I often eat my lunch in the McKinney café, by grand windows that look down on the brick beauty of the American Tobacco Campus. My favorite sight? A fading storefront with hand-painted lettering that reads, “Lunch ‘Downstairs’ Lunch,” and below this, “Home of the 15¢ lunch. All you can eat.”

I love this sign. To me it says, “we’ve got midday sustenance for ya’ right here. Only a dime and a nickel. Rub ‘em together and make a sandwich.” I think they should resurrect the 15¢ lunch today. For a little pocket change, you could get a shot glass of mac and cheese or a quarter-sized quarter-pounder.

I wanted to find out a little more about this place, maybe even see a picture or too. So I contacted Michael Goodmon, Vice President of Real Estate for the Capitol Broadcasting Company, which manages the ATC.

Here’s the rub: the restaurant never existed.

It was painted, he said, by Michael Brown, a muralist whose done work all over the Triangle.  I was crushed. To me, this was a forgery. Then I started thinking, all those factory workers had to eat lunch somewhere. I dug a little and, lo and behold, there was such a thing as a 15¢ lunch in the ATC.

"The Crowe Building used to house the American Tobacco cafeteria," says Eddie Belk of Belk Architecture. "It had no windows so workers wouldn't be tempted to linger after they ate.” And just what might they have eaten?

15¢ offerings would take us back to 1910 or so and didn’t include French Fries or a free prize. Just simple fare like beans, cold beef sandwiches, eggs, coffee, corn cakes and milk. Not fancy, but it, ahem, kept things rolling.

Postscript

In a strangely ironic twist, the Crowe Building now houses Saladelia, a popular take-away lunch spot with a coffee bar. The prices, sadly, are no longer 15¢.