The "Flying Saucer" or "Space" House: Signal Mountain, Tennessee

This popular Chattanooga area landmark, known by locals as the “Space House,” was built in the early 1970s for $250,000 (in 1970s dollars) by Curtis W. King, who joked, “as a bachelor pad for my son.” The property later sold in 2007 for only $165,000 (in 2007 dollars), and again in two later auctions, for 135,000 in March 2008, and $119,000 in December 2008.  READ MORE

Joe’s Crab Shack Admits Its Beach-Kitsch Thing Isn’t Working in NYC

(Grub Street) - Maybe to atone for the city’s soft spot for Bubba Gump Shrimp, New Yorkers have shown themselves to be commendably resistant to Joe’s Crab Shack. One of city’s final two remaining locations, up in the Bronx, will close “in a few months,” the chain says, along with another that’s over in downtown Newark.

It’s fair to say Joe’s used to have high hopes for the New York–metropolitan–area market — 16 of its 128 locations are presently located in it. But according to today’s New York Post, the company admits its carefully crafted, witty image (the go-to spot to “take your top off” and maybe receivea casually racist place mat) isn’t scoring the requisite “urban appeal.” The confession comes just a few months after Joe’s also shuttered its location in Harlem — the city’s first to open, back in 2013. The only remaining location will be out in Elmhurst, Queens.

Robert Merritt, head of parent company Ignite Restaurant Group, says Joe’s will finally just accept its sad fate as a hokey souvenir store that also offers food. “It’s a vacation brand,” he told investors, adding, “Florida is a perfect market for us.” Read more.

Season Of The Kitsch: Tacky And Tiki Are Back, Again

(sfist.com) - In 2009, San Francisco's foremost Tiki bar looked about ready for a condo conversion. That was then, and this is now: Currently, the Tonga Room & Hurricane bar at the Fairmont Hotel expects its best year in decades, with Melissa Farrar, the hotel's director of marketing communications, telling the Chronicle that she projects the bar's 2016 revenue to be double what it was in 2011.

Opened in 1945, the Tonga Room surfed on the Polynesian pop wave. As kitsch connoisseurs know, the bar was conceived of by an MGM set designer in what was presumably a post World War II Pacific Theater fever dream. It hasn't changed much — except for an update to its drinks and a plug from Anthony Bourdain — since then. But like the intermittent indoor "rainstorms" over the bar's artificially blue lagoon, arriving like clockwork and then drying up, kitsch culture appears to have returned, right on schedule. Read more.

The weirdest house in N.J.? Take a tour of a $3.2M wonderland of kitsch

(nj.com) - The estate along Route 9 in Bass River will make you smile, gasp or freak out.

Atop a 800-foot-long ochre-colored wall, elephants march, sea serpents slither, dinosaurs menace, giraffes gawk. Army tanks rumble and WW2-vintage planes prepare to take off. A Roman soldier glowers from his mighty steed and a galleon majestically sails the seas. Two religious statues stand next to a Japanese anime robot. Behind them is the Statue of Liberty.

You ain't seen nothing yet. Read more.

1 World Trade Center Gains Popularity in the Pantheon of New York Kitsch

(New York Times) - You glance toward Lower Manhattan and expect to see a single tower where two once stood. You delight in the spectacle of sunlight glinting off its slivered facade.

Suddenly, you realize, the new 1 World Trade Center — the Freedom Tower — has become familiar. And 15 years after the twin towers disappeared abruptly from the skyline, they have begun to fade from popular consciousness.

They once nearly rivaled the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building as simple, graphic representations of the complex idea of New York. In movies and logotypes, on knickknacks and letterheads, two parallel strokes meant only one thing. Now, a shaft of slender, alternating isosceles triangles — so simple a child could draw it — is coming to mean the same thing. Read more.