Iggy’s Diner – Friendly Service – Good Food
The first recorded diner was a horse-drawn wagon equipped to serve hot food to employees of the Providence Journal, in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1872. Walter Scott, who ran the lunch wagon, had previously supplemented his income by selling sandwiches and coffee to his fellow pressmen at the Journal from baskets he prepared at home. Commercial production of lunch wagons began in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1887, by Thomas Buckley. Buckley was very successful and became known for his “White House Cafe” wagons. Charles Palmer received the first patent (1891) for the diner. He built his “fancy night cafes” and “night lunch wagons” in the Worcester area until 1901. In 1906 Philip Duprey and Irving Stoddard established the Worcester Lunch Car Company, which shipped ‘diners’ all over the Eastern Seaboard. The first manufactured lunch wagons with seating appeared throughout the Northeastern US in the late 19th century, serving busy downtown locations without the need to buy expensive real estate. It is generally accepted that the name “diner” as opposed to “lunch wagon” was not widely used before 1925. Many diners still exist in the Worcester area.
The Bendix Diner in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, is an example of Art Deco style and neon signageA Bayonne, New Jersey, man by the name of Jerry O’Mahony is credited by some to have made the first “diner”.
The Jerry O’Mahony Diner Company of Elizabeth, New Jersey, produced 2,000 diners from 1917 to 1952. Only approximately twenty O’Mahony diners are still in existence throughout the United States and in certain parts of the world. In the U.S., the northernmost is Martha’s Diner in Coventry, Vermont.
The Summit Diner, a 1938 model, is located in Summit, NJ. The oldest southern diner (non–stainless steel style) is believed to be the Hillsville Diner in Carroll County, Virginia.
The Triangle Diner, a 1948 stainless steel O’Mahony original model, is located in the old town of Winchester, Virginia and is currently being historically restored to how it appeared in 1948. The Triangle Diner is the oldest stainless steel style O’Mahony diner in the State of Virginia.
In 2007 Tommy’s Deluxe Diner was moved from Middletown, Rhode Island to Oakley, Utah where it opened as the Road Island Diner. The 50’s American Diner is located in Church Gresley, South Derbyshire, England.
One of the original ones displayed at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, made by Paramount Diners, is still in operation as the White Mana in Jersey City.
As the number of seats increased, wagons gave way to pre-fabricated buildings made by many of the same manufacturers who had made the wagons. Like the lunch wagon, a diner allowed one to set up a food service business quickly using pre-assembled constructs and equipment.
In 1938 sterling manufactured diner in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania (curved ceiling) Until the Great Depression, most diner manufacturers and their customers were located in the Northeast. Diner manufacturing suffered with other industries in the Depression, though not as much as others, as people still had to eat, and the diner offered a less expensive way of getting into the restaurant business as well as less expensive food than more formal establishments.
After World War II, as the economy returned to civilian production and the suburbs boomed, diners were an attractive small business opportunity. During this period, diners spread beyond their original urban and small town market to highway strips in the suburbs, even reaching the Midwest, with manufacturers such as Valentine.
Greek immigrants founded more than 600 diners in the New York region in the 1950s through the 1970s.
In many areas, diners were superseded in the 1970s by fast food restaurants, but in parts of New Jersey, New York, New England, Delaware and Pennsylvania the independently-owned diner remains relatively common. During this period, newly-constructed diners lost their narrow, stainless steel, streamlined appearance, and grew into much bigger buildings, though often still made of several pre-fabricated modules and assembled on site and still manufactured by the old line diner builders. A wide variety of architectural styles were now used for these later diners, including Cape Cod and Colonial. The old-style single module diners featuring a long counter and a few small booths sometimes now grew additional dining rooms, lavish wallpaper, fountains, crystal chandeliers and Greek statuary. The definition of the term diner began to blur as older, pre-fab diners received more conventional stick-built additions, sometimes leaving the
original structure nearly unrecognizable as it was surrounded by new construction or a renovated facade. Businesses that called themselves diners but which were built onsite and not prefabricated began to appear. These larger establishments were sometimes known as diner-restaurants.