Welcome to McDonald's Single Family Homes of Eastern Long Island
How a "Cape Cod" style of building keeps the local NIMBY activists at bay
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SOUTHOLD, N.Y.—In 1990, McDonald’s was locked in a battle over the construction of a store in Southold, a town on the North Fork of Long Island about a two hour drive from New York City. Protesters rallied with signs that said “Just Say McNo to McTraffic and McGarbage,” petitions were circulated, and there was even discussion of changing the town code just to keep the restaurant chain out of the area.
“People do not drive all the way out here to see McDonald's,” said the executive director of the North Fork Environmental Council. “If Route 25 turns into the kind of strip you see in western Suffolk and in Nassau County, people will stop coming here.” Burn.
Despite the vocal opposition, there were many more locals in support, especially if concessions were made. “When McDonald's came in, the community wanted it to blend with the other buildings, to resemble the Victorian-style one in Freeport, Maine, where you have to look for the golden arches in the little panes of the windows,” said Jim McMahon, Southold’s director of community development.
McDonald’s obliged. With a manicured recessed green that you could putt a golf ball on, and a Cape Cod architectural style building with a portico that rivals even the nicest homes in the area, the Southold restaurant went above and beyond to make sure the community would support the business. The location has now been open for over thirty years.
''It is a good example of how a business can be built and designed to look like the community,'' said town supervisor Jean Cochran.
Localizing the stores
McDonald’s may be famous for its standardization, but it localizes its stores all the time: sometimes it’s out of necessity, like an earth-colored building and turquoise arches to adhere to ordinances in Sedona, Arizona, or because they think it’ll attract more customers than the baseline store design, like adding a ski-up window to the store in Lindvallen, Sweden. For the most part, these are one-offs, as franchisees usually control just a handful of stores, spread across different communities with varying needs.
On Long Island, however, there’s Hunt Enterprises, owned by Peter Hunt and his daughter Katie Hunt Rotolo. Together, they control 27 McDonald’s locations, the most in the region, including the one in Southold.
There’s no shortage of stock design McDonald’s restaurants in the Hunt Enterprises portfolio, but the playbook from the Southold location is seen all over Eastern Long Island: keep an uppity community happy using a combination of large colonial grid windows, vinyl siding, shingled roofing, white picket fences, colonnades, and subtle signage. These are not existing buildings that are being retrofitted, but completely new structures designed specifically to placate the locals.
A representative for the fast food chain has called this a “Cape Cod” design “reminiscent of fishermen’s homes built in the 1800s”, but no McDonald’s restaurant on Cape Cod, and just two locations up the New England Coast all the way to Canada, has a similar build. This is a Long Island thing.
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Naturally, the Hamptons gave McDonald’s the most trouble. In 1999, the town of Southampton passed an anti-fast food law after the planning board already approved a restaurant on Montauk Highway in Hampton Bays. The chain filed suit and won, but the resulting restaurant is one of the most subtle in the entire McDonald’s system: the building itself, which resembles a single family home, contains no visible signage from the road and is hidden behind a grove of trees, identified from the sidewalk only by a wooden sign.
At least one other franchisee in the area seems to have gotten the memo: Bill Mohrmann, who controls four restaurants on Long Island, renovated his store in Moriches about a decade ago with a pared down version of the “Cape Cod” aesthetic. He didn’t return requests for comment, but it’s pretty clear that the need for this look is deployed on a town-by-town basis: another one of his stores just three miles up the road in Shirley was recently updated to the gray box design that’s now common around the country.
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How we got here
From the 1968 onward, the signature McDonald’s store design featured the double sloped “Mansard” roof, which was most iconically presented as cedar panels but by the 1980s had been painted virtually every color imaginable, most jarringly in the brand’s bright red, with yellow highlights to resemble french fries. Alongside the freestanding glowing golden arches signs that were designed to be seen by motorists from the highway, and you had a recipe for protest as McDonald’s tried to expand into quieter and more upscale areas.
One of the earliest documented skirmishes occurred in 1984, when residents in Freeport, Maine fought the arrival of the fast food chain. However, a survey of locals revealed that they were opposed to the look of a McDonald’s, not the business itself. The brand responded by buying Gore House, a merchant’s home dating back to the mid-19th century, and remodeled the interior to fit a restaurant. “What we are doing there is something we probably have never done before in terms of design and the amount of time and effort involved,’’ a spokesperson for the company said. “We are willing to spend the money to make it compatible with the area, the history, the community and the people who live there.”
Two years later, McDonald’s purchased a dilapidated former restaurant in New Hyde Park, NY for $1 million and planned to demolish it to make way for one of their Mansards, but local residents responded by forming The Committee to Save the Denton Estate and rushed the building through the landmark process. Eventually, the fast food chain was forced to either give up their plans or renovate and preserve the building. McDonald’s went with the latter, and today it is one of their most popular locations on listicles and whatnot.
Learning from these two instances, the residents of Southold angled for a store design that looked like a New England beachfront single family home, and got it. The McDonald’s restaurants of Eastern Long Island have never been the same since.