Record-Journal
08-07-2007, 12:22 AM
By Andrew Perlot, Record-Journal staff
MIDDLETOWN — A long-in-the-tooth diner, which may once have called Meriden home, has been hauled out of the muck and is on its way to Rhode Island and a new life, thanks to a group of diner enthusiasts.
For Daniel Zilka, architect of the endeavor, diners aren’t just places to grab a burger. For him, greasy spoons are the very stuff of Americana, and their disappearance something to be upset about.
There were once between 5,000 and 6,000 diners in the United States in the original sense of a small, prefabricated structure modeled after the dining car of a train, said Zilka, acting director of the American Diner Museum in Providence, R.I.
Today, there are fewer than 2,500 left, most of the rest having been scrapped long ago.
Part of a dying breed, the 1920s-era diner built by P.J. Tierney & Sons Inc. has been sinking into the mud and rotting for decades in a field off Bell Street. Far from commercial traffic, it had been used as a storage shed and possibly a kitchen for a private camp owned by the Gaffney family of Meriden.
“We had wonderful summers out there,” said Dennis Gaffney, an attorney in Meriden. “It was basically our family as far as people who stayed there during the week. On weekends anyone would be there. We had a lot of picnics and parties.”
Gaffney does not recall when exactly the diner was placed at the camp, or where it originally came from, but he remembered it being present during his childhood in the 1940s.
Originally, Gaffney thought the diner was an earlier incarnation of the Meriden Diner, which sat at the corner of Broad and East Main streets. Record-Journal archives have only one mention of movement at that diner. A stainless steel structure was brought in from Hartford and installed on the site to replace an older building in 1963. The building it replaced was torn down. However, a diner had been running on the site since 1928, making it possible that a still older structure was the one hauled away to Middletown. There were other diners in Meriden during this period, such as the Majestic Diner on Pratt Street, which also could have been moved.
Or the diner may not have come from Meriden at all.
Local historian Kenneth Cowing hadn’t heard about any diner being moved out of the city, though he did recall the Meriden Diner as a great place to grab a cheeseburger and a coffee after a late dance.
Wherever it came from, left alone with no foundation, the old diner was in pretty rough shape Monday and had sunken into the ground. The property it sits on was recently bought by someone intent on building a house. Rather than tearing it down, they offered Zilka the chance to take it away.
Part of the building was rotted, though Zilka says that the basic structure is secure. He and his group jacked the building out of a hole and shored up the beams for transport. A crane then picked it up and placed it on the back of a truck so it could be brought to Rhode Island.
The American Diner Museum plans to renovate the old diner to its original state and then sell or lease it to someone who wants to run a restaurant. “There seems to be a trend towards small, owner-operated restaurants,” he said. “People are getting tired of franchises. People go through a mid-life crisis and they want a small operation they can run themselves.”
Diners, he said, are a fantastic tradition, and are to America what pubs are to Ireland and cafes are to France. Zilka believes that diners offer a truly democratic eating environment, where people can come in and enjoy good food at a reasonable price.
Zilka even mentioned that the diner could come back to Meriden if a person here wanted to try his or her hand at running a small restaurant.
As for Gaffney, he’s just happy that an artifact of his childhood is being saved.
“I think it’s absolutely fascinating,” he said. “I had no idea that anyone would try to do it after all these years.”
aperlot@record-journal.com
(203) 317-2234
MIDDLETOWN — A long-in-the-tooth diner, which may once have called Meriden home, has been hauled out of the muck and is on its way to Rhode Island and a new life, thanks to a group of diner enthusiasts.
For Daniel Zilka, architect of the endeavor, diners aren’t just places to grab a burger. For him, greasy spoons are the very stuff of Americana, and their disappearance something to be upset about.
There were once between 5,000 and 6,000 diners in the United States in the original sense of a small, prefabricated structure modeled after the dining car of a train, said Zilka, acting director of the American Diner Museum in Providence, R.I.
Today, there are fewer than 2,500 left, most of the rest having been scrapped long ago.
Part of a dying breed, the 1920s-era diner built by P.J. Tierney & Sons Inc. has been sinking into the mud and rotting for decades in a field off Bell Street. Far from commercial traffic, it had been used as a storage shed and possibly a kitchen for a private camp owned by the Gaffney family of Meriden.
“We had wonderful summers out there,” said Dennis Gaffney, an attorney in Meriden. “It was basically our family as far as people who stayed there during the week. On weekends anyone would be there. We had a lot of picnics and parties.”
Gaffney does not recall when exactly the diner was placed at the camp, or where it originally came from, but he remembered it being present during his childhood in the 1940s.
Originally, Gaffney thought the diner was an earlier incarnation of the Meriden Diner, which sat at the corner of Broad and East Main streets. Record-Journal archives have only one mention of movement at that diner. A stainless steel structure was brought in from Hartford and installed on the site to replace an older building in 1963. The building it replaced was torn down. However, a diner had been running on the site since 1928, making it possible that a still older structure was the one hauled away to Middletown. There were other diners in Meriden during this period, such as the Majestic Diner on Pratt Street, which also could have been moved.
Or the diner may not have come from Meriden at all.
Local historian Kenneth Cowing hadn’t heard about any diner being moved out of the city, though he did recall the Meriden Diner as a great place to grab a cheeseburger and a coffee after a late dance.
Wherever it came from, left alone with no foundation, the old diner was in pretty rough shape Monday and had sunken into the ground. The property it sits on was recently bought by someone intent on building a house. Rather than tearing it down, they offered Zilka the chance to take it away.
Part of the building was rotted, though Zilka says that the basic structure is secure. He and his group jacked the building out of a hole and shored up the beams for transport. A crane then picked it up and placed it on the back of a truck so it could be brought to Rhode Island.
The American Diner Museum plans to renovate the old diner to its original state and then sell or lease it to someone who wants to run a restaurant. “There seems to be a trend towards small, owner-operated restaurants,” he said. “People are getting tired of franchises. People go through a mid-life crisis and they want a small operation they can run themselves.”
Diners, he said, are a fantastic tradition, and are to America what pubs are to Ireland and cafes are to France. Zilka believes that diners offer a truly democratic eating environment, where people can come in and enjoy good food at a reasonable price.
Zilka even mentioned that the diner could come back to Meriden if a person here wanted to try his or her hand at running a small restaurant.
As for Gaffney, he’s just happy that an artifact of his childhood is being saved.
“I think it’s absolutely fascinating,” he said. “I had no idea that anyone would try to do it after all these years.”
aperlot@record-journal.com
(203) 317-2234