Somerset, PA
In Somerset a midnight run to the store or a late night meal may not be as easy to come by as in other towns, due to few 24-hour establishments.

Some businesses that used to be open throughout the night are closing their doors for the night because of less customers.

“Our business did slow down a bit when they changed the laws with drinking,” said Mitzi Foy, owner of Summit Diner in Somerset. “People don’t stay out as late, which was our customer base. When the laws got stricter bars were shutting down earlier and we weren’t getting the same business.”

Foy said since the diner is a family business it was no longer feasible to stay open all night.

Foy’s father, Doug Shaulis, said he remembers when the diner was the only 24-hour restaurant.

“At one time this was the only place open 24 hours,” he said. “With Eat’n Park there’s not enough business for two places during that late at night. It just wasn’t feasible to stay open that long.” v

Wilton, ME
The old Farmington Diner, now boarded up and mothballed, awaits a second chance to become known as a place to go for a good meal at a good price.

In March, its owner, Rachel Jackson-Hodsdon of Wilton, had it hauled to Wilton from Farmington on a flatbed at a cost of $15,000. It now sits on metal beams, covered in plastic and boarded up, on land she owns on Cemetery Road off of U.S. Route 2. The town has given her permission to keep it there temporarily.

Jackson-Hodsdon has had some prior restaurant management experience and is now a grant writer working with non-profit community organizations.

Her dream is to bring the diner home to Farmington.

"I have been offered a place at the Mt. Blue Shopping Center (on Wilton Road in Farmington), but the lease would be very expensive," she said.

"Having the diner there would be a good draw for them. It is amazing at the number of people who have contacted me and said how they much they loved eating there," she said.

As a new diner owner, she has gotten caught up in the mystique and history of these prefabricated eateries that had their heyday from the early 20th century up until the 1970s.

"I've been going to diners like crazy," she said.

She hired a consultant from the non-profit American Diner Museum, an organization in Rhode Island dedicated to restoring diners, to look at the structure and come up with a budget to restore it. The estimate was at least $20,000 and that did not include the cost of a commercial kitchen.

When the vintage factory-built Cheyenne Diner near Penn Station closed last April after 68 years in business, widespread dismay was quickly replaced with hope when a Red Hook man bought it for $5,000 and promised to move the prefab gem across the East River. But it's been almost nine months since the closure, and the diner's gone nowhere because, as it turns out, it's too big to be moved over the Manhattan Bridge, even in two pieces.

The next-best option would be to relocate the Cheyenne to the Brooklyn waterfront via barge; that would require transporting it to a pier on the Hudson River and using cranes to load it and unload it. But new owner Michael O’Connell tells Chelsea Now that's probably cost-prohibitive: "We’re going to see what the financial feasibility is of moving it that way. If not, we’ll just scrap the whole idea of moving it."

By G.E. Lawrence | The Phoenixvile News | Dec. 31, 2008

A hundred years from now they’ll have to believe it, because nobody could ever have made it up.

Through most of the twentieth century and a few years of the twenty-first, Americans dined out, when they could — on home-cooked food. They did so in restaurants the architecture of which evoked the speed of train cars and trolleys — but which were, of course, firmly planted beside roadways. And “patrons” of those restaurants, even those fleeing home for a the anonymity of a public place, became, willy-nilly, part of another kind of family, the restaurant its own kind of home-away-from.

The diner made just as much logical sense as a warm slice of pie, served à la mode, on a frigid night. And was just as indescribably satisfying.

Pat and Charlie Valerio’s stainless steel Paramount version came into this town straight from manufacture in Oakland, New Jersey, by flatbed in 1948. The Vale-Rio diner opened on Thanksgiving that year, and stayed planted —just off Nutt Road and Bridge Street — for 60 years. In 2008, it was back on wheels again, closed, a shell moved to storage.

Pineville Properties, local developers, had entered into an agreement of sale on a two-fer from Francis Puleo and two others: the Fountain Inn at the intersection’s corner, and the land on which the Vale sat. The Inn would be thoroughly rehabbed for Starbucks Coffee Company, the Vale removed or demolished to make way for a Walgreen’s pharmacy. Puleo was given a year to figure out to do with his Vale.

All of Pineville’s municipal approvals were in hand by August, 2007, but the future of the Vale was still uncertain as 2008 began. Staff began to collect and display memorabilia from those sixty years, anticipating the November anniversary, or a closing. Whichever came first.

It had been even for visitors to town a Phoenixvile landmark. But at its center were the real regulars, and the family histories that could be wrapped around that building. “The only things we haven’t had here [are] the birth of a child or a death in front of us,” staffer Helen Jackson to The Phoenix’s Brian McCarthy.