History
The diner was established in 1941 by John O'Rourke, who later brought the 1946 Mountain View diner car that anchored the diner's distinctive appearance into Middletown. John's nephews, John and Brian bought the diner in 1976. In 1986, due to corrupted business practices John sold his half share of the diner to his cousin Brian.
On August 31, 2006, O'Rourke's Diner suffered tremendous damage from a fire that broke out after a hamburger steamer was left on overnight. Because the diner did not have fire insurance, fundraising efforts were launched to cover the estimated $350,000 cost of repairs. By June 2007, $180,000 had been raised and preparations for reconstruction were underway. On February 11, 2008, following successful renovations which included assistance from the local community and Wesleyan University, O'Rourke's was reopened at 5:00 am.
Read more about this topic: O'Rourke's Diner
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)