You’ll recall that I mentioned trying to find the American Diner Museum on my recent road trip to Pawtucket. Well, after I wrote that post, I decided I would look for their website to see if they had moved; my GPS database is out of date, so it was entirely plausible that they were somewhere else and I could plan to visit another time. After all, diners are a huge American cultural icon, and the “train car diner” in particular is a New England-born legend.
Enter The Google. Sure enough, the American Diner Museum’s own webpage is the very first hit, but the second hit was even more intriguing. “The American Diner Museum And I Are Now Enemies” reads the search header, as does the title of the blog post it takes you to. You can read that for yourself, but the gist of it is that the blogger had seen a video that included the museum, set out to see the place for herself, and, like me, discovered that there was no there there. So she ranted about it on her blog (gee, whodathunkit?) and even got a smarmy comment from a fellow named Daniel Zilka, who is involved with the museum, pointing out that the website “clearly states” that the “museum” does not have a public exhibit space. In other words, there really isn’t a museum, per se, simply an effort to have one someday.
There’s some back-and-forth in the comments, but what eventually emerges is a controversial picture of Mr. Zilka and the board of his museum, along with what seems to be a somewhat checkered history. Ladyandria ended up finding this web page which chronicles a series of blog posts from a fellow named Randy Garbin, who blogs about a variety of nostalgia-restoration topics such as diners, railroad cars, and roadside attractions. Garbin has amassed quite a bit of detail about Zilka and what appears to be a string of failed restorations of train-car diners all over New England, not to mention some questionable business deals involving the sale of some diners, and the never-quite realization of the museum itself. Even if you’re not interested in the topic of diner restoration, Randy Garbin is a pretty decent investigative reporter, and it would be great to see some follow-up and answers to the many questions he raises.
Garbin’s articles were written between 2003 and 2005, but his appearance in the comments from Landyandria’s post (dated June 17, 2008), as well as Zilka’s make it clear that the controversy continues to some degree. Meanwhile, Johnson & Wales University’s Providence campus has added their own diner memorabilia exhibit to their culinary history museum (…and Daniel Zilka even tried to get himself installed as the director of THAT operation at one point). Even though Providence is just beyond the radius of my Road Trip map, I can guarantee that the next time we go to Providence, we’ll check that out and I’ll report on it for you.
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