Is The Wagon Wheel Motel Mentioned In Morphine's "Thursday" in Salinas, CA?

Right on the heels of Ice Cube's "Good Day" being identified (or was it?), I happened to discover what could very well be the Wagon Wheel Motel mentioned in the Morphine song "Thursday" during a drive through the Northern side of Salinas, CA (specifically, here.)

In case you haven't heard it, here's the (wonderful) song in question:

Morphine - "Thursday" Cure For Pain (1993)

We used to meet every Thursday Thursday
Thursday in the afternoon
For a couple of beers and a game of pool
We used to go to a motel a motel
A motel across the street
And the name of the motel was the Wagon Wheel

Could this run-down, flea-infested hole in the wall be the famed motel Mark Sandman sings about in his debaucherous tale of infidelity? If so, the first clue would be if there was a pool hall across the street.

I looked across the busy road and saw this:

While it is unlikely that a place called Golden China Restaurant would be where one goes for a couple of beers, a game of pool, and to meet a loose married woman, I gave a peek inside anyway. Alas, no pool tables to speak of. It made sense, after all, Sandman probably would have mentioned Moo Goo Gai Pan in the song if that had been the case, because, well, why wouldn't you? 

Granted, this doesn't mean that the building couldn't have housed a seedy pool hall sometime in its history before it was transformed into a dubiously authentic Szechuan joint, but it was already late in the day, and a trip to the Salinas Historical Building Society was out of the question.

Of course, once I returned home and dug a little deeper, I realized that although "Thursday" was semi-autobiographical and Mark Sandman did travel extensively, he almost certainly wrote the song while in rural Colorado, making it unlikely to be set in Salinas, more than 1,000 miles away. 

So, really, all I got from this is just a couple of crappy pictures of a crappy motel and a crappy Chinese restaurant in a crappy part of town.

But I got out of the house and listened to Morphine, so all in all... I guess it was a good day.
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Cure For The Pain: The Mark Sandman Story is currently making the festival rounds. I hope it gets some sort of distribution because I'd love to see it soon.