The Albany Business Review | June 19, 2009

A deteriorating railroad car diner in downtown Schenectady is once again for sale after a local construction company withdrew from the project.

Ed Zemeck, president of Prize Construction in Niskayuna, said he couldn’t pursue renovations of the Silver Diner on Erie Boulevard because his hands were tied by the city.

“Basically the city and Metroplex [Development Authority] didn’t fulfill some of the things they said they would do,” Zemeck said.

Photo by Ron Dylewski

Metroplex Development Authority Chairman Ray Gillen said he didn’t want to get into a “tit for tat” with Zemeck over the project. He said the city and Metroplex needed to see progress on the structural repairs because the building probably can’t survive another winter.

“I think it was a bunch of different issues that came together,” Gillen said. “We made a lot of concessions to him along the way.”

City officials a year ago announced a deal with Prize Construction in which the company would purchase the old rail car for $1, maintain its art-deco styling and restore the interior as its new office.

The long-term plan was to eventually open a diner, recalling the days when General Electric Co. workers from the nearby factories would line the counter and fill the booths.

By Jim Balow | West Virginia Gazette | June 10, 2009

Charleston, WV
Sixteen years after a city agency bought and razed the old Holley Hotel, a developer has finally been found to do something with the mid-town parking lot.

It won't become the offices for an energy company or a new hotel, although there was serious interest in both projects in recent years, Charleston Urban Renewal Authority Director Pat Brown said.

Photo by Ron Dylewski

And while one observer called that a missed an opportunity to do much more with site, Brown and Mayor Danny Jones said there were no other options.

CURA members named JDL Castle Corp. as the designated developer of the CURA-owned property just west of the Quarrier Diner, once the site of the Holley and the Worthy hotels.

CURA bought the hotels from the late Frankie Veltri, tore them down and paved the sites as a parking lot while waiting for someone to redevelop the property. The agency is asking $1.47 million, or $35 per square foot, for the site -- a little less than an acre.

Two developers, both with identical proposals to build 20,000-square-foot offices for the FBI, responded after CURA advertised the site a month ago, Brown said. But only one of them appeared at the CURA meeting Wednesday. Gary L. Cobb of West Second Street Associates was a no-show.

CURA members agreed nevertheless to give Cobb a second chance. "If he wants to come and make a presentation in the next few days, we could designate both as developers," Brown said. In that case, CURA would let the federal General Services Administration choose the final developer.

Dewitt Blundon of Old Colony realty in Charleston said he has been helping JDL Castle look for FBI sites here for about two years. The FBI has outgrown its existing rented offices in One Bridge Place, and new security restrictions mean the agency needs to been in its own building, said Brice Shearburn of JDL Castle.

Because of the security rules, the building will be set back 30 feet from Quarrier Street, Shearburn said. The offices will be on the second floor, with enclosed parking on the first level.

Brown asked what else would be located on the ground floor besides parking. A site plan shows that parking would take up only about half the ground floor.

Shearburn said he couldn't go into detail. "Expansion and room for radio and electronic equipment. By agreement, we don't show specifics of the interior."

As proposed to CURA, the building would also require the purchase and demolition of the former Quarrier Diner.>/strong>

By Hugh Martin | The LA Times | June 5, 2009

The gig: Co-owners of the Pink's hot dog stand. Richard Pink, 65, his sister, Beverly Pink Wolf, and his wife, Gloria Pink, inherited the stand near the corner of Melrose Avenue and La Brea Boulevard in Hollywood from Richard and Beverly's parents. Richard Pink, a real estate lawyer for ING Real Estate, holds the title of president. His wife, Gloria, oversees operations and promotions. The family took the business from a humble pushcart in a weed-choked lot to a Hollywood landmark.

The eatery seats a maximum of 80 people but serves as many as 2,500 hot dogs and nearly 170 pounds of chili a day. The wait time to order a meal ranges from a few minutes to two hours or more, depending on the time of day.

How did it all start? When Romanian immigrant Isadore Pinkowitz landed on Ellis Island in the early 1900s, immigration officials shortened and "Americanized" his name to Pink. Fast forward to the Great Depression. Isadore's son, Paul Pink, and his wife, Betty, bought a pushcart for $50 and began a hot dog business on the corner of La Brea and Melrose. When the landlord raised the monthly rent from $15 to $25, the couple bought the land and, in 1946, built the eatery that sits on that same corner today.

How did Pink's get the Hollywood crowd to line up for the dogs? Richard Pink, his wife and sister were sitting around a kitchen table in 1998 trying to devise ways to drum up publicity for the upcoming 60th anniversary. They decided to invite celebrities to work behind the counter, with all the profit going to charity.

"Anything in L.A. that is connected to Hollywood is very important," Richard Pink said.

Groton, CT
The Oh Boy! Diner across from Wal-Mart on Route 184 closed suddenly Monday, leaving scores of regular customers wondering what happened and an estimated 30 to 40 employees out of a job - at least temporarily.

”There was no warning, no nothing,” said Jennifer Wilson of Groton, a single mother with two children who had waitressed at the diner on Fridays and Saturdays for the past few months.

”Some guys came in and just sent everyone home,” said another former employee, who asked not to be identified in case he had a chance to be hired back.

The 24-hour eatery, at the site of the former Rosie's Diner, is expected to reopen in about three weeks as an Italian bistro, former employees said. Aimee Nix, the diner manager who said she will take on multiple roles in the new bistro, added that the eatery will still be open for breakfast.

”We're looking to keep the good employees, the ones who were dedicated to the company,” she said.

Oh Boy! Diner had been owned by John D'Angelo, who has decided to relocate to Texas, according to employees. According to several sources, the business has been sold to Tony D'Angelo, who currently operates the popular New London restaurant Tony D's.

A Greek diner that closed over the weekend after serving as a late-night refuge for patients and staff at Bellevue Hospital Center since 1984 will be able to reopen, and will not be supplanted by an Au Bon Pain, as some had feared.

The city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs Bellevue, reached an agreement Tuesday night with the family that owns the diner, the Tower Cafe, whose contract had expired on Saturday. The new agreement allows it to continue operating for at least three years. As The Times reported in March, the diner reduced its hours in January, seven months after Au Bon Pain won a contract to open a kiosk selling sandwiches, croissants and other food items under the glass tent of the I. M. Pei-designed lobby. The chain was also seeking to operate the dining concession.

The decision to reach a new agreement with the diner came as City Councilman David I. Weprin, a Queens Democrat who is chairman of the Council’s Finance Committee and is a candidate for city comptroller, held a news conference questioning the hospital system’s deals with Au Bon Pain and calling for an audit by the state comptroller.

Mr. Weprin and other critics, including Councilman Daniel R. Garodnick, whose district includes Bellevue, raised questions about the Health and Hospitals Corporation’s decision to award Au Bon Pain similar contracts at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx and Coney Island Hospital in Brooklyn.

The Prepis family, which owns the Tower Cafe, offered a competing proposal for the kiosk contract, which Au Bon Pain won last June. The family asserted that it lost the competition even though it offered superior terms, and also accused the hospitals agency of unfairly favoring Au Bon Pain.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | June 2, 2009

One of the three Park Classic Diners that Eat'n Park closed has been sold, and its site in Monroeville will become a CVS Pharmacy.

Orion Development RA LXII LLC of Weirton, W.Va., bought the site at 3893 William Penn Highway from Eat'n Park Hospitality Group Inc. under a $1 affidavit, but the deed filed in Allegheny County showed a sales price of $1.925 million.

Construction on the CVS should begin by year's end, with a summer 2010 opening, said Mike DeAngeles, a CVS spokesman. The other closed diners are in Jeannette and Boardman, Ohio.

With its peeling paint, the rusty old stainless steel and porcelain diner on Joseph Merli's five-acre property on Route 20 might be mistaken for an eyesore.

But to Merli, the 40-by-14 foot eatery he acquired from the village for $1 fits perfectly into his 1940s-themed Canal Street Station Village Museum.

Renamed the Miss New York Central Diner, the structure will go nicely, he said, in front of the General Store at what will be the intersection of Market and Canal Streets, next to a charcoal gray restored locomotive. Before that happens, he and friends will spend at least a year refurbishing the former Country Side Diner, once a popular gathering place along Routes 9 and 20, Schodack.

Some of the bigger projects will include adding a complete kitchen with an old monitor-top General Electric refrigerator, steel cabinets and washbasin sinks. The renovations will be in sync with the time period.

"I feel like I'm putting something back in America, representing the craftsman, and a time gone by that a lot of people remember," said Merli, 58, a carriage builder by trade.

The diner closed about four years ago and was removed to make way for a new diner, Merli said.

By Frank Juliano | Connecticut Post | June 1, 2009

The Milford Diner won't be demolished and will likely stay in its current downtown location, the owner said Friday.

"I've talked to a number of people who want to save it. That's what they want, that's what I want and it sounds like that's what the city wants,'' Bill DaSilva said. Although the demolition permit he was issued would allow him to remove the diner's wooden kitchen annex at any time, DaSilva said even that section will be spared.

The 1940s-vintage, chrome-trimmed diner has been closed more than five years, since the last owner retired. DaSilva, who also owns the SBC Restaurant across the parking lot from the diner, originally wanted to remove it.

"It's never going to be a diner again,'' he said, "but I'm open to ideas on what to do with it.''

The Economic Development Commission voted last week to invite DaSilva to a special meeting to "brainstorm'' about the diner. That meeting hadn't been scheduled by Friday afternoon.

The need for a modern kitchen and handicapped-accessible lavatories would make serving food in the diner unfeasible, officials said. Commissioners expressed a strong interest in seeing the small but distinctive building used as a tourist center, even if it had to be relocated elsewhere downtown.

Not long after dawn on my second day in Boulder City, Nev., I was on a rented bicycle heading for Hemenway Park, where I was told I might spy bighorn sheep grazing near the playground. I didn’t find the sheep, but I did run headlong into herds of much bigger game that Boulder City is hoping to catch.

My route sent me to an exit for a bypass that lets those heading for Hoover Dam, six miles away, avoid Boulder City’s business district, and as I waited at a light I watched no fewer than five packed buses from Las Vegas drive by.

At the dam, they would snap photos and buy souvenirs and, perhaps, journey to the west rim of the Grand Canyon two hours farther. But then they’d almost certainly go straight back to the Strip, never knowing how close they had come to a place so unlike anything else in southern Nevada.

Had those travelers gone straight instead of turning left onto the bypass, they would have encountered what, having just left a city famous for reproductions of the Eiffel Tower and the Manhattan skyline, could easily appear as yet another theme park — in this case, Main Street U.S.A.