Farmington, ME
A national organization is interested in finding a new home for the Farmington Diner.

The diner has been at the same location on Main Street across from Hippach Field since the 1960s, but it may be razed to make way for a new Farmington Rite Aid. The development is under review by the Planning Board, and a public hearing on the plans is set for 7 p.m. June 11 at the Farmington Municipal Building.

The American Diner Museum is a nonprofit organization based in Providence, R.I.

"We have saved 24 diners in the past five years," said museum President Donald Zilka. "We have either rescued them ourselves or put them on our Web site for sale and connected interested buyers and sellers."

Diners were designed to be portable and once any additions or roofs are cut away, they can be lifted onto a flatbed and hauled to another site and set on a pad, Zilka said.

"There are only a finite number of these left because the last companies that manufactured them went out of business in the 1980s," Zilka said Monday. "We have been seeing a resurgence of interest in them."

Pittsfield, MA
Adrien Chalifoux, 77, the founder of Adrien's Diner on Wahconah Street, a popular late-night eatery, was struck by a car and killed in front of his home last night, just feet from the old-school diner that bears his name.

The accident happened around 6:30, when a maroon Ford driven by William M. Shepard, 66, of North Adams was traveling toward North Street on Wahconah and veered out of the lane, striking Chalifoux.

Witnesses said Chalifoux was getting into a dark blue Ford Explorer with Connecticut plates when Shepard's car smashed into him, pinning him between the two vehicles.

Drive-in theaters may be a thing of the past, but one is still alive in Barstow.

Many Barstow and Victor Valley residents get their fix of old-fashioned movie nostalgia at the Skyline Drive-in, located just off Interstate 15 on Old Highway 58.

Here, they get the thrill of seeing two big-screen feature films for the price of one in the privacy and comfort of their own cars. “It’s great to step back in time every once in a while and see a great double-feature at the Skyline Drive-in,” said John Hayes of Apple Valley. “I love the nostalgic feeling.”

To some, it is a ritual: Inflate portable mattresses; remove seats (if you can); dress in comfy clothes or pajamas; bring sleeping bags, blankets and pillows; and pack snacks and soda.

Vaughn Morrison has lost his battle to keep open his restaurant, Dodie's Highland Cafe in Akron's Highland Square neighborhood.

A decision issued by Summit County Common Pleas Court Magistrate John Shoemaker on Friday declared that Morrison no longer had any rights to the West Market Street building that housed Dodie's, effective the close of business on Friday.

``We have to be closed by the end of the day,'' Morrison said Friday.

However, by late afternoon, after several protesters had gathered in front of the restaurant, Morrison said he had gotten a stay of Shoemaker's order so that he could stay open until June 22.

Building owner Alex Perry said no such stay was given and expressed frustration that Morrison was being defiant in the face of a court order.

``He's going against judge-ordered mandates even as we speak,'' Perry said.

At the latest, Dodie's will be closed and Morrison gone from the property by June 22.

Named after the vessel that carried explorer Henry Hudson and his seafaring crew to the New World back in 1609, the Halfmoon Diner & Restaurant is certainly not blazing any new trails.

Backed by an oversized hard-cover menu, the Halfmoon Diner offers an exhaustive range of dining options. You know the drill. If you desire baked scrod at noon on a Thursday, you can get that here. Need a salami omelet, The Halfmoon Diner is your place. How about a tuna salad and sliced egg triple-decker sandwich? Yep, you can get that, too. The options are as wide and vast as the deep blue sea.

A quick aside for you diner aficionados out there: the Halfmoon Diner is a late model DeRaffele construction. Unlike many pre-fab diner makers, the New Rochelle-based DeRaffele Manufacturing Co. is still up and running. The Halfmoon Diner is just one of its many creations.

The decor is vintage 1970s diner.

By Josh Brogadir | WNEP-TV | May 24, 2007

A months-old smoking ban in Scranton is history. A magistrate dropped charges against a popular diner and the city's enforcement officers will not be handing out anymore smoking citations.

First Chick's Diner owners were told they had to stop patrons from smoking in their diner. Now they and other restaurants are being told that the city's smoking ban is unenforceable.

Four and a half months after the city of Scranton said "no" to lighting up at most bars and restaurants, the smoking ban is effectively lifted.

Last month, the owners of Chick's Diner on Moosic Street were fined 4300 each. They later challenged the ban and filed a lawsuit against the city.

Commonwealth court ruled that local government in the Pittsburgh area can not supercede the 1988 Pennsylvania Clean Indoor Air Act with a smoking ban, and that includes Scranton.

Northwestern Pennsylvania lost one of its bigger summertime attractions yesterday when cash-poor Conneaut Lake Park decided it will not open this year.

The 115-year-old amusement park in Crawford County typically drew about 150,000 visitors from the end of May to Labor Day. It also provided 200 teenagers with summer jobs.

"This is a disastrous day. We're saddened," George Deshner, the park's director of operations, said after announcing that the season had been scrapped.

The park is $2.3 million in debt and prohibited by a judge from borrowing any more money. It had hinged its hopes on finding a benefactor who would donate at least $100,000 to get the season started.

A gift that large would have enabled the park to open some of its rides, its restaurants and its historic hotel, Mr. Deshner said. But so dire are the park's finances that it would not have been able to afford repairs for its best-known attraction, the Blue Streak Roller Coaster.

Even Leigh Rzasa Ormes, the owner of Jeep 17 in Paramus, admits that it's an odd turn of events to have her business move onto the site of the old Forum Diner, a 40-year-old restaurant on Route 4.

More than two years ago, Ormes and her husband, Kevin, embarked on a reconnaissance mission in Paramus, looking for a site within the borough to relocate their booming dealership. They stopped for lunch at the Forum, where they overheard customers at the next table discussing the owner's desire to lease the restaurant.

From that day on, Ormes said, she and her husband befriended Steve and Angelo Yannitsadis, the owners of the diner property. Ormes worked with the brothers and Ted Laoudis, the owner of the diner itself, and eventually negotiated a 50-year lease agreement for the property.

The shift by Jeep to Route 4 from Route 17 will raise the dealership's profile, and Ormes says, double its traffic count to 120,000 vehicles a day. Jeep 17 has annual sales of $42 million, said Kevin Ormes.

The Forum Diner, which the Yannitsadis brothers built in 1967, shut its doors in the first week of April. By early 2008, it will be demolished to make way for Jeep 17's new dealership: a 25,000-square-foot building and "state-of-the-art service center," Ormes said.

Cranston, RI
The Cranston High School West campus expanded by one building over the weekend — and this new classroom is more than 80 years old.

On Saturday, the old dining car that had long been the front half the popular eatery Johnny B’s was hoisted from its home on Cranston Street and trundled to the school grounds, where it will be a hands-on laboratory for students in the residential construction program at the Cranston Area Career and Technical Center.

“We thought it would be a wonderful project for the entire school, starting with the construction students who are going to restore it,” Suzanne Coutu, director of the regional vocational school, said yesterday. “They’ll be learning construction, but because this dining car dates back to the 1920s, the process will be very different than building something new and they will be learning many other skills such as historical investigation.”