Pursuits : Elizabeth Thomsen

There’s a proposal to ban transfats in Massachusetts, so reporter Carl Stevens of WBZ Radio paid a visit to the Deluxe Town Diner in Watertown which stopped serving transfats three years ago. The actual story doesn’t have much substance, other than to report that the food still tastes just fine, but this is the second report Stevens has done from a local diner, and it’s just good to see these diner visits recorded and shared.

Capitol Diner Video on YouTube — Carl Stevens visits one of my favorite diners

The Central Diner is in Millbury, Massachusetts, just outside of my hometown of Worcester. My aunt and uncle live in Millbury, so I have visited the town many times over the years, but somehow I never get to the downtown area, and had never seen the diner.

Yesterday I had a meeting in the area, and afterward I decided to finally go see the diner and photograph it. When I arrived, I was rather shocked to find it in this condition. I was sure it was closed and perhaps headed for destruction.

Fortunately, however, that doesn’t seem to be the case. From what I read, it’s going through a restoration, and I look forward to visiting it again and taking a new picture when it’s done.

The Central Diner is Worcester Lunch Car Company #673, brought here in 1930 to replace an older lunch wagon which had operated at this location since 1910.

Last Tuesday I participated in a professional meeting at Tower Hill Botanical Garden in Boylston, Massachusetts. It’s a beautiful place, and I enjoyed walking around outside during the breaks to take a few pictures of flowers and statues.

But after the meeting, I headed off on a quest to get the picture I really wanted, a shot of Chet’s Diner in nearby Northborough. I have been wanting to get this one for my collection, but I seldom seem to be in that part of the state.
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Here’s a simple little video interview Carl Stevens of WBZ Radio did with Bobby Fennell, state lawmaker and owner of the Capitol Diner in Lynn. It’s just a few minutes long, the camera work is shaky and no one says anything particularly profound, but I think it’s great to capture, save and share these little glimpses into interesting places.

“He’s hard at work. He’s not cooking up legislation, he’s cooking breakfast!”

• Capitol Diner : It’s the Real Thing — My blog posting on this diner

After a meeting yesterday, I took a drive down Route 28 in Middleboro, Massachusetts, to check out two diners. The first is Dave’s Diner, one of the newest diners in the state, a 1997 Starlite. It’s a gleaming silver thing, and although I took a few pictures, it’s way too new for me. But what’s really the cut-off point? At what point is a diner too new to be real? And why do I care? I thought about the kids who go there now with their parents. They don’t know or care that this is not a real diner, and when they grow up, this will be a part of their history, just as real to them as the Agawam Diner is to my daughters and the Miss Worcester is to me.
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In a previous post here about Shrewsbury’s Edgemere Diner, I called it “an old beauty who has fallen upon hard times” and ended with these words: Meanwhile, the diner sits deteriorating on Route 20, awaiting rescue and rehabilitation.

That was last July, when the situation seemed pretty dire. To be honest, I thought the place was a goner, which is one of the reasons I kept taking photographs of it every time I was in the area — each one could be the last.

But the situation has changed dramatically since that time. A new owner, David Kupstas, has been found. When I drove by today, I was happy to see a truck parked out front and a bunch of men on the roof working on the renovations. Kupstas is planning to open the place as the Edge Diner as early as January. Initially it will open only for lunch, with plans to add breakfast and dinner as soon as he can. Kupstas says “We want to keep the diner atmosphere,” and I really hope that he can do that. I’m looking forward to visiting this old beauty as soon as it reopens.

Links

• Edgemere Diner — My blog posting from last July
• Lease gives life to old favorite — By Lisa Kocian; Boston Globe, November 25, 2007
• Edgemere Diner — Photos on Flickr

Somerville, Massachusetts, a city of 77,000 people located just north of Boston, is home to three diners, and they are quite an interesting assortment, representing different periods and styles.

The oldest of the three is also the smallest : Buddy’s Truck Stop. It was built by the Worcester Lunch Car Company in 1929, and originally ran as Sawin’s Diner in Leominster. It was moved to the current location, 113 Washington Street in Someville, in 1951, to replace an older diner at that location. It’s a tiny twenty-stool barrel-roof car, completely ungentrified and one of the most “dinerish” diners I’ve ever seen. The exterior is covered with striking metal panels in a Deco sunburst design.

Kelly’s Diner is almost the opposite of Buddy’s Truck Stop. It’s much larger, seating seventy, and is a typical shiny O’Mahony diner from 1953, similar to the Agawam Diner in Rowley.

Kelly’s Diner fits right in at its Ball Square location, and looks like it’s been there forever, but it was actually bought by Larry Holmes and moved here from Wilmington, Delaware, in 1995. It’s become a busy, popular neighborhood diner.

The last of the three Somerville diners is probably the best-known and most-photographed, the Rosebud Diner in Davis Square. It’s featured on the cover of Randy Garbin’s popular book Diner of New England. The Rosebud is a 1941 Worcester Lunch Car Company diner, #773, still at its original location. It had fallen on hard times by the 1980s. According to Garbin:

it had become the butt of jokes and a place to avoid. By then the diner had devolved into a dive bar that fronted a strip club.

But when the Red Line MBTA line was extended to Davis Square, the area and the diner were both transformed into cooler, more prosperous versions of themselves. The Rosebud was restored, and is now a thriving, popular spot.

Among the diner’s many romantic images, one of the most pervasive has it as a stainless steel, middle-of-nowhere truck stop, where the coffee is strong, the waitresses sassy, and the food portions big. The Bel Aire would fit well within that image.

That description by Randy Garbin, who honored the Bel Aire as a Featured Diner in his 2005 book, Diners of New England. A year later, the diner was closed.

The Bel Aire Diner has been closed for nearly two years now, after a failed auction on eBay. There’s a sign saying “Closed for Renovations” but there doesn’t seem to be anything happening. It was last mentioned in the local newspaper back in August, when owner John Kallas appeared before the Licensing Board to discuss the potential sale of the diner’s liquor license.

The Bel Aire is a Mountain View diner, #359, which was installed here new in 1953, when this stretch of Route 1 was an important tourist route through farmland. According to one of article, the wife of one of the owners suggested the name “Bel Aire” in honor of the fresh breezes of this then-rural location. The Bel Aire was always a trucker and traveler’s favorite, a large diner with over eighty seats and a full liquor license. A 1992 article by Jeremiah V. Murphy of the Boston Globe mentions another type of customer:

Sometimes they arrive in the parking lot area in the same car. The man walks into the diner and sits alone and waits. A few minutes later the woman leaves the car and quietly walks into the diner. She knows where the man will be sitting. She walks over and sits beside the man. They talk very quietly and then they drink a coffee and leave. They are very discreet.

According to owner John Kallas, the diner’s business took a big hit twenty years ago when a ramp connecting Route 1 and I-95 was built near the diner, diverting much of the traffic to the interstate. And then a highway divider was installed on Route 1 between the northbound and southbound lanes, which meant that commuters heading south in the morning toward Boston had to double back in order to visit the diner on the northbound side. By the time it closed, the diner was only open eight hours a day, down from twenty hours in its heyday.

Back in January of 2006, John Kallas was quoted as saying:

If we can’t get at least $175,000, we’ll probably keep it, pull it off its foundation, and start looking for another site. Even in downtown Peabody, I could almost guarantee, we would be busy all the time.

But for now, at least, the Bel Aire stands empty on what has become a particularly ugly section of Route 1. It’s a shame — this is one of the few surviving diners in the area, and I’d love to see this one back in action, somewhere else in the area if not here in its original location.

Home on the Range — This Roadside Approved Attractions article by Teri Dunn includes photographs showing the exterior and interior of this diner when it was open.

This is my first Google map, and it’s not comprehensive. It only includes diners that I have photographed, but I hope to keep working on it. I love Google Maps, and can’t believe how easy it is to set something like this up. And by setting these up on Google Maps, you also get a link to a KML file for Google Earth, which is a really amazing pieces of software.

View Larger Map

Diners of Massachusetts KML — See this on Google Earth

The Capitol DIner is in downtown Lynn, but it’s tucked away on Union Street, just off Washington Street, and it’s a beautiful example of a dying breed : a real diner.
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