Next week on Friday, at 2 p.m., Bobby Crowe will lock the doors for the last time on the meat-and-vegetable restaurant that has carried his and his wife’s names for more than three decades – Bobby and June’s.
The 14th Street restaurant thrived for years. People would line up for lunch in the homey business that would seat around 75 people at a time.
Not any more.
“We were doing over $700,000 a year until the bridge closed the street,” said Bobby Crowe.
The bridge was 14th Street crossing the Downtown Connector just before Interstates 75 and 85 split going north. With that link broken, many 14th Street businesses closed or moved.
The owner of the Silver Skillet, another popular lunch and breakfast spot on 14th Street, said when the bridge reopened in September 2009 his business had dropped 30 percent. Crowe's was down more than half.
“It kept a lot of people away,” the 79-year-old Crowe said from the front porch of his restaurant where he was greeting the Thursday lunch crowd. “I didn’t owe anybody a penny two years ago and now I owe $195,000 on the house I live in.”
Crowe secured a line of credit to supplement the restaurant’s income. He had 15 employees plus utilities and insurance had increased and was costing him almost $6,500 a month.
“That takes a lot of sausage and biscuits. It takes a lot of plates,” Crowe said of his expenses.
But the crowds didn’t return when the bridge reopened last September.
“That bridge down here killed me,” he continued. “I fought it and kept all my employees and did the best I could with what I had. I lost a lot of money since the bridge closed down. I kept hoping it [the business] would come back. The traffic on 14th Street didn’t come back like it was. Seventeenth [Street] gets all the traffic now.”
It was clear it was time to leave the business when he paid his taxes this month, Crowe said.
His wife of 44 years, June, has been ill for several years though she still does the restaurant's accounting. Crowe now comes to the business for only a few hours a day and that’s to meet lunch customers.
His two children, who work at with the business, will find something else to do, said Crowe, who started in the restaurant business when he was 13.
On Friday a “for sale” sign will go up.
“In the following week, I would like to have somebody come out here and buy this thing and work out a deal to keep it open,” Crowe said.
Either way, Crowe says he will retire to the North Georgia mountains.
"It’s the end of the line."