The Top.

Diners became ubiquitous in the forties and fifties in the Northeast, springing first to life around the factories that dotted industrial centers in areas like Allentown and Bethlehem. They were often open twenty-four hours to feed workers from all three shifts --days, swing, and graveyard-- and served breakfast any time of the night or day. A motley ensemble of "dining cars" ran west-to-east along Tilghman Street in Allentown and across the Lehigh River into Bethlehem, where Tilghman became Union Boulevard. It competed with a long north-south section of Route 35 in New Jersey (been there!) as the most concentrated aggregation of diners in the country.

12:10 P.M. at The Top Diner,  Allentown, Pennsylvania, sometime before I bought my first digital camera in 2004. I wasn't entirely convinced that the guy in red looking at the camera wanted his picture taken.

Taken as we were getting into the car after lunch. I had to take it in a rush as the guy in red was coming out of a door in the back brandishing a sawed-off shotgun. We lived.