Miss Bellows Falls Diner

The 16 × 30–foot, barrel-roofed diner is Vermont's most intact Worcester Lunch Car and one of its oldest diners still operating. The diner's name runs across the front porcelain panels in red letters and a ribbon of railroad-car windows runs above with orange glass transoms. Wall-and soffit-mounted incandescent lights attract customers at night. The interior has beige and brown ceramic tiling, red-striped enameled panels, and dark varnished wood-veneer walls. It is fitted with oak booths, enameled-metal kitchen cabinets, a marble counter, and circular metal stools. Car number 771 was the 571st diner the Worcester Lunch Car Manufacturing Company had built since 1906. In 1941 Willie Frank and John Korsak purchased it for use in Lowell, Massachusetts, and three years later, Francis A. Cutler moved it to Bellows Falls. “Booth Service” was lettered on panels at each entrance to indicate that the diner was not just a workers' lunch counter. Such streamlined diners are an evolutionary link between the horse-drawn, factory-gate lunch wagons of the late nineteenth century and the larger sleek diners of the 1950s and 1960s.