Classic Diners of Massachusetts

By Larry Cultrera

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts was birthplace to the burgeoning "night lunch wagon" manufacturing industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These horse-drawn food carts eventually evolved into classic American diners. For many years, diner builders like the Worcester Lunch Car Company and J.B. Judkins Company operated in the Bay State, while few new diners opened for business after 1960. This left the state with a high concentration of some of the best-preserved diners built during the early to mid-twentieth century, including the Capitol Diner in Lynn, the Route 66 Diner in Springfield and Buddy's Diner in Somerville. Eatery historian Larry Cultrera discusses this appetizing history and the not-be-missed items on unforgettable diner menus.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781625841025

Book preview

Chapter 1

Metropolitan Boston

From the first appearance of the horse-drawn lunch wagons in the late nineteenth century through the turn of the twentieth century, they were prevalent in business and recreational areas in Boston, as well as the surrounding communities. As time went on into the 1910s, some of these roving lunch wagons started interfering with traffic from other horse-drawn vehicles, as well as trolley cars and automobiles. Citing traffic and curfew laws, cities and towns started to curtail the hours of operation of these lunch wagons to the overnight hours, which severely limited the amount of money the lunch wagon proprietors could make.

Some of these enterprising souls saw that they could circumvent the traffic laws by setting their wagon on a sliver of land off-street and continue to operate at all hours. The lunch wagon manufacturers saw that the need for transporting them nightly was starting to change, so they started building the wagons longer and wider. This new larger configuration added more seating and kitchen space to the wagons. Also, at this point in time, eating in a railroad dining car was considered the height of luxury, and the longer lunch wagons were being designed with a strong resemblance to their railroad counterparts. So by the mid-1920s, the term lunch wagon had been supplanted by the term dining car or the shortened version—diner. From that point on, diners started to become full-service restaurants serving breakfast, lunch and dinner.

At one time, there were countless diners in the metropolitan Boston area. From the 1920s through the late 1950s, they seemed to be everywhere! Diners even weathered the Depression of the 1930s fairly well. Production halted during World War II but resumed with a vengeance after 1945, when construction supplies became available. Also, there were many servicemen returning from military duty who wanted to get into the business, and the diner manufacturers did their best to meet the demand. This demand resulted in even more new diners opening in the area. By the mid-1960s, with competition from fast-food restaurants and real estate sometimes becoming more valuable than the business (in this case, diners) that occupied the property, diners started to disappear from the urban landscape little by little. Also, the distance and costs associated with shipping new diners from the factories in New York and New Jersey contributed to the dwindling of diners in northern New