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:
“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)