Between 1980 and the early 1990s, Wendy's bolted a glass room onto roughly 700 of its restaurants. Hanging ferns, wood trim, too hot in July and too cold in January. Starting in 2012 the company began tearing them off during remodels. Nobody kept a list of the ones that survived, until now.
Denny Lynch, then Wendy's VP of communications, explained the logic to the New York Times in 1985: a lit, visibly-occupied dining room is its own billboard. People who want to eat want to see other people eating. The solarium added roughly ten tables, let franchisees hang plants to match the Victorian-ish branding, and doubled as legal nighttime illumination that sidestepped local outdoor-lighting codes.
Permit applications from 1985 put the build cost at $38,000–$42,000 a room. They were also, in the words of architect Ray Caliendo, an energy problem — built before modern efficiency codes, brutal to cool in summer and cold in winter. Wendy's "Image Activation" remodel program, beginning around 2011–2012, is what finished them off.
This is the whole methodology. It takes about two minutes per restaurant and anyone can do it.
If you have one near you, the registry wants four things: the full street address, whether the sunroom is intact or a shell, the date you last laid eyes on it, and a photo or Street View link. Guesses and "I think there's one somewhere in…" are logged as Reported, not Confirmed.
Wire this up to whatever you already use — a mailto:, a Netlify form, a Google Form. The submission target lives in one place in the source: search for SUBMIT_TARGET.
An entry is marked Confirmed only when a specific street address is tied to a specific sunroom claim by a citable source. An entry is Reported when the sunroom is credibly attested but the exact address is still unresolved. Lost entries are documented closures or removals.
Every location on this map was cross-checked against Google Places for a real, currently-listed address before being plotted. Coordinates are not estimated. Where an entry shows Open verified Street View, the pano was aimed by hand at the glass and the solarium was confirmed by eye — that is the registry's highest standard of proof. Per-entry sources appear in the detail panel when you select a location.
Entries are also removed when they fail verification. The second Wendy's in Ajax, Ontario (274 Kingston Rd E) was carried briefly as a candidate, checked, found to have no sunroom, and deleted. A registry is only as useful as the things it is willing to take back off the map.