Diners of Pennsylvania

Copyright ©1999, 2011 by Stackpole

Books First edition published 1999. Second edition 2011

Published by

STACKPOLE BOOKS 5067 Ritter Road

Mechanicsburg, PA 17055

www.stackpolebooks.com

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Stackpole Books, 5067 Ritter Road, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania 17055.

Printed in China

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

All photographs by Kyle R. Weaver, unless otherwise noted

Cover design by Caroline M. Stover

Front cover: Prospect Diner, Columbia.

Page iii: Pastry display case at Lancer's in Horsham.

Back cover: Gap Diner sign.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Butko, Brian.

Diners of Pennsylvania / Brian Butko and Kevin Patrick ; revised and updated by Kyle R. Weaver ; foreword by Richard J. S. Gutman. — 2nd ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8117-0676-6 (pbk.)

ISBN-10: 0-8117-0676-1 (pbk.)

1. Diners (Restaurants)—Pennsylvania. I. Patrick, Kevin Joseph. II. Weaver, Kyle R. III. Title.

TX945.B884 2011

647.95748—dc22

2010038848

eBook ISBN 978-0-8117-4416-4

Contents

Foreword

Return to Pennsylvania Dinerland

Metro Philadelphia

Diner Drives

Featured Diners

Bob’s Diner

Daddypop’s Diner

Silk City Diner Bar & Lounge

The Dining Car

Miss Oxford Diner

Diner Directory

Pennsylvania Dutch Country

Diner Drives

Featured Diners

Mel’s Diner

Ernie Risser’s Family Restaurant

Prospect Diner

Saville’s Diner

Trivet Diner

Diner Directory

Anthracite Region and the Poconos

Diner Drives

Featured Diners

Kay’s Italian Restaurant

Chick’s Diner and Hawley Diner

Charlie’s Pizza & Subs

Village Diner

The Diner at Tannersville

Diner Directory

Central Pennsylvania

Diner Drives

Featured Diners

Kuppy’s Diner

Wellsboro Diner

Highspire Diner

American Dream Diner

Baby’s Burgers & Shakes

Diner Directory

Western Pennsylvania

Diner Drive

Featured Diners

Girard Dinor

Dean’s Diner

Lawrence Park Dinor

Ritter’s Diner

Gatto’s Cycle Diner

Diner Directory

Diner Manufacturers

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

Foreword

Iam from diner country. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Allentown, with parents from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, I’ve always had diner blood flowing through my veins. But in the 1950s and ’60s, who pondered the question of why diners? You went there for a meal; you didn’t analyze it to death.

OK, four diners were within walking distance from my house near the fairgrounds: the Plain & Fancy, Hook’s, Thomas’s, and Tabbs’, all of which we patronized. But that didn’t mean my family ate exclusively in diners when we wanted an inexpensive, family-style meal. In fact, one of our regular places was across the street from the Tom Sawyer Diner, and from our booth in the Charcoal Drive-In or when we enjoyed curb service there in our 1953 Ford convertible, the immense neon sign of Tom Sawyer himself advertising the diner was what dominated our view. (Threatened with demolition, the Tom Sawyer was rescued by restoration specialist Steve Harwin, and it is now operating as Sawyer’s in Harrisburg.)

It wasn’t until 1970, when I was an architecture student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, that my eyes were opened to the glories of diner architecture. I can thank the visiting professors from England, who had never seen a diner before, for helping me to discover them. Subsequently, I put their history on paper for the first time. The factory-built diner, a unique example of industrialized building, was the subject of my thesis.

Returning home on breaks from college, I hit the road on diner hunts. Pre-Internet, the method was to consult the Yellow Pages and compile a list of places to check out, beyond the ones with which I was already familiar. Allentown turned out to be a gold mine, with at least twenty-two diners in that All-American city of 100,000. No wonder I was diner-conscious, though only subconsciously, during my youth.

According to the up-to-the-minute data in this book, Allentown still has fourteen diners within the city limits and another seven perched outside. That’s an amazing survival rate. Allentown even rates its own map. However, as pointed out here, only four are in their original condition. Unfortunately, that’s progress.

As I devoured this updated book, I was enlightened by all the changes to the places I know and have eaten in, as well as the delightful discoveries of the ones I never stumbled upon during my travels, or never even knew about. There are great stories here. The authors have unearthed the likes of Philip Rowe and his forty or fifty different diners owned; recounted the amazing discovery of the nearly perfect 1930s Jerry O’Mahony Monarch-style diner buried inside Fegley’s Restaurant in Birdsboro; and told us about the rescue and revival of the 1927 Tierney (originally known as the Lackawanna Trail Diner) by Gordon Tindall.

But I can’t help thinking back four decades, when Allentown hosted nearly one of every kind of diner: a double Ward & Dickinson, Ina’s, at 15 South 10th Street; a pristine Fodero, the Plain & Fancy, down the hill from the football stadium of Allentown High; along with great diners from Kullman, DeRaffele, O’Mahony, Mountain View, Manno, and a handful of Silk Citys. Nearly one diner per mile for nine miles on Tilghman Street and its connecting road, Union Boulevard! Who knew! Unbelievable!

The popularity of diners has waxed and waned over the years, but there is absolutely no question that they have staying power. They change with the times—both the look and the food—and thus they survive. People remain fascinated by them. As director of the Culinary Arts Museum at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, where we have the only permanent exhibit about diners, I know for a fact that they are as popular as ever. And there’s one a mile and a half down the road from my office, where I can get my poached eggs.

—Richard J. S. Gutman

It has been twelve years since we first published Diners of Pennsylvania. With this new edition, Kyle R. Weaver has joined the team, having explored the landscape to see what changes have come about recently and providing the necessary updates and new insights on Pennsylvania’s diner scene.

For diner fans, the current state of affairs may at first seem bleak, with twenty-seven diners having been destroyed by either accidental fire or the bulldozer of progress; however, a recent trend toward preservation has saved more than a few of the state’s diners. A fair share that had been threatened with destruction have been moved to other parts of the state and restored to their original condition. For instance, a 1927 Tierney from Stroudsburg is now in Towanda, and after being restored it looks as though it was delivered fresh from the factory. A 1954 Silk City from Bethlehem is now a sparkling jewel along Route 6 in Coudersport. A 1951 Mountain View from Wilkes-Barre is now an attraction in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. One diner near Reading, a 1938 O’Mahony, was discovered intact behind restaurant walls that had encased it for half a century; it is now in a museum in Boyertown, where it is being restored for exhibition.

We suggested in the first edition that if America were regionalized by restaurants, the roads into the northeast United States would be marked, Welcome to Dinerland. Although the diner here is taken for granted by the average person on the street, it remains a novelty at the national level, part of a long-running nostalgia industry centered on the 1950s. Newly manufactured stainless steel diners sporting neon, glass block, and black-and-white-checked tiles can now be found all over the country in places that never had diners before. The Northeast has not been immune to the infatuation with diners; here it is just the latest in a long history of attitude and style changes.

The story therefore continues, but it is more than the nostalgia-laced one that waxes poetic about a hot cuppa joe, Adam and Eve on a raft, gum-cracking waitresses who call you Hon, and the good ol’ days when Potsie and the gang cruised their hot rods down to the diner. The untold story is about the diner as a unique American form shaped by the sweeping changes of industrialization, modernization, and the rise of the automobile as the dominant means of transportation. It is the untold story of the diner as an integral element in the cities, towns, and neighborhoods of the Northeast and in the lives of its middle-class inhabitants. This is the story of the diner as a place, rather than romanticized history, and the setting for this story is Pennsylvania.

A book on Pennsylvania diners should start with some basic questions: How many diners are there? Where are they located? What do they look like? Sounds simple, but it isn’t. The previous edition counted 260, but that number is now down to 239. It might be more, but it’s probably not less. As mentioned above, more than two dozen have been demolished, and some have been moved to other states, while a few others sit in storage waiting for a new home. More restaurants that call themselves diners, but are not, have been checked, and some authentic diners that look nothing like the classic form have been discovered. So what is a diner? For our purposes, a diner is a factory-built restaurant transported to its site of operation. People can get very touchy about whether an assumed diner is real or not. Our criterion is not a value judgment about the restaurant, just a way of distinguishing diners from other eateries.

Yes, we had to leave out some great non-factory-built places like the Keystone Diner in New Oxford, Pamela’s P&G in Pittsburgh, Ernie’s Texas Lunch in Gettysburg, Red’s in Lewistown, the South Street Diner in Philadelphia, and a thousand other places. Then there are the numerous stick-built retro diners that have appeared on the landscape since the 1990s in the wake of the diner nostalgia craze. These structures include the same stainless, neon, and checkerboard patterns of recent factory-built diners, but were either constructed on site or are old restaurants remodeled in the retro style, putting them beyond the scope of this book.

One of the draws of a factory-built diner to an operator has been the ease of upgrading to a newer, larger, and more modern diner. If not destroyed, the old diner can be sold and moved to a different location or be sent back to a manufacturer’s lot for reconditioning and resale. Many diners have been completely covered or converted to other uses. Some of these are obvious, like Hill's Quality Seafood Market, formerly Green Hill Diner, in Newtown Square; H.L.'s Live Bait & Tackle, formerly the Transit Diner, in Morrisville; Country Food Market, formerly Ed's Diner, in Doylestown; or Grandma's House Tea & Gifts, formerly the Congress Street Diner, in Bradford.

Reading Diner sees the light of day after being entombed for fifty years behind the walls of Fegley’s Restaurant in Birdsboro. It was later moved to Boyertown Museum of Historic Vehicles, where it is on permanent exhibition. PHOTO BY CARL W. SLISHER

All the moving and remodeling can make identifying diners pretty difficult, but we had help. Our most useful sources have been the diner lists generated and maintained by such experts as Richard J. S. Gutman in American Diner: Then and Now, Randy Garbin of Roadside Online, and Daniel Zilka at the American Diner Museum. These leads have been combined with library searches, many miles on the road, discussions with diner staff, and a lot of diner food.

Contrary to a widely held misconception, the diner did not evolve from the railroad dining car, but from the lowly lunch wagon. In 1872, Walter Scott pioneered the night lunch business by loading up a horse-drawn wagon with sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, and pies and peddling them on the streets of Providence, Rhode Island, to the staffs of the town’s three dailies, who toiled nightly to get out the morning edition. Scott, and his soon-to-appear competitors, found that the nighttime streets were filled with potential customers eager for a bite to eat.

Lunch wagons are quite elusive, even to discerning historians, but the one at the lower left of this postcard was caught serving Gettysburg tourists in the teens. BRIAN BUTKO COLLECTION

It’s not surprising that the diner originated in southern New England. This region witnessed the dawning of the American industrial revolution. Folks in rural America worked in the daylight and slept at night, but in industrial New England production ran full-tilt 24 hours a day. Employees worked in shifts, and hundreds were on the streets at odd hours. Walter Scott and his many competitors soon were operating around the clock, just like the 24-hour factory system.

As the concept spread, the skilled workers needed to build lunch wagons were readily available in the towns that most appealed to operators. During the industry’s early period in the 1880s and 1890s, all six of America’s major lunch wagon manufacturers were located in Massachusetts. But two developments around the turn of the century transformed the fledgling lunch wagon business into the diner industry. First, wagon owners began settling on permanent sites to satisfy licensing requirements and to save wear on wheels and horses. Wagons could be situated on odd plots where rents were low and they could be moved if business fell off.

Second, cities were changing over from horse-drawn trolleys to electric cars, and for $15, one could purchase a trolley, remove its wheels, and convert it into a makeshift lunch wagon. Already worn-out from years of service, these dilapidated cars left a long-lasting stigma on the diner industry. A 1948 Saturday Evening Post article noted that when Patrick Tierney started making lunch wagons in 1905, diners were about as easy to sell as rattlesnake pits. Typical of early wagon owners was one profiled in the article who amassed $50 in 1904 to open his first diner. His place seated seven customers, and could be moved by borrowing a horse somewhere. He carried water for coffee in a pail from the nearest house, and clambered to the roof of the car every night to fill the gasoline tank which fed fuel to his stove. His first week’s profit was $4, but he was still in business (in a newer car) four decades later.

In the maturing industrial economy of the early twentieth century, building lunch wagons in the backyard became a thing of the past. Manufacturers like Tierney and Jerry O’Mahony standardized their models and expanded their offerings to include indoor toilets and full-length, marble-topped counters. Tierney’s innovations helped save the reputation of diners, and his ambitiousness made him worth $2 million by time he died in 1917 (the equivalent of $36 million today). Yet the stigma remained. In a 1922 issue of New York Times Magazine, a bank clerk said about his mother, When I told her I ate in a lunch wagon she nearly had a fit.… ‘Why mother,’ I told her, ‘the butter and eggs in that wagon—you can’t get ’em any better anywhere.’ But mom wasn’t convinced: ‘It’s degrading!’

By then, a lunch wagon’s wheels were used only to move the eatery to its operating site. Railcar styles and dimensions were adopted to accommodate transportation by rail and to emulate their fancier cousins, railroad dining cars. Most notably, lunch wagons adopted the monitor roof, a raised center portion running lengthwise with a strip of ventilation windows. The style endured until midcentury, mainly because the design cleverly provided both light and ventilation to the interior of the car, something railroads had long before discovered. The wagons came to be called dining cars as a way of expressing the full menu of a 24-hour restaurant, and by the 1920s, the name was shortened to diner. The term also alluded to the elegant meal accommodations of crack express trains like the Broadway and Twentieth Century Limiteds.

Where to Find Diners

The Keystone State is home to a multitude of diners—we counted 239. They’re usually found at one of six different locations. Diner distribution overwhelmingly favors edge-oftown highway sites (45 percent). Other highway sites include suburban commercial strips (13 percent) and isolated rural locations (3 percent). In-town diners are predominantly found at the edges of the business district (22 percent) or at commercial arterials (11 percent). A few may be found at the center of business districts (5 percent). Two are preserved in museums (1 percent). In-town diners tend to be older and pedestrian-oriented, highway diners newer and auto-oriented.

Rail-delivered diners were commodious by lunch wagon standards, but were still compact enough to easily fit on an in-town lot—sideways with the end facing the street if the lot was particularly narrow. It’s this compactness that even today lends itself to a dynamic mix of customers: the lawyers, bikers, doctors, and families that diner owners like to brag about. A 1927 New York Times piece said a patron would find that formality ceased when he had pushed back the sliding door, sidled up to a stool and given his order. The lunch wagons were redolent with the atmosphere of good fellowship.

The diner industry was also aided by the endless possibilities of serving a mobile clientele of motorists and truck drivers along an expanding network of publicly funded highways. One writer suggested in a 1926 New York Times article that maybe it was the mobile nature of diners that made them so appealing: One feels instinctively that no mere profit hunter could have dreamed the lunch wagon. A philosopher, with tincture of the psychologist, was required— one who understood the hereditary or original whimsicalities of human nature . . . its appeal to the primitive nomadic instinct. Or as we’d say, Americans like to keep moving.

As the industry matured, its center of production shifted from southern New England to the Mid-Atlantic states, around New York. By the teens, two of the nation’s five top diner builders operated in the shadow of New York City, and by the twenties, downstate New York and New Jersey had six diner manufacturers to Massachusetts’s four. After 1942, the only New England diner manufacturer left was Worcester Lunch Car Company, while nearly a dozen companies produced diners from plants in northern New Jersey.

A secondary diner manufacturing center arose in western New York and Ohio to serve the sprawling food processing, steel mill, furniture, and metalfabricating cities along the Great Lakes. A handful of companies opened there in the 1920s and 1930s, most notably Ward & Dickinson in Silver Creek, New York, which sent much of its output to Pennsylvania. The small town of Warren, for example, welcomed the American Dining Car in 1926 and Jackson’s Diner in 1932, and nearby Youngsville greeted Riche’s Dining Car in 1932— quite a concentration of diners away from big cities.

Factory gates were favorite locations for diners since lunch wagon days. A 1927 Atlantic Refining Company article even boasted of a lunch car inside its Philadelphia refinery. It was open to the public, but its 24-hour schedule was to provide shift men and men working overtime . . . a warm nourishing meal instead of cold sandwiches carried from home.

Kuppy’s Diner, here shortly after its delivery to Middletown in 1938, was one of many Ward & Dickinson models that came to Pennsylvania, but one of the few that survive today. KUPPY’S DINER

A 1920s O’Mahony catalog listed eighty-four of the manufacturer’s dining cars, eight of those in Pennsylvania: one each in Allentown, Carbondale, Easton, Pottsville, Stroudsburg, and Wilkes-Barre, and two in Philadelphia. In 1927, the United Dining Car Operators’ Association in Philadelphia estimated that some 350,000 residents ate in its diners every week. The association stressed just how sanitary dining cars could be: Nothing is concealed. If the customer orders a steak, he sees it come fresh from a clean, tile-lined ice box; sees it sizzle and brown on a clean griddle. . . . Compare this with the ordinary ‘hole in the wall’ type of restaurant, where the cooking of food is a dark secret carefully hidden from the customer. Did anyone ever see the cook in that type of restaurant? Is he neat and in good health? Who knows?

The 1920s Lewis Diner, in a classic downtown setting tucked among the buildings on Philadelphia Street in Indiana, was still advertising Tables for Ladies on its façade when it was photographed here on the evening of New Year's Day in 1949. BRIAN BUTKO COLLECTION

The effects of the Great Depression led to a restructuring of the diner industry, but to the amazement of all, it continued expanding. Even under economic hardship, Americans were loath to give up their automobiles, and diners rode out the hard times as recession-proof havens that actually attracted investment. Both O’Mahony and Worcester Lunch Car survived the Depression, and although Tierney went under in 1933, its remains were recycled as DeRaffele Manufacturing Company, which continues to make diners. In fact, many of the great postwar diner manufacturers, such as Fodero, Kullman, Mountain View, Paramount, and Valentine, got their start during the 1930s, frequently with personnel from earlier diner producers.

As with many other products during the Great Depression, diner styles were retooled to reflect an improved image of machine age efficiency, which had become tarnished when the mechanized economy put a quarter of the labor force out of work. A style subsequently tagged streamline moderne attempted to imply the feeling of movement by incorporating curved corners, horizontal banding, and slick surfaces. New building materials like stainless steel, glass block, and neon gave diners a modern, progressive look.

Diner Styles

The following are general categories of diner styles developed by the authors, based on traits typical for the era. Not all features are listed, and some styles overlap periods. Years are also approximate.

Barrel Roof (1910–35)

Exterior:Wood, painted sheet metal, or porcelain enamel; sliding doors at front center and side. Interior: Marble counter; porcelain enamel ceiling with vents; mosaic tile floor; walls of 2-by-4-inch off-white and green tiles. Booths and restrooms are introduced. Cooking is done behind the counter. Note: This category also includes the few monitor roof diners from the 1930s (usually Ward & Dickinson).

Modern Stainless (1935–55)

Exterior: Large porcelain panels or vertical fluting in early years; façade of stainless steel with horizontal bands, usually red, blue, or green; corners rounded in early years then getting squarer; monitorstyle or rounded roof.

Interior: Booths at one end; stainless steel backwall behind counter, with sunburst pattern; Formica countertops and ceilings; 4-inch square-tile walls of yellow, pale blue, pink, or gray. Cooking is done behind the counter or in an attached kitchen