Cascade Lodge and Cabins in Saco, Maine (Postcard Series)

Still in business in 1963.

Last days of a Route 1 icon.  (Portland Press-Herald, 3/17/2010)

Excerpt:  The Cascades Family Restaurant served its final lobster dinner this past summer. Earlier this year, the kitchen equipment was sold off at auction and buyers have since carted away most of the Cascades cabins. 

In the next couple of months, what remains of the roadside resort, a diamond-shaped array of three dozen cabins surrounding a central lodge-style restaurant, will be flattened and hauled away. Developer Elliot Chamberlain said he expects to begin building a corporate office building in its place on the corner of routes 1 and 98 by fall. 

The demise of the Cascades, a Route 1 landmark for nearly 80 years, was entirely foreseeable, and perhaps inevitable, given the development pressures along this busy coastal highway. But many people who knew the seasonal restaurant in its heyday, when 100,000 lobsters were served there each summer and tables were set with real linen, say they cannot drive by the gutted building without the sense that a piece of local history is being lost.