This old-fashioned Chinese restaurant on U.S. 50 in Falls Church, Virginia, appears to be out of business, and suffered poor reviews for years. It's a time capsule of an American, and Chinese-American, cultural moment. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/the-sun-sets…
Along with a mediocre takeout-style buffet, Harvest Moon was a cavernous banquet and event hall, commonly used for large weddings. Here’s the view through the entrance. The names of whichever couple was last to hold their wedding here are, for now, preserved by abandonment. 
A place like this is a nonrenewable cultural resource. A restaurant is a business, but it’s almost like an organism too, a living repository, a little compendium of folkways unique to the era in which it was started and the people who started it.
Except in a self-conscious and cheeky way, where nostalgia is the explicit theme, nobody is ever going to open a restaurant quite this again, with its combination of décor and menu, its plain fare that was once unusual, and its formal service and table settings.
So when there's a fully preserved commercial entity like this along a churning, ever-changing commercial strip, it feels almost like a museum. It's cool. But it's sad, in a way. It almost reminds me of the last individual of an endangered species. Alive, but already extinct.
I know this sounds dramatic, but I think a lot of people feel this way, even if they can't put it into words, even if it sits below consciousness. In fact, I think a fair amount of NIMBYism is something like this, searching for an expression.
I find that I appreciate these things more when I understand that they’re impermanent - that a business or a cultural era is a dynamic thing and not an object you can encase in amber. It's similar to my idea of having funerals for buildings.
.@katherinewzhao @chineseeateries you might enjoy this article I wrote
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