The demise of the Jersey diner…

I’m a Jersey Guy who’s been away from living in New Jersey for almost 27 years. I was back last week with my son doing some painting in the house I still own there. On Friday night we wrapped up about 10:30 p.m. and my boy said he was hungry so, before returning to our motel, we were going to stop for a bite.

I didn’t think there was anything special about that because of the phenomenon of the Jersey diner. The Garden State used to be known for its diners: no-frills, community-based places for a good meal at a decent price that stayed open until late night, some even 24 hours. My favorite was the Reo Diner Woodbridge, an institution that, since the 1930s, for decades has been true to its motto, “Meet me at the Reo!”

We got there at 10:40 p.m. To my surprise we reached the front door to find it locked. There were still some folks inside, but it was clear they were the last customers on whom the manager was waiting to leave, not to let in new ones. The awning displays notwithstanding, the Reo was no longer “Open 24 Hours!”

As John was hungry, I just started Googling other diners I remembered. Peter Pank in Sayreville—closed. Menlo Park on Route 1—“permanently closed.” Galaxy in Rahway. Ditto. After I ran out of local diners, we eventually located an Appleby’s in the Woodbridge Mall. That, too, was a surprise: when it opened in the early 1970s, Woodbridge Mall was a popular site but, last Friday night, it looked rather abandoned. We got there to find a group of mostly twenty- and thirty-something young people, a respectable—but certainly not crowded—showing.

Having known the Jersey diner as a place of encounter, I began to ask people about its apparent demise. I’m told a lot of the decline occurred during the COVID era. Diners closed. Some never came back. Those that did reopened with fewer hours. And the “night life” was gone.

Peers told me about memories of going out to movies, dances, or even drinking and then stopping at a local diner for a late night bite and some last goodbyes before making their ways home. I was also told those days are gone.

I’m not going to get into the economics—both for diners and for people who might go to them—or into our pandemic policies four years ago. I want instead to prompt some (semi)-theological thinking: “it is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen 2:18).

I’m beginning to ask whether, today, we still believe that?

Yes, there are generational differences, something my kids remind me of if I seem not to take sufficient account of it. But those generational differences do not simply explain, much less justify, the seeming retreat today from the “other”.

Last Friday was a Friday night three weeks before Christmas. One of the most active times of the year. And the two towns I was in share nearly 100,000 people between them. It’s hard to believe they all just want to sit at home, maybe stare at a screen, and go to bed.

But getting people out of the house doesn’t seem to be just a “weekend” or “nighttime” problem. Employers in those sectors that have been operating on hybrid or virtual schedules are also experiencing pushback (to a large degree, also generational) against full-time return-to-the-office. That split also seems to cleave along class lines: most of the blue-collar and/or more physical work (from store clerks to health care personnel) has long been back in their workplaces, while government, IT, and other sectors more conducive to “virtuality” still cling to “remote” work.

Employers have also learned that physical workplace presence is not just about “efficiency” or “supervision” of “performance.” There are valuable human skills, including informal exchange of knowledge and experience and building of morale that comes from the multiple interactions of the workplace, including the legendary “water cooler.” Those experiences cannot be replicated virtually from home.

Italians have even spoken of a phenomenon, marcire a letto (“rotting in bed”). By that term, author Paolo Giulisano speaks of the bed “as the privileged place to spend the day,” not just to sleep in. It becomes a place to sleep, eat, vegetate, be entertained, and even “work.” Increasingly, life assumes a horizontal, undressed, unshaven norm.

Which leads me back to the Genesis statement: it is not good for the man to be alone.

In his “Theology of the Body” addresses, St. John Paul II noted what many Biblical scholars point out about that passage: who makes that assessment? It is not Adam who complains about his aloneness. He doesn’t seem to say anything. It is God who looks at the human situation and declares, “it is not good for the man to be alone.” It is He who changes it.

In doing so, Genesis 2 affirms the same truth as Genesis 1, when the latter speaks of humans created from the beginning, “male and female.” The point is: humans are inherently social beings who need other human beings.

But, it seems, there are plenty of trends in our modern world that want to deny that truth.

It is not “good” for people to “rot in bed.” It is not “good” for people to lounge around the house alone, producing reports or letters or commentary alone, absent human interaction. It is not “good” that the home be folded into the workplace. It is not “good” for young folks, three Fridays before Christmas, not to have safe, normal, and relatively healthy places to go even at night.

Like a diner.

I mention that because I think there are plenty of unsafe and unhealthy places they might be attracted to. Clubs that are sexualized. Gambling, which is increasingly focusing particularly on young men: a recent issue of The Economist tells us, with glib assurance, “America’s gambling boom should be celebrated, not feared.” Drugs, especially with the legalization of marijuana and sometimes even harder drugs in (mostly Democratic) jurisdictions as well as the scourge of fentanyl crossing our borders.

Pundits today lament the decline among young people even of dating, which, of course, then leads to the decline of marriage and, later, fertility. In my day, the diner was also a place to sit, talk, and get to know somebody else. What has replaced that function (because I fear nothing has)?

Mark Bauerlein, the author of The Dumbest Generation, has argued that the pervasive proliferation of screens has “stupefied” people. He doesn’t just mean they don’t read as much as they used to or that their intellectual curiosity has been blunted into 240-characters. He also means that such interaction has impaired the natural human need for interpersonal interaction: what passes as “communication” might better be called an exchange of data, because it is often neither interactive nor synchronous. Don’t believe me? I’m 65. When I was younger, people ran to answer the phone that didn’t tell them who was calling. The New York Times recently ran a modern etiquette feature in which folks debated whether a spur-of-the-moment call is polite.

My Woodbridge diner’s motto was “meet me at the Reo.” One wonders what’s up with a society where simple, ordinary, community-based places to “meet me at” are disappearing. And when people seem not to need to “meet.” Does it still think “it is not good … to be alone?”