The guy who owned this venerable restaurant once, in junior high school, saved my ass from a bully (I was pathetic: wore glasses. was poor. read a lot. couldn’t fight my way out of a paper bag.). I always appreciated that. A few years ago, he said the bully guy had died a decade ago. I was surprised that I didn’t have any reaction to that news. Time and wounds and all that stuff…
I took the reference picture for this drawing the day they tore this historic building down. That’s why you can see through the front door. The site is a parking lot now…for a church.
To be more precise about the date of the Homestead’s demise, I took the information from Jeff Fleming’s comment below and checked back to my journals from 1992. This, apparently, was my final drawing of this building (I apparently did two others. One I remember, the other I don’t). Unfortunately, I made no mention of when I actually took the picture, but it was before August, 1992.
Bob Lawrence's Kingsport 