“NEVER CLOSED”

[Munson Diner, 200 11th Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

From Michael Engle and Marlo Monti’s Diners of New York (Stackpole Books: Mechanicsburg, PA, 2008):

In 1921, Harry Zelin (born Samuel Zelinsky in Poland, in 1893) and his partner, Irving Greenman, rented space at 106 East 14th Street in Manhattan under the name Munson Lunch Company and started a quick lunch restaurant. After twenty-one years, Zelin opened his first restaurant at Greenwich and West Houston Streets, in the old Union Freight Terminal. In 1944, Zelin, under the name Delano Realty, acquired an existing old-style diner built in 1930 on the southwest corner of 49th Street and 11th Avenue. The following year he opened the Munson Diner, a new Kullman model with streamlined stainless steel and blue porcelain enamel flutes. He gradually added other diners and, by 1959, had at least five, including four on 11th Avenue: at 24th, 37th, 42nd Streets, and the aforementioned Munson Diner at 49th Street. Under the Delano Realty moniker, he brought a 1958 Silk City diner to 375 West Street, which was recently the Rib Restaurant, a now-closed barbecue joint.

The first restaurant: 588 Greenwich Street.

The older diner at the southwest corner of 49th and 11th: 681 11th Avenue.

The diner at the corner of 37th and 11th: 456-458 11th Avenue.

There’s no tax photograph for a 42nd and 11th location.

Diners ran in the Zelin and Greenman families: other family members owned three Market Diners and the Empire Diner. Here’s an elegy for the Market Diner at 43rd and 11th. Still going at 210 10th Avenue (under different ownership) is the Empire Diner. A tad upscale, no?

The Kullman diner at 681 11th (which replaced the diner in the photograph) is now in the Catskills, in Liberty, New York, living on as the New Munson Diner. Google Maps has it in its new location.

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A reader passed on a link to an application to place the relocated Munson Diner in the National Register of Historic Places. The application’s thirty-seven pages are teeming with the history of that diner and of diners generally. Thanks, reader.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)