I love roaming around through the amazing collection of public domain books on the Internet Archive, but there’s no good way to search just the illustrations within the books. I have been copying some of the images and posting them to Flickr, linking back to the Internet Archive book record both as a credit and for more information.

Right now I am working with James Arthur Ambler’s Worcester Illustrated from 1875, which has lots of pictures of commercial buildings, factories and more. The size and quality of my images vary as I experiment with using different versions of the Internet Archive files and different ways to make copies. I’m also fooling around with the files a bit, straightening and cropping them, doing minor color correction and adding borders. I’m not very good at this, but I’m not going to worry about it. I feel like I am making these images more findable and more shareable, and that even at their worst they are way better than noting.

I am putting these in a Flickr set called Worcester History Images along with some of my scanned old Worcester postcards. When I have time, I’d like to get these into a real database, put them on a Google map, do some then-and-now photographs, etc. But right now, I just want to get these out there so they can be search and found, so someone might find a picture of the factory where his great grandfather worked, or the school his great-great-grandmother attended.

This slim volume from Arcadia’s Images of America series is a collection of old photographs, advertisements, articles, menus, matchbooks and other documents and memorabilia about The Worcester Lunch Car Company and some of the 651 diners they made during 55 years in business. Gutman, who is the author of American Diner Then and Now, interviewed some of the key personnel from the diner manufacturer before they died, and had access to the company archives preserved at the Worcester Historical Society, as well as his own collection of photographs from decades of road trips and research.

There’s an introduction and each chapter opens with a page of text, but the book is mostly a scrapbook of images, with meticulous descriptive captions to provide context. There are some fascinating photographs of diners under construction at the factory and diners being moved to their new locations, and there are pictures of diner people as well — factory employees, owners, cooks and customers.

My favorite page in the book shows one of artist John Baeder’s paintings of the late great Worcester diner, “Alice and the Hat.” I used to pass this all the time on the bus, and the name intrigued me. “Alice” I could certainly picture, but who or what was “the Hat”? The front of the diner shows the hat, one of those hats men are always wearing in old movies from the thirties and forties. Eventually I learned that Alice and the Hat were a couple — she ran the diner, and he was a sportswriter for the Worcester Telegram whose nickname was the Hat. I loved thinking about Alice and the Hat, and all the tales that must have been told in that diner! This book has an old photograph of the interior of Alice and the Hat, showing the Hat himself sitting at the counter with a cup of coffee and one of his newspaper pals. He doesn’t quite look the way I pictured him, which was as William Powell, but it’s still great to have this glimpse into the past. Sadly, the Alice and the Hat diner was bricked over and turned into a real estate office.

I am really enjoying this unique collection of diner images, and just wish I could see more!

Link

• Diners: Still Cookin’ in the 21st Century — “An exhibit of diner history from the collection of Richard J. S. Gutman” at the Culinary Archive and Museum at Johnson and Wales University, Providence, Rhode Island, through June, 2008.

Our family moved to Worcester when I was ten, after my father died, and the Miss Worcester Diner became just an ordinary sight, one of those places you pass all the time on the way somewhere else, the punchline of occasional jokes. It wasn’t until I left Worcester that I came to appreciate the Miss Worcester and its unique role in the diner world. It was across the street from the Worcester Lunch Car Company’s factory, and it served as the company’s showpiece and model.

A few years ago, I was sad to hear that the Miss Worcester was closed and its future was in doubt, and happy to hear that its ownership had been worked out, and the diner had been restored and was open once again, and I was glad to have a chance to go take a few pictures. I definitely need to go back soon to have a meal there, and take some interior shots.

The Miss Worcester Diner is now officially known as B.K.’s Miss Worcester Diner, and it’s Worcester Lunch Car Company #817.

• A new crown for the Miss Worcester — An article by Chet Williamson about the restoration and reopening of the Miss Worcester Diner (Worcester Magazine, March 23 – 29, 2006)
• Miss Worcester Diner: Worcester, MA — A review with photographs from the Dinersaur blog
• Worcester’s Own: Diners — A brief history of diners in Worcester from the Worcester Historical Museum