I went to college in Madison, New Jersey—I wrote about it here—and it’s a very quiet, sort of timeworn little place. It’s probably a prime candidate for new housing, with a rail station into New York and a lot of small, aging commercial buildings scattered around town.

Today I’m featuring one of those buildings: this old diner on Main Street, at the very end of the town-like part of Main Street, before it turns into a suburban-style commercial strip.

This is Google Street View from 2013, when I was there; it was a sub shop. Then it became a trendy sandwich shop after I graduated, and now a new restaurant is coming soon. But it obviously started as a classic diner (the roof, however, is almost certainly an addition.)

As is this residential portion on the back. Look at this. Also note how small the diner portion is.

One evening at college, there was a talk advertised by a commercial historian who documented classic diners. I went out of curiosity, and he mentioned that he’d taken a walk around town earlier than day and spotted this old diner. He went on to talk about it a bit, but unfortunately I don’t remember any of the details. There’s a good chance it was actually manufactured in New Jersey, though!

But the really neat thing about it is what’s under it. One day I was walking in town and I saw an estate sale sign in the window of this place, which had recently closed under its sub-shop incarnation. I went inside, and the bar and countertop were piled with antique radios. An older man was standing behind the counter, and he said he was a radio collector. He closed down the business, was moving, and had to sell much of his collection.

We chatted for a bit, and then he offered to show me even more radios. I followed him, and he went into the residential back half of the building, and then down a flight of stairs, to a finished basement with living space and another stash of antique radios!

I ended up buying one little tabletop model—an Emerson, I think—for just ten bucks. It was worth it just to see the private inside of this neat building.

The reason this interests me is that nothing like this really exists in modern suburbia. It’s mostly either totally single-use and car-oriented, at a scale that largely favors chains, or it’s large-scale mixed-use. What always strikes me about older stuff like this is its small—“human”—scale, and its informal mixing of uses. These buildings are so small, they take up so little land, they’re modified over the years. People could really make them their own. It was efficient in a way that also feels cozy—in a way that works with rather than against our natural feelings and impulses.

For whatever reason—many reasons, really—we don’t do construction and business this way anymore. If you look at the development of suburbia from an evolutionary perspective, these were all vestigial urban features that were no longer needed.

But maybe they are.

Related Reading:

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #2

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #12

Living in the Motel

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