Next to a Giant Graveyard, a Classic Philly Diner Awaits Its Fate
Developers in Philadelphia want to knock down old greasy spoons and rebuild them inside brand-new apartment buildings.
Growing up, I was subjected to the same dad joke every time we pulled up to Bob's Diner. The classic 1940s stainless steel dining car in the Roxborough neighborhood of Philadelphia was tightly nestled between a church and a sprawling 300-year-old cemetery, which always begged the question: Why did they need to build a fence around the graveyard?
"Because everyone is dying to get in there," my father would quip without fail. The joke seemed as irresistible to him as the creamed chip beef or the black-and-white milkshake he ordered every time we sat down inside. For my dad, coming to this diner was a lifelong ritual that began sometime in the 1950s while he was growing up nearby—and one that he was eager to share with his own kids.
It’s unclear if I’ll ever be able to pass that tradition down myself. Leverington Cemetery is still actively accepting new burials, but Bob’s is barely hanging on by a thread. Diners in the city are disappearing, but it’s not just a Philly phenomenon. Even New Jersey—the so-called diner capital of the world—lost a quarter of its diners over the course of the past decade, according to an unofficial industry tally recently cited by NPR.
"The situation has changed dramatically," says Randy Garbin, an expert on classic American diners and the founder of Roadside, a print magazine that lovingly chronicled the nation’s diner scene for 15 years. I would take it somewhat further and say that, over the last decade, the diner death toll in Philadelphia has started to feel downright apocalyptic. Little Pete's. Trolley Car Diner. Ridge Diner. Oak Lane Diner. South Street Diner. Midtown III. The Continental. Melrose Diner. All of these places have dimmed their neon lights for good. Garbin told me that there were probably close to 30 diners when he first came to Philadelphia in the late 1980s.
Now, there are only a handful left. The exact number depends on who you ask, but virtually no one will disagree that it’s shrinking. “It’s very hard to be in this business now,” Garbin tells me, citing ballooning business costs, evolving consumer tastes, and the lingering effects of the pandemic. “It’s always been a challenge, but now it's just crazy hard.”
Most histories of the American diner trace its roots back to 1872, when a newspaper pressman named Walter Scott started selling sandwiches and coffee from a horse-drawn lunch cart to night shift workers in Providence, Rhode Island. But the diners most people know and love today first appeared in 1913. That’s when an entrepreneurial Jersey native named Jerry O’Mahony built the world’s first stationary roadside diner. O’Mahony’s chrome-plated, train car-like structure became the model for the classic American diner that would soon pepper the roadways of the northeastern United States and typically be adorned with neon signs, filled with vinyl booths, and resplendent with the scent of freshly brewed coffee.
By the 1950s, O’Mahony’s company was one of several manufacturers—including Paramount, Kullman, Silk City, Podero and Sterling, to name a few—that were busy mass-producing diners in an effort to meet the demand that came with the expansion of America’s highway system. For his part, O’Mahony built more than 2,000 prefabricated diners by 1952, including about 20 in New Jersey and a few more in the Philadelphia area. One of them, an original 1930s O’Mahoney diner in the Philly suburb of Frazer, appears to have quietly shut down in January. One of the few remaining ones is Bob’s, in Roxborough.
“It’s the primordial example of a classic diner,” Garbin says of Bob’s. Perfect omelet? Check. The kind of retro interior that makes it feel like you’re stepping through a time portal? Also present. He has strict standards, too. As far Garbin is concerned, a diner has to have counter service and it has to be built in a factory and brought out to the site. Sure, there are many perfectly fine diner-like establishments that exist outside of this rigid, almost academic conceptual framework, but they aren’t really diners. "It's a very unique part of American roadside history that is being rapidly lost to time," laments Garbin. "There's nobody building them anymore."
By that he means most of the old school dining car manufacturers went out of business years ago, though a few others managed to pivot—one even launched a subsidiary in the late ‘90s with the sole purpose of exporting the classic American-style diner experience to Germany. While the factories that once mass-produced thousands of stainless steel diners are no longer doing so, there are still plenty of people who remain invested in keeping the American diner alive in one form or another. Richard Gutman, a cultural historian and author who is regarded as the preeminent expert on American diners, has been involved in more than 140 diner construction and restoration projects over the last 45 years. During that time, Gutman has consulted with everyone from entrepreneurs launching new diners to museum curators and historic preservation groups trying to restore old ones.
“I think that the whole idea that it's an endangered species is not true,” Gutman says. “Thousands of diners have come and gone over the 150 years that lunch wagons and diners have existed. I think that people love them enough to ensure that they will last forever."
Admittedly, Gutman’s optimism is somewhat dependent on the evolving semantics of what constitutes a diner. Over the years, he has seen various iterations of the concept, many of which stray pretty far from the classic, prefabricated diners he has written four books about. While some stay true to that tradition, others borrow various elements from the wide menus and retro design aesthetic of the classic diner to create something new, yet familiar. In some cases, Gutman thinks these conceptual tangents are fine. He finds others—like when a coffee shop or restaurant that happens to have counter service calls itself a diner with little justification—unforgivable.
"When you see it, you know it," Gutman says. "If you look at a diner like the Mayfair Diner or the Melrose before they demolished it, you saw it and you knew it was a diner."
The Mayfair Diner, another O’Mahony-built establishment, is still going strong in its original Northeast Philadelphia location. The Melrose, on the other hand, was demolished in 2023, a year after a kitchen fire unexpectedly forced it to shut down. Michael Petrogiannis, who owns both establishments, said he plans to open a smaller replica of the latter on the first floor of the six-story apartment building being developed where the diner’s original structure stood—a reality, while tragic to some, is not terribly surprising to Philadelphians who have been watching the city’s property values and real estate development explode over the last decade.
And the Melrose isn’t the only classic Philly diner being promised a second life inside a newly-developed residential building, either. Northeast Philadelphia’s Oak Lane Diner, whose original 1940s Paramount-built dining car structure was damaged by a fire in 2015, is now slated to reopen inside the 65-unit building that will eventually replace it. The same thing is reportedly happening with the recently-shuttered Tastee Diner in Silver Springs, Maryland, suggesting a trend of zombified restaurants that may or may not hint at the future of the diner as we know it—something that doesn’t sit right with Gutman.
“When you just recreate it with bits and pieces of the original—and who knows what happens with the menu—it's a different place,” he says.
Different, sure. But is it still a diner? As the concept itself continues to evolve, it’s often a matter of perspective.
When most people move to a new place, their first move might be to pinpoint the nearest post office, grocery store, or maybe even the best spot to get a stiff drink. For Randy Garbin, the diner purist, it’s the neighborhood greasy spoon. In Philly, spots like The Trolley Car, Daddypops, the Melrose and Bob’s quickly became favorites of his. It’s what he considers the centerpiece of any neighborhood worth its salt, because it provides something he calls “public intimacy.”
An example: When Garbin moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, years earlier, he honed in on the Parkway Diner, an original 1930s lunch cart diner that was acquired in 1956 by a former US Army cook. It was there, sitting on one of the Parkway’s red vinyl-topped diner stools that Garbin would chat with this new owner—who still dutifully manned the grill well into his 70s—and also get to know many of his neighbors. “I learned more about the city and its neighborhoods and pretty much everything else in one night over a stuffed pepper than I would have with a six-month subscription to the local newspaper,” Garbin says.
I got my own taste of what Garbin called public intimacy myself on a recent trip to Bob’s. Thirty years ago, after some initial reluctance, a man named Jim Evans decided to buy Bob’s Diner from its original owner. He’s still behind the grill today at 71 years old. When I showed up to interview him for this story one recent Sunday afternoon, Evans was so busy flipping pancakes and running around the restaurant that we both realized the conversation would be better saved for later on.
Sundays are often hectic at Bob’s, but this one came with an extra, unexpected responsibility. One of the guests, Evans announced loudly as he emerged from the kitchen with a large muffin, was there celebrating her 93rd birthday. After leading the packed diner in singing “Happy Birthday,” Evans stood up on the nearest unoccupied booth to snap a group photo of the woman and her family—a gathering of about two dozen people representing three generations of Bob’s Diner customers.
“She probably comes into the diner maybe every three or four weeks and her grandkids and great-grandkids have breakfast with her,” Evans says. “We actually celebrated a woman’s 98th birthday here a couple weeks before. She goes to the diner every Sunday after church at St. John’s and fundraises. That lady has been coming here forever.”
It’s not just older generations who flock to Bob’s. The diner has maintained a cross-generational appeal, thanks in part to the diner’s proximity to multiple colleges and universities. Evans says that the tradition of going to Bob’s is often passed on by upperclassmen, who inform freshmen that the diner is “the place to be” for breakfast on Saturdays and Sundays. “We have a lot of young people who come in here,” Evans says. “That just tells me that it’ll be a continuing institution.” That sort of word-of-mouth tradition is exactly why Evans took over, too. He loved sitting there at breakfast and overhearing people say “meet me at Bob’s” over the phone. It was never Bob’s Diner. Or the diner on Ridge Avenue. Just Bob’s.
Running the joint hasn’t always been easy. Covid forced Bob’s to shut down its indoor dining service in favor of a takeout-only operation, and eggs don’t travel well. Four years after the pandemic, the business continues to endure the rising costs of food, labor, and repairs to the diner’s aging structure. As much as Evans says he still loves running the diner, the allure of retirement is getting harder to ignore. “I don't want to see it go under,” he says. “But I can't see myself doing it for another 20 years, either.”
Meanwhile, real estate developers keep calling. Evans says he has heard from “eight or nine” developers who have expressed interest in buying the property in the past year alone. Evan isn’t sure he gets why. The property itself is only about a quarter of an acre and is surrounded by a massive sea of gravestones. Oh, and Evans says he's seen ghosts in the diner’s basement. But rather than be deterred by the spookiness, one of the developers even suggested the now-trendy idea of leveling Bob’s to build a new apartment building and then resurrecting a zombie version of the restaurant inside. It’s an idea Evans isn’t sure he can stomach.
“It might sound stupid but I can't wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and say, ‘I'm the guy that bulldozed Bob's Diner after 78 years,” he admits. “I'm hoping that it's gonna remain.”