulevard, culminating in multiple protests on 18–20 May 1963 resulting in mass arrests as well as an eventual rapprochement with the city government. Future senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, while a student at the University of Chicago in 1962, helped organize picketing of a Howard Johnson's location in Cicero, Illinois, during his time as a student activist for CORE.
By 7 December 1962, the Howard Johnson Company issued a statement to the press opposing racial segregation in its restaurants, citing its corporate policy against discrimination: "Where it has been possible to change the operation of our company-operated restaurants in the South to conform to our national policy of service without discrimination, this has been done." The letter, written in conjunction with CORE and the NAACP, praised the organizations and aligned company policy with their outlook that segregation was "not defensible."