Well first camping trip was kind of a success. But more on that later. Today we're talking DINERS. And no, not Guy Fieri's Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives (although a guilty pleasure). We're talking legit old school diners. Maybe it's the New Jersey birthright in me, but I love myself a good diner.
This past weekend, my friends and I were rained out of having the deluxe camp breakfast we were planned to have. So instead, we went scavenging for food in the middle of the north woods of Pennsylvania. Somewhere between the foggy haze of Galeton and Coudersport, along Route 6, we came across Fezz's Diner.
Now this silver bullet plopped in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania was our saving grace late Saturday morning. With a grumbling in hollow stomachs, we order a round of coffees; girls black, boys cream and sugar. The standard place mats read off the local businesses and a little story about how our shelter from the rain made its way here from Paterson, NJ.
See, as a couple of kids bred in Philadelphia. When we hear "Silk City", we think that diner/bar on Spring Garden. Who knew this was actually a thing? We didn't. We wanted to know more, but fading cell service wasn't helping us as we waited for our food. Curiosity peaked.
Silk City Diners was a subdivision of the Paterson Wagon Company. Between 1926 and 1966, around 1,500 diners were made in Paterson, NJ. Each diner was marked with an ID that signified the year it was made and the order it was built. In hindsight I wish I knew this little tidbit of information so I could photograph the tag. If I ever find myself in that neck of the woods, I will add it to this note. Now, many of these diners have been long shut down, but for the ones still around, most of them are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
It was nice to see a little bit of Philadelphia on our escape to the woods. Now, I kinda want to scope out the other Silk City Diners in the area, photograph the tag, and have a cup of coffee with a buttered toasted blueberry muffin.