By Susan M. Cover | Kennebec Journal | Jan. 5, 2009

Vassalboro, ME
Neighbors who live near the Grand View Motel, which could soon offer a grand view of another sort, offered mixed opinions Sunday on a proposal to turn the old motel into a coffee shop with topless waitresses. Members of the Vassalboro Planning Board on Tuesday will consider Donald Crabtree of Ellsworth's request for a business permit. Crabtree, who was working inside the building on Sunday, said he did not want to talk about his proposal prior to the meeting.

"I'd rather not talk," he said. "Not right now."

The former motel, which has been the site of many business ventures in the last several years, is on Route 3 just over the Augusta line. It was most recently Mac Daddy's Pub at the Fat Cat Grille, which closed three or four years ago, said Planning Board Chairwoman Virginia Brackett.

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."