The great diner extinction

Category: Preservation

Published on Wednesday, 15 February 2012 14:50

Written by Randy Garbin

As a fan of not only diners, but also of design, quality, history, and heritage, few things crush my heart more than seeing that photo of the once-​pristine diner where its owners have seen fit to completely obliterate all those traits that made us fall in love with such places. You cannot, of course, turn back the clock, but if at any moment I wish I had Superman’s powers to reverse time, I would have moved it back a month to just before the point just before the worker applied the crowbar to the Deepwater’s façade.

In the twenty-​odd years of Lou-​Roc-​ian infamy, some have yet to get the message. Some never will, of course, but I have to think that too much of this insult to our landscape comes from simple ignorance. People just don’t know better. Perhaps we spread the message a little too well that we have no one left to do proper and affordable restoration work. When faced with the difficulties of finding the right contractor who will properly restore the diner as opposed a more expedient solution to keep the losses to a minimum, the owner walks the path of least resistance. Plus, when the contractor comes up and sells “modernization” because that’s all they know, the operator with little or no knowledge or appreciation of the diner’s inherent charms and marketing advantages hears a siren song too seductive to resist.

Of course, it doesn’t help matters that those of us who carry this torch don’t actually work in the business. Who’s going to listen to a group of whiney preservationists in numbers too small to fill a Greyhound, and who among themselves can’t even seem to get along?

Frankly, I don’t get that last part of it. I never did. My original goals for Roadside were pretty simple: Get more people to appreciate diners and get them together to speak with one voice. Sadly, some among us have chosen instead to co-​opt this effort for their personal gain, taking more from the community than they have given, and in the process caused a pointless schism that has effectively diminished our collective voice.

For the record, I have made every attempt at inclusion and have gladly shared whatever knowledge I have gained from my travels and efforts on behalf of this preservation effort. I have actively recruited other voices, I have involved myself and Roadside in ongoing efforts to build this community, and I have opened the site to other contributors, giving them access to the audience we’ve built over twenty-​three years of publishing and outreach. I have made the Diner Finder freely available and have sought your participation to keep it the largest and most accurate database of such information. (If you disagree with my claims, I’m all ears. I’ll even buy you lunch.)

I have done all this as part of my personal effort to keep this flow of information running freely, because I see it as the only way to stem what looks to me like a diner holocaust. Unless we establish a more robust network of correspondents, we will continue to find ourselves tragically surprised by the travesties of the Deepwater, the Oasis, the Hollywood, and whatever else currently lurks out there threatening to homogenize our landscape and strip even more joy from our the back roads and Main Streets explorations.

Sometimes preemptive action does work. Back in 1995 when the then-​owner of the Branchburg Diner enthusiastically described his planned renovations to me, I not only pleaded with him to change his mind, but I mounted a media campaign that not only convinced him to reconsider the renovations, it increased his business.

These efforts work, but we have to know in advance to apply the pressure in a more timely fashion, because after they pry away all the stainless and toss it in a dumpster, it’s just too late.

Help stop the madness. When you get word of threatened diner, let us know. Take pictures and send them in. Tell the owner to give me a call, because I know of resources that will help him or her preserve their diners, make more money, and give us all good reasons to stop in for multiple visits. Lou-Roc’ing not only destroys a precious part of our heritage, it’s good money thrown after bad. The financial case can be made, and from experience I can tell you that this is the only argument that 99% of those owners really care about anyway.