Taking from Teek

Published on Wednesday, 06 July 2011 16:40

Written by Randy Garbin

Vacation for the Family Roadside inevitably includes a little diner hunting and chats with strangers at local bars.

Wurtsboro, New York makes a good jumping point for anyone looking for diners, but you shouldn’t waste any time starting that hunt. They’ve all seen much better days, and some have dubious futures indeed.

The Quickway Diner in Bloomingburg, New York. Great bread pudding and coffee.

It has one of its own, and though it hasn’t served a drop of coffee in at least twenty years, it still fascinates the diner crowd because for years it sported a distinctive renovation from the master Erwin Fedkenhauer, who took a run-​of-​the-​mill Silk City diner and transformed with the flamboyance of a Googie-​style coffee shop. The diner and its newly flared profile sat idle for years and its owners allowed the landscaping to eventually obscure most of the façade, until sometime a few years ago, they decided to “restore” the diner, removing all of Erfed’s work. This, sadly, has left much of the diner effectively exposed to the elements, and diner fanatics such as myself now fret for its future.

The mysterious diner in Wurtsboro, now stripped of its Erfed renovations

Around Wurtsboro, you’ll find two diners to the north, the 209 in Ellenville and the Rainbow Diner in Kerhonkson. To the South, from which we came, we passed by two in Milford, Pennsylvania and one closed and damaged in Westbrookville. To the West, Monticello has three and the previously featured Munson in Liberty.

The splendid interior of the Quickway DinerFinally to the East, just up and over the hill, sits the Quickway Diner in Bloomingdale, an expansive diner complex that has spread out around the original 1940s O’Mahony diner. You can’t miss the diner thanks to the billboards seen along Route 17, telling travelers to “Take it from Teek. Take it from Vee,” accompanied with the floating heads of the two owners. Nearly fifteen years have passed since I stepped through the door, so I took myself there for a bread pudding and a coffee. Though hardly a bell jar example of diner preservation, the Quickway’s interior remains relatively untouched and extremely clean. I left with a happy tummy and a slew of photographs, and then went to finish my solo flight at Danny’s in the heart of Wurtsboro.

Throughout the Northeast and especially in New York and Pennsylvania, a backroads trek usually passes old inn buildings at major crossroads, and in such a place one finds Danny’s. The late 19^th century Victorian structure wears a full suit of vinyl these days, but step inside and experience the knotty pine goodness of a your classic mid-​century supper club and lounge. The menu features plenty of good pub food with a seafood spin, but I just came for a beer and possibly the Phillies game on television.

Beer yes, but this deep inside Yankees territory, Phillies no. Happily, I had my iPhone with the At Bat app that allows me to watch live games. I sat at the busy bar, sipped my beer and took in the game on the tiny screen for a while, when the gentleman with his wife sitting next to me asked if I was watching a live Phillies game. I said yes, and then asked, “Why? Are you a Phillies fan by any chance?”

He didn’t do a Danny Thomas spit take, but he ever-​so-​briefly flashed an expression that implied, “Are you kidding me?” If I forgot where I was, it quickly came back to me.

We went on to talk about the local area, having exactly the conversation a travel writer considers gold. Currently New Jersey residents, the couple come up to the area to vacation as well, but with property in the husband’s family Mr. Yankees Fan knew the region well.

Danny’s, he said, has stayed pretty much the same for a good thirty years or more and does well, but he confirmed my observation about the area’s poor economic prospects. In this part of he country, a debate currently rages about how or whether to extract all the natural gas buried deep inside the Marcellus shale formation that stretches under the Appalachians from the Catskills all they way down to Kentucky. In New York, two of the three affected counties banned it outright, while Sullivan county, the most depressed, imposed a moratorium.

“Didn’t banning gas drilling leave a lot of money on the table?” I asked him. “I mean, I’m concerned about the environment too, but eventually they’ll find a way to do it right.”

“A lot of decisions are made around here based on the fact that we provide most of New York City’s water,” he said. “This tends to kill a lot of economic development.” It would seem that the city of New York would have no objection to turning everything north of it that surrounds its watershed into a national park.

After telling him about our cabin and its location, I pressed, “Do you have any stories you need to tell me?”

With sly smile, he offered only that he thought the lake had become a little overcrowded over the years. While hardly a premier resort destination, I concurred that I thought the properties were a little too bunched together. I got the sense that his own little piece of the Catskills paradise would make my jaw drop.

The talk turned back to baseball. I have my run-​ins with Yankees fans in the past, and while behind enemy lines, I do my best to be diplomatic and keep my opions to myself, but I think it’d kill my mother if I ever wished a Yankees fan good luck with the season. This guy, however, was a class act and we kept the chat friendly.

I related my evolution from a Sox fan into a Phillies fan, and I told him about Faithful, the book I brought with me about the 2004 Red Sox season. Without skipping a beat, he recommended a book called Game 6, about the sixth game of the 1975 World Series. I was only 14 at the time, but I remember the Fisk home run well. Actually, it’s hard to forget since the sports shows trot it out for every World Series highlight reel.

After that unexpectedly gracious expression from a citizen of the Evil Empire, I settled up and we parted ways. “Maybe we’ll bump into each other again next year.”