Diners of New England

Introduction

New England: The diner Mecca

My concept of scenic New England often belies the cliché post card fantasy of white church steeples, village greens ablaze in fall foliage, sleepy pastoral farms, and rusty skuppers. While this hazy dream still helps to sell so many wall calendars, movies, Yankee Magazines, and Food Network forays into “real” New England life and culture, it generally excludes the reality for most of its residents. Aside from the old Yankee families who settled here first, establishing the first agrarian culture celebrated by the likes of Robert Frost and James Thurber, the true nature of New England lies in the streets of its industrial centers.

Poor soil, harsh climate, and rugged geography justify an oft-told supposition that if the Pilgrims had landed in San Diego, New England would have become a national park or a Canadian province. The New England of my experience and of the earlier generations who struggled to build lives in a land almost completely devoid of any extractable natural resources would not sell many calendars. This New England with its patchwork of ethnicities, declining mill towns, and abandoned farms had once laid the foundations of the American economic juggernaut. We now call it “Yankee ingenuity.”

Thus, what more natural birthplace for the American diner than New England? Developed to serve the needs of hungry, late-shift mill workers in the expanding industrial towns in the last half of the nineteenth century, the diner's predecessor, the lunch wagon, became yet another ingenious method for ambitious men and women to achieve the American dream. With a little bit of money, a lot of determination, and plenty of luck, any Joe could open up his own diner.

And all these “Joe's” have Walter Scott to thank for sparking the idea. A budding entrepreneur in the age of Horatio Alger, Scotty noticed that all the restaurants in his native Providence, Rhode Island closed after serving dinner. Meanwhile, the factories stayed open all night, and the workers inside still needed something to eat. Converting a horse drawn freight wagon, he set up a mobile operation to dispense simple but hot meals on the street corner outside the offices of the Providence Journal.

Though Scotty hardly invented the idea of serving meals from a mobile structure, the stars aligned around his initiative, and the idea spawned imitators and an industry. The simple converted freight wagon would evolve into an ornate enclosed rolling lunch counter, complete with seating. Competition by any expanding roster of builders brought more innovations to the trade. Builders constructed larger and more stylish, but still-prefabricated and movable structures featuring booth service, ceramic tile interiors, refrigeration, and the toilet. The one constant through the diner's 125-year evolution remains the counter and the idea that the customer could get a good hot meal any time of the day for not a lot of money. The diner became America's first fast-food restaurant.

Providence rightly claims itself as the birthplace of the diner concept, but Worcester, Massachusetts gets the credit for starting the industry of building diners. This centrally located industrial powerhouse, home of many firsts, saw Samuel Messer Jones set up shop building wagons for others (under his employ) to operate. After Jones came C.H. Palmer . Then T.J. Buckley, Charles Barriere, and then Charlie Gemme and his Worcester Lunch Car Company, who all built wagons and/or diners for sale to others. For a short while around the turn of the century, Worcester reigned supreme as the center of the diner industry, with some builders churning them out by the dozens for use in towns and cities all over the industrial northeast and beyond.

Soon, lunch wagons appeared just about anywhere where a crowd might gather. Early appellations of these enterprises included color terms such as “Dog Wagon,” “White Eagle,” “Night Owl,” and eventually “Diner,” which both capitalized on the romantic image of railroad dining and the similarity between both structural forms. To this day, many people still propagate the myth born from simple marketing of diners as converted railroad cars. Building diners that looked like rail cars hardly required much special engineering given the comparable proportions, and indeed some rail car builders expanded into this field as a hedge against economic recession.

Worcester held its position as a diner-building center for a preciously small period. In a story that closely parallels that of the rest of American industrial history, the epicenter moved south, though only as far as New York and New Jersey. The faster growing population and economy made this shift almost inevitable. Companies such as Tierney and O'Mahony soon displaced Worcester Lunch car as the predominate builders, and those two companies led to the founding of many others.

The iconic image of the diner most people envision most likely came from those built in New Jersey. Hand crafted by meticulous artisans who perfected the form, the streamlined and stainless steel clad beacons along the roadside advertised the singular purpose of food service in a setting built with an unmatched level of workmanship. New England gave birth to the diner, but New Jersey took it to its logical extremes.

By the 1920s, most diner manufacturing had left the region, but a few lingered on. Lowell's Pollard Company built a small number of diners in that decade, of which only two still exist. In Springfield, Mass., the Wason Manufacturing company struggled through the Depression with few orders for its railroad cars, converted its line into diner building. Similarly, the J.B. Judkins coach builders in Merrimack, Mass., jumped into diner construction after the demise of its coach-building markets. Judkins remains most notable for introducing the sectional diner and for its much-loved Sterling Streamliner with its bullet-nosed end caps. None of these companies saw the end of World War II.

Until 1961, Worcester Lunch Car limped along as New England's sole representative in the industry. Unfortunately, its stubbornly Yankee reputation for sturdy but staid diners did not serve it well in a business that increasingly celebrated newer, shinier, and larger. The players all generally leapfrogged each other with new outlandish designs and advancements in food service efficiency. While the Jersey builders churned out gleaming, streamlined, stainless, and Formica-clad structures, Worcester chugged along with its quaint and cozy, barrel-roofed diners that appealed to an ever-shrinking local market.

Eventually, the diner industry and the New England restaurant industry would, for all intents and purposes, turned their backs on each other. Worcester Lunch Car closed up shop in 1961, building its last diner in 1957. The Jersey builders, increasingly threatened by the franchised chains, sent only a trickle of new units further north than Fairfield County, Connecticut. The region's remaining diners, consisting mostly of small, aging facilities in declining neighborhoods became increasingly marginalized. The restaurant industry's most successful players developed operations where the food would now wait for its customers. Those customers in turn, would stand in line to order, pay for, and carry that food away for consumption in the one's own car. With the concept of actual service marching slowly into obsolescence, the future for the diner with its onerous overhead of waitstaff, dining areas, and food prep, looked increasingly bleak. Baby booming families now marched lockstep with the clown-faced pied piper promising quick, cheap burgers and fries. Worship of technology seemed to trump any concern for nutrition and the economic and social impact of losing so many independently operated businesses.

Fortunately for us all, the diner survived, and in some places thrives. The wholesale demolition of diners has largely stopped, and even in New England, the actual numbers of diners in operation has increased by a small degree in the last fifteen years. Diner aficionados with an appreciation for a better class of comfort food can look to this region for some of the standard-bearers of the diner's true possibilities. Yankee ingenuity lives on in the a small number of classic gems run by culinary school graduates seeking to wipe the diner clean of its greasy spoon image. Others have rediscovered diner operation as a difficult but ultimately rewarding vocation where the little guy has an opportunity to make a positive impact on their local communities.

The diner has finally come full circle with the industry and society at large finally appreciating this distinctly American restaurant form. To be sure, we still lose diners to the bulldozer, obsolescence, and a festering lack of appreciation, but more often than not, some good soul will make at least an attempt to find the diner a new home - whether that means installation in a museum or hopefully at a new location to serve a grateful market.