On a grey and overcast October afternoon, I stopped by at the remains of the Club Cafe in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. I didn’t take much notice of the guy with a tape measure wandering around, but I decided not to clamber through the window opening and have a last walk round the skeleton of the building. Sometimes you meet people as intrigued by a building as you and sometimes you skulk past them, eyes not meeting, knowing they don’t see what you see.

The Club Café opened in 1935, five years after the Santa Rosa stretch of Route 66 was completed; its blue-tiled frontage and smiling ‘Fat Man’ logo, a happy gent wearing a polka dot tie and looking delighted after, presumably, dining on the Club Café’s home cooking, became well-known to thousands of travellers on Route 66.

But, by the time I-40 bypassed the New Mexico town, people didn’t want home cooking. They wanted a quick stop at one of the generic fast food places just off the interstate. The Fat Man looked dated in the face of the ubiquitous clown and southern gentleman. In 1992, the Club Café closed its doors forever. It was bought by Joseph and Christiana Campos who planned to reopen it, but the building had suffered too much

over the years. They couldn’t save the Club Café, but they got permission to use the Fat Man logo at their restaurant, Joseph’s Bar and Grill, down the road.

On the low retaining wall in the parking lot were painted signs from a happier time, commemorating ratings in the Mobil Travel Guide as well as Chef Ron Chavez, who owned the restaurants for over twenty years. He’d been a cook here in the 1950s and then bought the café in the 1970s. Moving to Taos, he wrote poetry until his death last October, never seeing the final demise of the café he loved. The Club Café’s sign still stands (others were taken down and left on the site – they are now gone) for now, although its fate seems uncertain. The guy with the tape measure gave it a cursory glance and moved on.

The Club Café has always been there every time I’ve passed through Santa Rosa. I thought it always would be. But, for once, I stopped and took a few photos. Had I known that the bulldozers would be moving in the next morning, I would have run the camera red hot. I guess these may be some of the last photos ever taken of the Club Cafe.