The Forum Diner

Michael Perlman, a New York City preservationist hopes to find someone to move the Forum Diner, a 40-year-old eatery in Paramus, N.J., before the end of the summer.

Although the Forum Diner was scheduled to be destroyed, last month Perlman reached an agreement with the owner of the Jeep 17 dealership that now owns the property: The diner must be transported by the beginning of August to be saved from demolition. Perlman has been successful moving Manhattan's Moondance and Cheyenne diners, and hopes for a similar outcome in this case.

"Historic diners are becoming an endangered species," self-described diner enthusiast Perlman says. "I consider diners to be the ultimate public institutions. We must do everything in our power to preserve them." So far he has heard from five prospective buyers.

The landmark eatery closed in April 2007 after 40 years. The Forum Diner was a significant, well-known meeting place in the area, says Fred Rohdieck, president of Paramus' chamber of commerce.

The chamber gets at least one call a month from former residents about the Forum Diner. It was the place I went for breakfast on the weekends. I went there for two job interviews." Rohdieck describes the venue as "classy looking," but laments that it was getting run-down, and its owners, the Yannitsadis family, had to make a tough decision whether to invest more or shut down the business.

The 1960s Mediterranean-style building was prefabricated by the Yannitsadis family and transported to its current site. Now empty, it was vandalized three months ago, but the damage was minimal. "The vandals threw around some chairs, smashed drinking glasses, trashed the kitchen, and stole the cappuccino machine," says Perlman. "There was no graffiti, and the woodwork was miraculously not vandalized. The Forum Diner just needs some TLC."

But Daniel Zilka, acting director of the American Diner Museum, thinks saving the Forum Diner will be a difficult job because of its age.
"We haven't quite made it to preserving diners from the 1960s. When people say 'diner,' they think about diners from the 1950s – everybody's sitting at tables eating hamburgers and drinking milkshakes."

Zilka believes that if someone buys the Forum Diner, they will have to turn it into a theme restaurant, evoking nostalgia like the Tick Tock Diner in Clifton, N.J. "[Diners] were real community gathering places, real democratic eating tables. Everyone was treated as equals in a diner. That's what people are missing now at corporate franchises."

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