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."

Some states are putting their remaining diners on the National Registry of Historic Places, he said. The museum just facilitated a sale that sent a diner from Rhode Island to a tiny town near ski resorts in Park City, Utah, where townspeople hope to attract tourists. Zilka said the sale price was $30,000, and it cost $33,000 to have the diner hauled across the country.

From photos of the Farmington Diner that ran with a recent story in the Morning Sentinel, Zilka was able to identify it as one manufactured by the Mountainview Diner Co. in New Jersey, probably before 1948.

According to Diner City, the online guide to classic American Diners, there are three other diners in Maine that were manufactured between the 1930s and 1980s: the Brunswick Diner, Moody's Diner in Waldoboro, and the Palace Diner in Biddeford.

Attempts by the museum to contact Brian Wood, the manager of the Farmington Diner, have not been successful, Zilka said.

"That is not unusual," Zilka said. "Sometimes people just want to sell them and be done with it."

Messages left for the owner, Russell Wood, in Florida, were not returned Monday.

The owner of record of the property is Michael Grimanis, who ran the diner for more than 20 years until 2004 and holds the mortgage. His wife, Rose, on Monday said any decision on the diner's fate is up to Russell Wood. Zilka, an architectural historian, said that if the owner is not interested in preserving the diner, the museum would contact Rite Aid after the sale goes through. He said he has worked with Wendy's and Walgreen's in saving other diners destined for demolition.

"It can be a good public relations move for these big chains to show the community they want to help preserve local history," Zilka said.

Originally published online here: http://morningsentinel.mainetoday.com/news/local/3968049.html