After a meeting yesterday, I took a drive down Route 28 in Middleboro, Massachusetts, to check out two diners. The first is Dave’s Diner, one of the newest diners in the state, a 1997 Starlite. It’s a gleaming silver thing, and although I took a few pictures, it’s way too new for me. But what’s really the cut-off point? At what point is a diner too new to be real? And why do I care? I thought about the kids who go there now with their parents. They don’t know or care that this is not a real diner, and when they grow up, this will be a part of their history, just as real to them as the Agawam Diner is to my daughters and the Miss Worcester is to me.
But the truth is, Dave’s Diner is not a real diner in my mind, but a replica, and I’m just not interested in that. So I continued driving down Route 28, and found what I was looking for — Sisson’s Diner, the only converted trolley diner in Massachusetts, a rare item indeed. And, unlike the shiny Dave’s Diner, this one looks old. The car was built in the 1910′s by the Wason Manufacturing Company in Springfield for the Middleborough, Wareham, and Buzzards Bay Railway. When the line shut down in the 1920s, Elmer Sisson bought the car, moved it this site and converted it into a diner. The current owner, Kiriakos ”Nick” Rentumis, bought it in 2006. He’s a native of Greece, and he told the Boston Globe the history of Sisson’s Diner was important to him. ”I came from a world like that,” he said. ”You respect old stuff. You can see buildings in Athens that are thousands and thousands of years old.”
Sisson’s isn’t exactly in the same class as the Acropolis, but it’s a rare and interesting example of roadside architecture, and I’m glad I had a chance to see it.
- Old Trolley Diner is Back on Track — “Historic eatery regains its luster with new owners,” by Christine Wallgren, Boston Globe; February 23, 2006
