Always good to see their beaming faces.
The poster is on a window at Franks’ Diner, formerly an exterior window, but with an expansion of the diner many years ago, now facing the added section, where Ann and I had lunch on a late July Friday. Kenosha, home of Franks’, was another stop in our recent rambles around southeastern Wisconsin.
Finding Franks’ Diner was no serendipity. We’d been there, back in 2012. The Stooges, back in 1946. I’ll bet they were playing the nearby Kenosha Theater, which is still standing, but in need of restoration.
Not only is the 99-year-old Franks’ still there, it’s still dishing up dandy diner fare at popular prices. Back then, I wrote:
The place had that diner smell: eggs and meats and hash browns and coffee. It also had that diner sound: the murmur of conversation, workers calling to each other, silverware scraping plates, metal clinking metal, the hiss of the griddle.
It was packed. A row of people sat at the counter, while others were at booths in the small room added to the counter room. A line of people waited for their seats in a long row behind the people at the counter.
That’s exactly the same as our July visit, except that people waited outside, since it was summer instead of winter and (of course) prices were higher. Once seated, I had the Garbage Plate. I’d skipped it last time, and I wasn’t about to miss it this time around.
2012: The star of the show is its Garbage Plate, a concoction of hash-brown potatoes, eggs, green peppers, onions, jalapeños (if you want them), and a choice of three or fewer meats (or including no meat). The thing is seriously large. The standard Garbage Plate has five eggs.
The restaurant also supplies some reading material.
After lunch, we went a few blocks away and parked the car in the shade of large trees in Library Park. Ann waited in the car with the windows down – it was very warm, but not too warm for a few minutes of that – while I wandered around the immediate area, including a couple of streets of storefront retail in vintage structures.
Houses across the street from where we parked.
The nearby St. Matthews Episcopal Church.
The inevitable welcome mural. The 1970 Gremlin is an unusual touch. But they were made in Kenosha, so not that unusual.
At the edge of the park, a seated Lincoln. Sculptor Charles Niehaus (d. 1935) did the work. Just one of many that he did all over the place. The president has been sitting there since 1909, centennial of his birth, with restoration work done in more recent decades.
Nearby in the park, Kenosha’s Civil War memorial, called “Winged Victory” on electronic maps, a name that gets right to the point.
It’s Library Park because of the Gilbert M. Simmons Memorial Library, a branch of the Kenosha Public Library system, dominating its side of the park. It has a little more heft than most municipal branch libraries.
When it opened in 1900, the building formed Kenosha’s main library. Daniel Burnham designed it.
The Civil War veterans have their memorial outside. Great War vets are honored inside the library.
We’d happened on the Library Park Historic District, surrounding Library Park. The park itself goes back to the early years of Kenosha, when the land was a New England–style town commons. Forty-two properties, built from 1843 to 1930, form the district. A diner and an historic district: just the thing for a warm summer day stroll.