Southeast corner of Eleventh Avenue and 24th Street, April 3, 1937. According to the photographer's notes, this dining car restaurant at the south east corner replaced a tenement building previously at 200 Eleventh Avenue. Upon closer inspection, the dining car is a Munson Diner. The Zelin family which owned Munson Dinner had four locations on Eleventh Avenue by 1959. Munson Diner's best known and longest running location was at Eleventh Avenue and 49th Street. That location featured a 1945 Streamline Moderne dining car and attached kitchen facility. It survived in Hell's Kitchen until 2004. Moved upstate to Liberty, New York in the Catskills, it reopened in 2007, but unfortunately after a series of unsuccessful operators and a name change, the diner has been closed since 2016. Today the pictured plot at 24th and Eleventh is home to a new apartment building that features the first car elevator in New York City, which allows residents to drive their vehicles into the elevator and lift them into "en-suite sky garages."

🥞 🍳 ☕... ✔️ Perhaps more than any other eatery, diners are the quintessential American restaurant. And for decades, starting in the 1920s, the railcar diners were a special breed of this iconic American venue. Whether actual refurbished rail dining cars (a very small %) or purpose-built, pre-fab diners made to look like railroad rolling stock, these venues provided a unique business model. In New York City, they often sat at narrow corner lots, hugged larger structures on leftover acreage, or occupied empty plots for the time between the razing of old buildings and the construction of new ones. With increased development, more advanced construction technologies, and the rising cost of land, most of these diners have been lost to time (and new construction). Here are some of the railcar diners that once fed New Yorkers.