WPCNR MAIN STREET JOURNAL. By John F. Bailey. October 27, 2007: On this rainy day it’s time to step back into living history one last time. White Plains is losing another living fossil of the past, The Corner Nook Café across the street from City Hall. America used to have thousands of locally owned “eateries” like the Nook, run by persons who put together serviceable tasty unique foods to a nononsense customers – they were called customers then – not clientele or clients or diners.

Good Bye Nook--Today is reported to be the old place's last time until next time.

Today is the final day in the Nook’s 25 year life, and the Dimitrakakis family who has run it for this friendly time will close down the operation making way for affordable – now politically correctly known as “workforce” – housing that will be built by the builder of The Ritz Carlton hotel so the Ritz condominiums can open for the buyers of Million dollar condos.  Such is the irony, the city of White Plains policy on affordable housing  says, we have to close you – Mr. Dimitrakakis -- down so I can build homes for people who cannot afford market rate homes, so people who can afford  market rate homes can move into them.

Super Developer Louis Cappelli with his new partners, Peter Dimitrakakis, his wife Antoinnette and daughter at City Hall last night. Mr. Cappelli will put Mr. Dimitrakakis in business at The Nook's same old stand in  Cappelli's glamorous affordable housing building that will begin construction shortly. Mr. Cappelli will compensate the family while construction on his affordable housing complex takes place over the next 10 months.

The Nook is a relic of another era. White Plains used to have more places like the Nook – Daddy Michaels, I’m told, and it still has family restaurants like Magnotta’s – that are like homes away from home. As a child I was taken to places like Schrafts in White Plains, a side trip when my mother and her mother went to Macy’s. The main ingredient in a restaurant where the owner is actually serving you is service, friendliness, and their pleasure at always welcoming you back. You don't get that much around any chain restaurant.

The Corner Nook has that. They will be back next year, and hopefully the same ambience of the long and narrow, intimately slap-dash coziness of the Nook will be recreated.

What I like about these little diners are the little touches. As Chuck Berry sang, “Looking hard for a corner café, where the hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day,” the grease and the aromas in the air. The luscious looking pies and cakes on platforms on the counter. The good cup of coffee you don’t have to take out a mortgage to buy. The Nook is real, and not the contrivance of the chain restaurantt. The City Limits almost makes that old time diner slapdash feel – at least they have the business like clash of china intermittently being clanged together – another trademark of a diner.

I like a diner where the waitress, poised to write on the green order ticket, says, "What'll ya have hun?" (My wife never says that.

I like the counter where you can watch the food being created.

I like the booths that are close in and you can hear a person talk across from you. Diners are great for dates -- neutral territory -- not expensive which says you're trying to impress your date -- but unintimidating, natural, where the male's faux pas do not look so bad. (You don't have to order wine, for example).

Desserts never look better than under those glass platforms, with cakes and pies just out their like centerfolds.

I am getting nostalgic. So for a happy ending, since the Nook shall return. Meanwhile its ambience can be found at the Star Diner across the street from White Plains Hospital Center.

Stoll around today and say goodbye to another piece of America.

Goodbye Nook.

But as the great Allan Freed would say, it's not goodbye, just good night.