Stuck(ey's) In Time
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #270
I saw this postcard scan in a Facebook post from Greg Gillette, a great local history expert in Hillsborough Township in New Jersey (I elaborated on a post from him here, too):
Gillette writes:
I normally wouldn’t post a Stuckey’s postcard here, but it is part of the history of the now-defunct Readington Diner on Route 22 in Whitehouse. Stuckey’s was a chain of “travelmarts” (travelmats?) that started as a pecan and candy store in the 1930s and expanded to include gas pumps.
I am not sure how long this location lasted on Route 22, but the Readington Diner opened on that spot in 1986 and was in business for about 30 years.
Stuckey’s is having a comeback under the leadership of Stephanie Stuckey, the granddaughter of the company’s founder. She’s also on Substack, and here she contributes a guest piece on her turnaround of the business at The Retrologist, another great newsletter.
Stuckey’s buildings differed a bit, but they typically had an A-frame-ish roof that sloped down gently, as the one in the postcard does.
Now it is true that the Readington Diner—or, as someone in the comments notes, the V.C. Diner and then later the Readington Diner—opened up on this spot. That structure is still standing today, and after a bit of a facelift, it’s now a restaurant called Kitchen American Grill.
I remembered the Readington Diner back in the day, which if I recall was mediocre, but in a way that was point of these places. We went there once or twice and passed it many more, because Route 22 is a major way around the area. It looked like this:
And its successor restaurant looks like this:
Now, it isn’t at all possible that that Stuckey’s building was actually never torn down, is it?
Well. Anything’s possible, and if you’re reading this, you probably know the answer!
Take a look at this aerial image from the Hunterdon County Parcel Viewer:
Unlike a diner, this building has a peaked roof, which as you can see from the Google Maps screenshots was semi-hidden behind the facade.
The facade is pretty minimal, in fact, and from the side, the building looked, and still more or less looks, like this:
If you look closely, you can make out the signature slope of the Stuckey’s roof:
In fact, to the left of the roof, that little garage-looking extension is even still there, unaltered. Old:
And new:
It appears flipped from the postcard; perhaps there was one of those extensions on both sides at some point, or the postcard might have flipped it. Sometimes they fudged the appearance of things a bit.
As to when it was built, the New Jersey Property Explorer map says 1980. That sounds pretty late for a roadside chain from the 1930s. I looked at NETR’s Historic Aerials, and it shows the building in 1956!
The earliest newspaper reference I can find for Stuckey’s in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey is a 1962 ad in the Courier-News, a Somerville (nearby town) paper:
Here, from 1970, in the same paper, is an ad for the Stuckey’s:
The first reference to the V.C. Diner is 1986; in 1995 it was majorly renovated, and in 1996 it was changed to the Readington Diner, as this 2006 newspaper story recounts. This was a continuous business; during the Readington Diner phase it was helmed by the sister of the two brothers who had run it as V.C., and her husband. The article also mentions its origin as a Stuckey’s, which was not common in New Jersey.
Someone on a diner preservation blog also knows this bit of history. In a comment, he wrote:
Also, in regards to the VC diner. It was built in the late 50’s or early 60’s and began life as the northernmost store in the Stuckey’s chain. I lived just up the dirt road between it and the Wonder Bar.
The blog entry itself is great too if a little sad, with a lot of photos of endangered diners, two of which were nearby on Route 22 and only one of which is still standing. I remember passing them, when they were both abandoned for a period, as a kid, many times.
Even then, that idea of abandonment, of things not that long ago receding into the past, struck me. In a lot of ways I think that was the genesis of my interest in all of this stuff.
It’s really fun and rewarding to write one of these about something I’ve seen a million times, and tell a little story that I, and very few people probably, knew; to see a familiar place a little differently, to imagine the layers and changes that it came from and which made it what it is, and will be.
Related Reading:
Pecan Log Rolls and Hotel Rooms