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In fact, Barry Levinson has quite a soft spot for the place, having utilized it in two of his other movies.

Hollywood Diner has appeared in several productions over the years. It is amazing to me how little the restaurant has changed since filming took place over 24 years ago. I was floored when I walked up to the structure and saw that the interior was visible through the front windows!Īt the beginning of Sleepless in Seattle, Annie Reed (Meg Ryan) stops for tea at the diner while on a Christmas Eve road trip to her fiancé’s parents’ house. Though there were plans to turn the property into a food truck park, using the interior of the diner for seating, it does not appear that the project ever took of.ĭespite the longtime closure, the diner still stands intact today, thankfully.

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The foundation couldn’t quell the café’s money problems, though, and, after undergoing a series of different management organizations and restaurant iterations, the site finally shuttered in 2012. Plagued by financial woes from the start, the restaurant was taken over by the Chesapeake Foundation for Human Development in 1991 and renamed “Hollywood Diner.” Run by city schools and the mayor’s office, the site served as both an eatery and a vocational training center for area students. It opened later that year as The Kids’ Diner. At the time, the diner lacked a bathroom and a kitchen, but locals donated time and money to spruce up the structure and transform it back into a functional restaurant. It was transferred to its new home at 400 East Saratoga Street in the heart of downtown in January 1984.

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Shortly after the movie premiered in early 1982, Schaefer implored local citizens to help return the structure to Charm City, putting purchase and transport of the eatery on his civil “wish list.” WBAL Radio heeded his cry, bought the restaurant from the graveyard and gifted it to Baltimore. When filming on Diner wrapped, the 48-foot by 17-foot restaurant was shipped back to the diner graveyard in New Jersey, which would have been the end of the story had then Baltimore mayor William Donald Schaefer not stepped in.

(Bacon), and Modell (Paul Reiser) hung out in the flick, but upon close inspection, it is obvious that the two are not one and the same. The establishment does bear a considerable resemblance to the café where Eddie Simmons (Steve Guttenberg), Shrevie Schreiber (Daniel Stern), Boogie Sheftell (Mickey Rourke), Timothy Fenwick Jr. Though some sources claim that Bendix Diner in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey was used for the filming of Diner’s interior scenes, that information is incorrect. (And yes, that’s a very young Kevin Bacon in the second screen capture below. He leased the 1954 café from the graveyard, transported it to the plot of land in Canton, and proceeded to shoot Diner there, dubbing the fictional eatery “Fells Point Diner.”īoth the interior and exterior of the diner were used extensively in the shoot. So he headed to a diner graveyard in New Jersey and quickly set his sights on a streamlined silver structure that formerly served as Long Island’s Westbury Grill. After failed negotiations with the owners of the Double T Diner in Catonsville, Maryland, Levinson wound up coming across a vacant plot of land in Charm City’s Canton neighborhood that overlooked the famed Domino Sugars sign and thought it would make the perfect setting for his movie. His former stomping ground, the Hilltop Diner, which largely inspired his story, had been turned into a liquor store years prior, so filming there was not a possibility. When writer/director Barry Levinson started pre-production on his semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama Diner, set in 1959 Baltimore, he sought out to find a coffee shop similar to the one he hung out in during his youth for the shoot. To discuss the restaurant’s history, though, we have to go back to the filming of a much earlier movie, 1982’s Diner. I’m talking about the Hollywood Diner in downtown Baltimore, which played the Capital Diner in the 1993 romcom Sleepless in Seattle.

and A Few Good Men, today’s locale can actually be found close to the Atlantic – though its name would have you believe otherwise. Another day, another diner from a Meg Ryan movie! Unlike the Port Café, the Wilmington, California eatery that portrayed East Coast establishments in both When Harry Met Sally.

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