Robbins Dining Car, circa
1920s, North Weymouth, Mass.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. - The diner is at the center of a new museum
exhibit in Providence, which also happens to be the birthplace of
this fixture on the American landscape. The major new show
currently on view through June 2008 at the Culinary Archives
& Museum at Johnson & Wales University is "Diners: Still
Cookin' in the 21st Century."
Curated by diner authority Richard J.S. Gutman, a Massachusetts
architect, the diner exhibit traces the streamlined lineage of
diners from their Nineteenth Century origins as wheeled wagons in
Providence to their ubiquitous presence alongside roads and
highways today.
Entering through a gleaming stainless steel and neon portal
(fabricated by Kullman Industries, Inc, a New Jersey concern
making diners since 1927), visitors to the exhibit enter the
world of diners, as they were and as they are. Drawn from the
14,000-item collection of Gutman and his wife, Kellie O. Gutman,
there are dozens of images and artifacts, including giant neon
signs, stereo slides in a 3-D viewer, models, stools, wheels and
a video documentary on breakfast in a neighborhood diner.
They all serve to trace the origins of lunch wagons, as they were
then called in 1872, and their evolution into the familiar and
comforting institutions they have become. The exhibit panels, as
fashioned by the firm of Malcolm Great Designers, offer rarely
seen, evocative views of how the world has changed in the past
century and a quarter, and how diners kept pace with those
changes.
From the earliest days of "meals on wheels" on through the golden
age of streamlined stainless steel, the exhibit informs viewers
on how construction technology enabled diners to become larger
yet still able to be transported fully constructed. The more
singular designs of the 1960s, from colonial to space age, reveal
that diners, like many people of that decade, preferred to dance
to the beat of a different drummer. After diners were
"rediscovered" in the 1970s, they returned to the reassuring look
and feel of the golden days.
The exhibit also introduces the pioneers of the diner phenomenon:
Walter Scott, the sometime peddler who first hitched a horse to a
wagon and sold sandwiches to the night shift; unemployed engineer
Sam Jones, who first brought customers inside his wagon to eat;
Charles Palmer, the father of drive-thru; former janitor Thomas
H. Buckley, whose tireless promotion popularized the whole
concept and won him the crown of "Lunch Wagon King"; Patrick J.
Tierney, who bestowed on the enterprises electric lights and
toilets; and Jerry O'Mahony, who "built 'em big, built 'em
strong," and built 'em looking much like they do today.
The Culinary Archives & Museum is at 315 Harborside
Boulevard. For information, 401-598-2805 or culinary.org.
