My father made one last trip to the Capital City diner, on this, its last day.
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– Michael G. Stewart

The Capital City diner, located at 1050 Bladensburg Rd. NE Washington DC, is set to close this weekend.

Friends,

We sincerely appreciate your support, patronage, and– most of all– friendship over the past two years. You’re more than customers; you’re our friends and neighbors.

Although we received positive response to our recent improvements, we also encountered rising costs, a declining economy, and a national chain “diner” restaurant opening almost a stone’s throw away. Now, we must refocus and reformat our restaurant to move forward.

This weekend, we’ll open from 7am until 6pm on Saturday and Sunday so that we can meet up one last time to say good-bye before we close to reformat and improve our concept.

Again, thank you for your support and encouragement, we’d love to see you one last time at the old diner to say good-bye this weekend.

Sincerely,

Matt & the Capital City Diner crew
diner@capitalcitydiner.com

The White House Lunch opened in Cumberland, Maryland in 1904, originally sited at the corner of Liberty St. and Baltimore St. In 1905 it moved nearly one block to an address near the corner of North Liberty St and Frederick St. It may have shuffled over a lot or two in 1907 to accommodate the offices of Charles. H. Wolford, but it didn’t go far, remaining roughly at 41 North Liberty Street until 1919.

The Lunch Wagon was owned by George A. Wadsworth and his soon Lloyd F. Wadsworth, who took over the business upon his father’s death in 1908. The lunch wagon was put up for sale in 1919 to James and Earl Bucy, who moved it to the site of the new Kelly Springfield Tire Company plant, which was being built across the river, and a little over a mile away. Construction on the plant started in 1917 and it was opened in 1921, so it’s easy to assume that the diner had a good two year run under the Bucy Brothers before being sold or scrapped.

From the name, “White House Lunch”, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that the place was made by T.H. Buckley of Worcester, MA. A date of manufacture of 1904 would put this right in Buckley’s heyday. The description of etched colored glass windows with portraits of great Americans points to Buckley’s style, as well.

The Prospect Diner opened Thursday, August 22, 1946. It was billed as Hagerstown’s Newest Diner, though the barrel roof design it followed would have been, by that point, ten to twenty years behind what the factories in Jersey were turning out. That said, for an on-site job, it played the “diner” game well, pulling heavily from factory built models, but with the great added twist of the full (structural?) glass brick windows. I can only imagine what this place would have looked like at night, with the entire roof seeming to hover over the heavy base, unsupported by window frames or pillars.
With the design what it is, I’m a bit surprised they didn’t take better advantage of the huge expanses of flat facade, like earlier builders were doing. I guess by 1946, that sort of lettering had more or less fallen out of use with just about everyone but Worcester, but the tiny signs by the front door seem like an afterthought.

The diner was located at 12 N. Prospect St., and has long since been demolished, and another building built on the site.

Four for a quarter. Good at the two Annapolis locations, which, like all Little Taverns, are unfortunately long gone.
The ad is from 1961.

What becomes of old trolley cars?, Popular Science asked.

Many old trolleys were re-purposed into roadside restaurants. A diner-on-the-cheap. Not very many survived, due to their inconveniently narrow width, their already used and abused condition after a life on the streets, and their somewhat disreputable image next to new, factory built diners, built specifically for the purpose. While the one from the article hailed from New Jersey, I’ve found quite a few conversions existed in the early days in Maryland. Generally, as soon as enough money could be scraped together, they were replaced, as was the case of the State Diner in Baltimore, a used 1930s Silk City, which replaced a re-purposed streetcar in the 1950s.

Work of the Woman’s Auxiliary Bravely Kept Up – Church Temperance Society Left This Field In Good Hands


New York Daily Tribune: January 25, 1897

May 2nd 1915 – The Washington Herald

You may remember my post of Jimmy’s Diner a few months ago, tracing postcard images of it through the decades. Now I have proper pictures of the place. Well- kind of. Somewhere underneath all of what’s there now still lies an early 1930s diner of indeterminate manufacture. It’s been covered since the ’60s and really and truly covered since the ’80s or so. The gas station is still there, too, but like the diner, it’s sprouted additions every which way that render the entire complex almost unrecognizable. Unfortunately, all the windows are boarded over so no interior shots / no way to identify the builder of the diner (on site, Mor-Lan, one of the big name companies). I would assume, however, that when they re-did the exterior for the last, and most drastic time, that whatever was left of the interior was obliterated.

In these first two pictures, the location of the original door is still visible, along with the later (’50s/’60s) horizontal windows, which enlarged the original ’30s style tall narrow ones. The roof and porch really do a lot to disguise the diner lineage of the building.

The back-side of the diner portion of Jimmy’s. Ignore, if you will, the roof and tack-on chimney, and this gives you a sense of the size of the diner.

Dead signage

The former gas station portion of the complex.

“Great architecture has only two natural enemies: water and stupid men.” – Richard Nickel

Above photo by Spencer Stewart, 2007

Photo copyright Michael G. Stewart

455 Shell Rd
Penns Grove, NJ 08069