Dairy Queen
DESCRIPTION OF HISTORIC PLACE
The Dairy Queen is a roadside ice cream outlet built as a one storey, compact building, including signage, and located on the southeast corner of Nelson Avenue at Kokanee Street in the Fairview neighbourhood of Nelson, B.C.
HERITAGE VALUE
The Dairy Queen site is important for its aesthetic values seen in its building design, and for its historical and cultural values related to the development of the modern city of Nelson.
The Dairy Queen site is important historically for its prime location in Fairview adjacent to the original toll booths for the Nelson West Arm bridge. The bridge was completed in 1957, just prior to the construction of the Dairy Queen, and replaced the old ferry service to Nelson’s North Shore. The Dairy Queen is an example of services and facilities that took advantage of the expansion of automobile use in Nelson, and the increased volume of traffic that occurred with the bridge construction and the city’s suburban growth to the north and east. The Dairy Queen is one of a number of modern buildings of the early 1960s, that changed the character of the city blocks leading up to the bridge.
The Dairy Queen building is highly valued in the community as a rare surviving example of the fastfood chain’s standard drive-in building design from the early 1960s. It is representative of simple, small franchise outlets that provided consistent imagery for each fast food industry brand across North America in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The Dairy Queen and its asphalt-paved site is important as a post-WWII extension of the suburban pattern of development of Nelson’s Fairview suburb, and as an indication of the city’s entry into a modern era seen in the development of automobile-oriented tourism, recreation, and daily life in the 1950s and afterwards.
The building is valued for its deployment of materials relatively new for their time: plate glass, concrete masonry units, tar-and-gravel shallow slope roofing, fluorescent lighting strips and large fluorescent-lit sign boxes.
From the City of Nelson Heritage Register, Page 22