Dining Under the Dome

The Dome Motor Inn was THE place to stay when traveling to Kamloops in mid-20th century Canada. A couple hundred miles northeast of Vancouver, British Columbia, Kamloops was home to the popular inn, which boasted a dome-covered restaurant that itself became a tourist destination. Red and lime-green vinyl seats surrounded wood tables that were arranged beneath an outdoor glass dome offering warmth and spectacular views of the sunny ski town.

In the late 1970s, Brooklyn, NY-based photographer Irving I. Herzberg traveled to Kamloops, where he took the above photograph of diners at the Dome Motor Inn restaurant. Seated at the table nearest Herzberg's lens are five middle-aged women, coiffed, and in the case of one, wearing a double string of pearls. Two of the women, wearing short-sleeved green shirts, appear to be twins. Herzberg's vivid capture of these diners at the famed restaurant is the Photo of the Week. It is among the many to be added to the growing Irving I. Herzberg photograph collection.

Born in Germany, Herzberg immigrated to the United States in 1935 and settled in Brooklyn, NY. In Brooklyn, he founded the Trump Village Camera Club in Coney Island, where he took many of his photographs. Beyond everyday life in Brooklyn, Herzberg documented people and places in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Pacific Northwest, and Canada, including Kamloops, British Columbia. His work, which spans from 1945 to his death in 1991, consists of over 2,000 photographic prints, negatives, and slides. Herzberg's photography is part of the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History. 

Digitization of these slides from the Irving I. Herzberg photograph collection was made possible through generous funding from the David Berg Foundation.

Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal at Brooklyn Public Library. We look forward to inviting you to CBH in the future to research in our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. In the meantime, please visit our resources page to search our collections. Questions? Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at [email protected].