For 66 years, the sign inside Big State Drug proclaimed it Irving’s “most modern” soda fountain.
For a booming postwar suburb, Big State was also a grocery, a clothes shop, a burger grill and the center of lunchtime traditions that spanned decades.
And then came the 21st century. Big State became a failing pharmacy wrapped around Irving’s last soda fountain. In May, it became another shuttered storefront on the downtown strip.
As modernity has a way of catching up, the past has a way of bouncing back.
After a rescue effort that stretched from the Irving City Council to a Dallas biker icon, Big State reopened its doors as a ’50s-style fountain and grill on Monday — with a huge crowd and a wholesale embrace of its history.
