History
Louis Lassen, a butter dealer, operated a lunch wagon on Meadow Street as early as 1895 and served steak and ground steak hamburger sandwiches, made from scrap trimmings, to local factory workers. The population of New Haven doubled between 1870 and 1900. Tens of thousands of European immigrants flocked to the city to find work in the many factories located there at the time.
According to family legend, one day in 1900 a local businessman dashed into the small New Haven lunch wagon and pleaded for a lunch to go. Louis Lassen, the establishment's owner, hurriedly sandwiched a broiled hamburger between two slices of bread and sent the customer on his way, so the story goes, with America's first hamburger being served.
In 1907, Lassen moved the business to Temple and George Streets. After a decade there, he left his lunch wagon for a square-shaped little brick building that had once been a tannery. Forced to move to make way for development in 1975, Louis' Lunch moved a fourth time, relocating the tannery building to its present location, 263 Crown Street in New Haven, CT. The fourth generation of Lassens own and operate Louis' Lunch today.
Read more about this topic: Louis' Lunch
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)