[Tip-Top Diner, The Bronx, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]
The archives have the address as 2448 Prospect Avenue, which can’t be right: no. 2448 is at one end of a row of rowhouses. Looking at Street View of 1940s New York makes me think that this diner resided on Crotona Avenue, next to what is now the Grace H. Dodge Career and Technical High School. There’s a fenced lot where (I think) the diner once stood.
Tip-Top is a lovely name for a diner: it suggests, at least to my ear, a modest spiffiness. The plates and coffee cups shine. The water glasses gleam. The counterman is wearing a bowtie. No cigarette dangles from his lips.
I would have guessed tip-top to be a nineteenth- or twentieth-century invention. But no. The Oxford English Dictionary dates it to 1702. From its beginnings, it had both literal and figurative meanings: “the very top; the highest point or part; the extreme summit”; “highest pitch or degree; extreme height; acme.” The earliest citation, from a translation of Cicero: “When a Wise Man is at the Tip-top of all Felicity, can he wish Things were better with him?”
Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives
[Beer and ale? That’s a Ballantine billboard.]
Sunday, March 12, 2023
Tip-Top Diner
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Tip top post
https://backinthebronx.com/address-book/?_sf_s=2500%20crotona
Crotona it is. Thanks, reader.
There must be a book, or several, about why retired rail cars were used for diners.
I suppose I should go find it... perhaps by calling a reference librarian. It seems like the kind of thing that would be hard to search (not that I have tried yet).
My guess is that it was a case of smart repurposing. And that later diners were made to look like the early ones. If I can find my book of diner paintings, I’ll see what history is in there.
Who would have fancied Cicero as the inventor of Tip-Top?
Ha!
I just discovered that the 1702 translation is in Google Books. The translator, Samuel Parker, made a pretty lively choice with “tip-top.”
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