Legendary popovers are only half the story

But nothing, not even the Glover, as everyone called it, lasts forever, and in fact the restaurant, so much a part of three towns on Boston’s North Shore, has been closed for a third of a century. Three years ago, the town of Swampscott condemned the building — it’s stood empty since the country was worrying about the skaters Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan — and declared it a “blighted or unsafe structure.” Now it’s only three months from demolition.

So why an op-ed column on the kind of dining landmark every town has and every town loses? Nashua, New Hampshire, lost the Green Ridge Turkey Farm, one of the favorite spots of my childhood and one of the few places on Earth that served turkey tetrazzini.

Pittsburgh lost Poli’s, which generations of Squirrel Hill diners entered by pulling door handles shaped like lobsters. Buffalo lost John’s Flaming Hearth, famous for its pumpkin ice cream pie. And New York’s Seventh Avenue lost the Stage Deli, where the waiters were salty and so was the corned beef. What’s the big deal?

Restaurants, even beloved ones, go out of business. Corky and Lenny’s restaurant closed in Woodmere, Ohio, four months ago — farewell to those overstuffed sandwiches, always accompanied by potato salad and pickles! — and no one wrote a nationally syndicated column about the vacated storefront on the strip mall on Chagrin Boulevard.

Here’s why the house in Swampscott is different: The General Glover House was General Glover’s house. General Glover, you ask? He was the fellow who repeatedly went to the rescue of George Washington’s raggedy Continental Army.

You may not know his name, but you’ve seen his image and likeness; have a look at Emanuel Leutze’s iconic painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware and there, amid the ice and the storm on Christmas night in the storied year of 1776, is General Glover.

“And then, through their own initiative, without orders, the Marbleheaders captured a crucial bridge at Trenton that sealed the fate of the battle as a decisive American victory,” the historian Patrick K. O’Donnell wrote in the latest issue of American Heritage magazine.

That publication transformed the fate of the historical landmark at 229 Salem Street into a national cause celebre rather than a merely local issue for historically minded North Shore residents, nostalgic diners and a developer with a 140-unit housing project (and presumably big profits) in mind.

“When I heard about the threat to the Glover House, I was shocked,” said Edwin Grosvenor, the editor of American Heritage magazine, who is in Swampscott this weekend to gin up interest in the house. “Glover was not just an important Revolutionary War general, he’s a great American hero. We owe him and his men a great deal — in fact, every one of us owes our freedom to Glover and the brave men who followed him. It would be appalling to tear down the house where he nursed his wounds, especially since it’s still intact almost 250 years later.”

The general’s farmhouse stands at a triangular junction where the boundaries of Swampscott, Marblehead and Salem actually converge. He bought 180 acres there in 1781; he wasn’t quite sure what community it was in, and in fact the town of Swampscott, though settled in 1629, wasn’t established as a separate entity until 1852.

He moved in a year later, and following the passage of a half-dozen more years, he was part of the Massachusetts state convention that ratified the Constitution. He died during John Adams’ presidency and was interred in the Old Burial Hill — gone but not forgotten, because on each Jan. 30, Glover’s Marblehead Regiment marks his passing with a modest ceremony.

The effort to preserve the farmhouse is being led by emerita Salem State University professor Nancy L. Schultz, who heads the Swampscott Historical Commission and who has provided much of the research behind the effort.

“On the eve of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, we need to renew our commitment to the values on which this country was founded,” Schultz said in an interview. “General Glover personified those principles.”

One of those principles — not expected in the 1770s — was a commitment to diversity. The Glover regiment included Native Americans and Blacks, the first integrated military force on the continent. “What Glover sought to achieve with his commitment to diversity was to exemplify the promise of America,” said Schultz. “This would redound in honor not only to him but the values of the Revolution he was engaged in.”

My classmates — and my parents and their friends, the habitues of the restaurant and the devourers of the popovers — of course knew none of this. They just knew they were in a comfortable setting, less hectic than Pier 4, which Anthony Athanas, the owner of the General Glover House, operated in Boston and which for a time was one of the country’s largest-grossing restaurants, maybe because it also offered popovers and marinated mushrooms.

“There was nothing like the popovers and mushrooms at Glover,” recalled Cindy Smith Walsh, who began work at the restaurant at age 16 and later taught art in New Hampshire. “We didn’t know anything about the history surrounding General Glover or the house. We only knew that the food was great. And one more thing: They fed us while we were working.”