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The
First Diners |
July
2002
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The
first diner started as a horse-drawn lunch mobile in Providence,
Rhode Island around 1872. The owner would travel from factory
to factory selling cheap, quickly made food to workers. He
achieved instant success, and soon many other people copied
the idea.
What
did the lunch wagon serve? You could have ordered boiled
eggs and sliced bread for 5 cents or sliced chicken for
30 cents. You could also order a "chewed sandwich." It
wasn't actually chewed, but made out of finely chopped
scraps of meat mixed with mustard and served on bread. |
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The
lunch mobile spread throughout the northeast, where many factories
operated. The original Club Diner in South Jersey started as
a horse-drawn lunch mobile. In the early twentieth century,
the owners stopped driving the carts and parked them on empty
spaces along the street, so they could put in bigger kitchens.
Unlike
regular restaurants, diners are prefabricated; they are built
at a factory then delivered and set up on site. That's why
you need to walk up steps to get inside. The first man to mass-produce
diners was Patrick J. Tierney. He named them dining cars after
the popular Pullman dining cars found on trains. Diners were
built to resemble train cars in hopes of capitalizing on this
popularity. Tierney died from indigestion, and rumors still
say that it was after eating food at one of his own diners.
Next: Growing
Popularity
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