Retail History | Pizza Hut — The Brick Room That Left Kellogg and Bluff
· 1958-6
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Retail History | Pizza Hut — The Brick Room That Left Kellogg and Bluff
kevin
People treat Pizza Hut as a red-roof chain that was always a PepsiCo or Yum Brands brand on a highway ramp.
The first room was a small brick building at Kellogg and Bluff in Wichita.
On 15 June 1958, University of Wichita students Dan and Frank Carney opened that room after borrowing $600 from their mother.
A landlord on the corner had read a November 1957 Saturday Evening Post piece on the pizza fad and wanted a tenant in a vacant building she already owned.
The brothers mixed dough with help from family, friends, and classmates. Pizza was still a novelty on the southern Plains.
The name followed the sign, not a branding meeting.
A vendor-supplied board over the door had room for only a few letters after PIZZA. A family member said the building looked like a hut, and the eight- or nine-character limit closed the argument.
The first franchise opened in Topeka in 1959. By 1971 the chain claimed the lead in pizza-restaurant sales and outlets.
In 1977 stockholders approved a merger with PepsiCo for a reported $300 million in 1977 dollars. PepsiCo later spun the restaurants into Yum! Brands, the S&P 500 parent that still owns the name.
The brick building did not stay on Kellogg.
Highway work erased the original corner. The structure was moved onto the Wichita State campus and dedicated on 11 September 1986 as a reminder that two students had started here.
In 2017 the university moved it again, to the east side of campus near the Marcus Welcome Center at 3728 Perimeter Road. A small museum opened in the same 1958 shell.
The pin is that public museum, not the vanished intersection.
Stand on Perimeter Road and you are looking at the room, not a replica of the later red roof. The red roof came in the 1960s, after this building had already done its work.
Photo: Sanjay Acharya, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Photographed on the WSU campus, 25 December 2004.
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