The other night I had
dinner at the Blue Fountain Diner. Diners are
ubiquitous throughout the conterminous United States;
nearly 7,000 of them sprouted before the outbreak of
the Second World War. While I drank coffee and ate my
Breast of Capon a la Parmigiana, a slab of chicken
too large for my plate, and a side of spaghetti, I
contemplated my surroundings. The place is
essentially the same as when it opened in 1966, my
first year of high school. They added a large dining
room to the back. They sealed off the downstairs and
moved the restrooms upstairs to be more accessible
for drunks and the elderly. They have added a stone
façade to the exterior so that the place looks more
established and not like a section of train that has
had its steel wheels sunk into a block of cement.
I came with my parents on evenings my father decided
to spare my mother from the drudgery of cooking. The
place was all spanking new. Then as now, the menu was
encased in a clear plastic sheath that made it easy
to keep clean. The menu ran for several pages crowded
with choices, all familiar dishes. Inside were much
smaller clear pockets into which were slipped the
daily specials. Even then extra pages would be
paper-clipped in with still more specials. It little
mattered to me, who at that age consistently ordered
either the hamburger or the fried chicken.
As a child I always wanted to sit at the counter on
the swivel stools bolted to the floor, but my mother
always insisted we take a booth. She regarded the
counter as somehow disreputable, perhaps because it
resembled the bar in a barroom.
A diner is supposed to resemble a railroad dining
car. The myth is that diners began life as rolling
stock, but were derailed to become stationary
restaurants. This is not true. Indeed, the first
Pullman Company dining cars were far more elegantly
appointed, their interiors made to resemble
restaurants. The very first Pullman dining car was
named "Delmonico" for the plush New York
City restaurant. There had been a few railroad cars
and even buses that were converted into diners, but
these were the extreme exceptions. The myth was
supported by a conscious desire of the manufacturers
of diners to build their restaurants in the shape of
a railroad car - and even buses. The resemblance is
often uncanny and always intended.
The interior of early diners was long and narrow,
with tables or booths along the one side that had the
windows facing the roadway, and along the opposite
side a long counter ran parallel. In those first
diners the cook prepared food on the back bar behind
the counter. In time the diner evolved an extended
room onto the rear and the kitchen moved into it.
Still, in most modern diners you can see the vestige
of the traditional layout.
Many a night when we were restless and there was no
school the following day, my friends and I found our
way to the Blue Fountain Diner. It was the hallmark
of diners to always be opened and to serve breakfast
twenty-four hours a day. Diners harbored the
restless, the weary, the out-of-sync oddballs, and
those who would skulk through the concealment of
night. After the game or the school dance or the late
night movie, only a few diners were opened. There we
found the truckers, travelers, men on their way to or
from sleepless industries, and the refuse of bars
after closing time. It was a collection of the rough
and rude and ridiculous, folks who chafed the tired
waitresses. Fond memories, and there I was again,
thirty years down the road, slumped over my chicken
breast and java before dragging myself into work.
As kids we would stretch a paper napkin across a
large glass, often half-filled with someone's
abandoned drink. The napkin was held in place by a
rubber band. A dime was put into the center of the
napkin. While we talked, with our cigarettes we'd
burned holes into the paper hoping not to spill the
dime into the glass, for that would be the loser.
Why should a restaurant be made to resemble a
railroad car? I think it catered to our twentieth
century perception of being a nation of perpetual
industry and movement. While I was dining at the Blue
Fountain Diner, I speculated that the railroad car's
appeal might be as a symbol of speed, efficiency, and
convenience with which a meal could be prepared and
consumed.
Much of a diner is stainless steel inside and out. It
was easy to wipe down and keep clean the stainless
steel, the Formica, and the glass. This other night I
was alone, not eating with my mother, so I was free
to sit at the counter. I was noting the expanse of
stainless steel covering the back bar. Every item
upon it was encased in matching sheet metal; milk
dispensers, coffee brewers, juice dispensers, syrup
pumps, and cabinets with sliding glass doors filled
with cakes and pies. It's the same layout, the same
product line, in so many of the diners I've visited,
most of them owned by Greek families. "How did
you know I was Greek?" asked the woman at the
cash register. She had an accent. I looked past her
at the print hanging on the wall, a Greek Orthodox
icon of the Virgin Mary. I told her it was obvious
from all the Greek dishes on the menu.
The Blue Fountain Diner used to display a half-naked
naiad standing in a shell that formed a fountain. It
was their centerpiece, greeting you when you first
walked in. It is now gone and replaced with sculpted
children standing under an umbrella. When I asked
after the missing nymph, the cashier explained how
she had been sent out for repair and cleaning, and
somehow got stolen.
Diners have served my nation well during the century
of the combustion engine, feeding an assortment of
drivers making their way across the country's great
distances. Diners and roads are the epitome of
twentieth century America, our gluttony for food and
gasoline.
The Blue Fountain Diner sits adjacent to the Old
Lincoln Highway. Already by the time the diner first
opened nobody remembered the significance of the name
Lincoln Highway. Lincoln Highway was the first
"paved" transcontinental highway in the
United States, an idea conceived in 1912 by Carl
Fisher and James Allison, the same gentlemen who
three years earlier gave birth to the famous
Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Lincoln Highway was well
established by the 1920s with its eastern terminus in
Manhattan's Times Square and its western terminus at
the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco's
Lincoln Park, a distance of over 3,400 miles (5,472
km).
This portion of the Lincoln Highway was also
designated US Route 1. In 1925 the United States
Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Public Roads,
established a numbered highway system. The States
were persuaded to voluntarily superimpose this common
numbering system onto their own highways as an aid in
navigation for drivers crossing State lines to
distant points on the continent. Odd numbers
designated routes running north-south and even
numbers for those running east-west. US Route 1
stretches almost 2,400 miles (3,860 km). Its northern
terminus is Fort Kent, Maine, where the road crosses
the border into Canada at a point further north than
Quebec. At its southern terminus, US Route 1 leaps
off the mainland to island-hop 110 miles (180 km)
before reaching Hemingway's Key West, Florida. But
for thirty miles between Trenton, New Jersey and
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Lincoln Highway and US
Route 1 share the same pavement and pass before the
Blue Fountain Diner.
Both the Lincoln Highway and US Route 1 have been
supplanted by newer high-speed roadways designed with
no intersections, with wide shoulders and wide median
strips. These new highways bypass the Blue Fountain
Diner. What is the future of diners? Fast food
restaurants like MacDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell,
and Kentucky Fried Chicken have been drawing away
many customers since the sixties. Also, in the last
forty years many of my countrymen have acquired more
sophisticated tastes. Since more women must work for
a living to maintain households, and more young
adults have larger discretionary incomes, restaurants
have increased tenfold giving the diners further
competition. Where once the Blue Fountain Diner stood
an oasis for the hungry, now it is in a sea of
restaurants.
But what the Blue Fountain Diner remains is a place
to sit long hours with friends. They will not chase
you out unless they're busy and another customer is
waiting for your seat. That doesn't happen often late
at night. It is a place for the anxious, the
desperate, the hardworking, and for exuberant youth.
It is suburbia's enduring community center for the
nocturnal. |