Loring Grill

[156 West Fordham Road, The Bronx, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Recall Brooklyn’s Unique Diner: in The Bronx, as in Brooklyn, urban planning apparently required that a dining car to be dropped into the empty slot.

The archives give no street address for the Loring Grill (a short walk from Loring Place), but searching for block=3225 AND lot=169 BX reveals the address. In recent years, no. 156 has been building-less. I suspect it has been building-less since the dining car disappeared. Google Maps shows the location from 2007 to 2022 as a vacant lot, a holding area for an auto-repair shop, a holding area with a storefront security door, and a vacant lot with a storefont security door. The brick building that housed the Gulf station and later auto-repair shop still stands, now boarded off from the sidewalk.

Telephone number for the Loring Grill in 1940: FOrdham 4-8824.

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An assiduous diner-friendly reader found on two relevant pages. Here’s a view of the diner and environs from the east. And here’s a 1947 yearbook advertisement for Charles Tschudin’s Tolentine Diner — same address, different phone number. The yearbook is from St. Nicholas of Tolentine High School. St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church is a block away, at the corner of West Fordham Road and University Avenue.

Also: “A young woman and three men who stole a taxicab yesterday morning and then held up a lunch wagon at 156 West Fordham Road, the Bronx, were captured after they had led two policemen a wild chase for miles through the northern part of the Bronx and Harlem”: The New York Times, January 27, 1931. The owner was a Fred Zucht. The lunch wagon was held up at 1:00 a.m.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

[Why do I insist on capitalizing the t? Because it’s The Bronx.]