Since the beginning of the 20th Century, Diners have been prefabricated by a number of manufacturers, most in New Jersey, and are delivered fully assembled (or broken into smaller slices for ease of transport) and ready to go. You need to walk up a few steps to enter a Diner. Breakfast is the big meal here, usually served all day. At other mealtimes the menu is supplemented with simple, hearty fare: homemade meat loaf, real mashed potatoes, string beans straight from Le Can, homemade squash pie, and a bottomless mug of coffee; as opposed to grilled medallions of veal with capers and lemon butter sauce, served with mixed field greens (aka "weeds"), a side of boiled New Potatoes (as opposed to Old Potatoes), and a nice Cabernet Sauvignon, all artistically presented in an elegant setting for only $54.95. Diners are egalitarian by nature: where else but in a Diner will you find a construction worker, a tie-wearing businessman, a tye-dyed Deadhead, and a leather-clad biker, all sitting elbow-to-elbow at the counter, wolfing down American Chop Suey and trading insults with the waitress?   from Diner 66

The American diner, Everyman's eatery, is slowly disappearing. There are perhaps half as many diners today as there were in the 1940s. The survivors, oldtimers with their silver exteriors and Formica ceilings, their steamy windows and wisecracking waitresses, diners like the New Englander, are still found primarily on Main Streets and their tributaries in industrial Eastern Cities. But they have failed to keep up with the times, it is said. They are not now.

It is difficult to define a diner with precision. Technically, and only technically, it is a factory-built restaurant transported to its site either intact or in sections, and it has a counter. And that's it. But everyone knows that a diner is much more than that. It's a place of practicality where the hallmarks are good and ample-if not fancy-food, friendly prices and quick service. Diners are unpretentious, comfortable and tolerant places where nobody holds it against you if you don't wear a tie, or if you do. The owner, in all likelihood a Greek, can usually be found in the kitchen or at the grill. And the waitress calls you Hon.

Diners may also be distinguished from other restaurants by what they don't have: reservations, wine lists, candles, a maitre d' in a tux, plastic flowers in Perrier bottles and please-wait-to-be-seated signs. There are places with some of these amenities that call themselves diners, to be sure, places that also fit the technical definition of being constructed off-site. These are the Colonial, Mediterranean or contemporary diner-restaurants that have flowered on suburban boulevards in the past 20 years. Diner buffs, a small but passionate band, looked askance at these mutants when they first materialized in the 1960s, but most have now adopted an attitude of benign tolerance.

In the past few years diner aficionados have discerned an even more startling development: diners have become chic, fashionable, marketable as a "concept." Stylist eating places in several cities now feature a diner "look" without diner prices. 

Diners are uniquely American. They are a product of our culture, our energy, our tempo and our style; it was here that they were invented, evolving from wheeled lunch wagons to stainless-steel "streamliners" to today's roadside palazzi, and here alone that they flourished. Their numbers and popularity have always been greatest in the Northeast because that's where the manufacturers were and are; at one time or another as many as 20 companies built diners, but now only four do. The buffs know the great diner towns-Worcester, Syracuse, Providence-and the great diner highways, like Route 22 in northwestern New Jersey.

A case can be made that diners reflect the American character. "They help define us," says David Slovic, a Philadelphia architect who collaborated with diner historian Richard Gutman on the splendid book American Diner. "They exemplify many of the best American qualities: free enterprise and entrepreneurship, mobility, our love of gadgets and machines-they were fitted out like a ship with everything in its place-the emphasis on convenience and, most of all, democracy. The diner is everybody's kitchen."

The diner business has appealed to immigrants. "Diners were a step into the American dream," declares investment banker Douglas Yorke, a longtime buff. "The roadside was a route to business success." Even now, when a new diner-restaurant often represents a $1 million investment, most of the buyers are ambitious Greek-Americans who are willing to work till they drop. "Several of them will get together and buy a diner," Mike Kelker says. "One will be the chef, another the short-order cook, one of the wives will be the cashier. They'll work constantly, take their meals at the diner and sometimes sleep in the basement until they start to pay it off."

In an age of cookie-cutter uniformity on the roadside, diners are stubbornly individualistic. Though nominally mass-produced, each diner was in fact as customized original with its own distinct blend of design, colors, equipment and features. Stools, tiling, windows, the sign, the enamel strips outside-almost anything could vary. Time and the owner's personality enhanced the differences until no two were alike. 

Diner history, Richard Gutman tells us, began in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1872, when the founding father, a Yankee entrepreneur named Walter Scott, started dispensing homemade five-cent sandwiches and pies and 30-cent chicken plates nightly from a horse-drawn lunch wagon. Scott's inspiration proved so popular that a satisfied customer named Sam Jones copied the idea when he moved from Providence to Worcester in 1884, and expanded it by inviting the customers inside. Worcester was a good diner town even then, and Jones soon built a fleet of wagons fitted with ornamental stained-glass windows.

The lunch wagon's next leap forward was mass production, introduced by a wide-awake Worcester manufacturer named Thomas H. Buckley, who became known as the "Lunch Wagon King." His wheeled "White House Cafes" were marvels of intricate woodwork, mural-covered exteriors and stained-glass depictions of the Presidents. They efficiently deployed kitchen, stools and counter in a cart that was only 16 feet long and seven feet high.

Buckley's wagons were wheeled into combat in the war against demon rum in the 1890s when New York City's Church Temperance Society bought several in a campaign to lure besotted patrons away from saloons offering "free" lunches. But this moralistic interlude was followed by a descent into unsavory repute when scores of decrepit old horse-drawn trolleys, rendered obsolete by electric streetcars, were converted to food wagons. The begrimed ex-trolleys and their seedy clientele "set many a virgin heart a-shudder," The Diner magazine reported, and tarnished the nascent diners with a stigma that persisted for decades.

It was Patrick J. (Pop) Tierney, a mercantile genius from New Rochelle, New York, who restored the diner's respectability and transformed diner making into big business. Tierney was the diner industry's great innovator. He built neat, state-of-the-art units so efficiently that before long his plant was completing a diner a day. He sold them on credit and financed the buyers himself, a practice still followed by diner builders. Instead of lunch wagons, Tierney called them "dining cars" and "diners," thus linking them to Americans' love affair with railroads. He is also esteemed by diner chroniclers as "the man who brought the toilet inside." Tierney was a millionaire when he died in 1917; his death, awkwardly enough, was attributed to "acute indigestion" after a diner meal.

In the 1920s and '30s, diners plunged into the American mainstream. "Booths for ladies" appeared in a bid for the family trade; the ladies didn't care for stools. The wheels that the builders included were often removed or covered as diners settled on permanent sites. 

Diners reached full throttle just before and after World War II. New materials like stainless steel and Formica gave the eateries a snappy modern look, and the popular "streamliner" style gave them dazzle and dash. Builders began making them in sections in 1941, upping capacity and thus profit. By 1948, 13 manufacturers were producing 250 diners annually at an average price of $36,000, the Saturday Evening Post reported, and the average check was 50 cents.

The long downhill slide began in the late 1950s. Fast-food restaurants appeared, displacing diners as the prime purveyors of cheap meals to those in a hurry, and the diners' blue-collar faithfuls began to abandon downtown and their downtown haunts for the suburbs. "Diners didn't keep up with the times," David Slovic says. "The little towns in New Jersey and Pennsylvania wanted a McDonald's as a sign they were making it." Diners had never made serious inroads in the Midwest, West or South, and now it was too late to try; shipping costs were prohibitive.

A dwindling rear guard of builders fought back by switching to larger, brick- and stone-sided "diner-restaurants" in the 1960s and '70s. Diners didn't look like diners anymore, and even the name didn't quite fit; one longtime manufacturer now calls its products "modular restaurants." The cost valued upward to its current perch at about $800,000. Diner makers claim that their new-look "dinerants" are serving more people than ever, but the number of diners in operation has dwindled from around 6,700 in 1940 to 2,336 last year. 

Excerpts from an article by Donald Dale Jackson

ia arts and music