Community gathers to watch the historic Windsor Diner move down Main Street
Published: 07-03-2025 2:22 PM
Modified: 07-07-2025 1:00 PM |
WINDSOR — Theresa Taylor walked around the lawn outside Old South Church cemetery in downtown Windsor checking in on the dozens of people gathered there Wednesday morning.
“Honey, do you want a water out here in the sun? Some pink lemonade?” she asked. “Complimentary today,” she added as she passed out beverages.
Ever the proprietor, Taylor, of Claremont, worked the crowd like she normally would at the Windsor Diner. But on this day, the diner was in the process of being lifted up by a crane and her customers were gathered there to support her — and see something few had witnessed before.
On Wednesday, the Windsor Diner — a classic 1952 dining car made by the Worcester Lunch Car Co. — moved 550 feet from 135 Main St., where it had sat for more than 60 years, to its new home at 161 Main St.
Among the onlookers were Windsor resident Heather Cannistraci and her 3-year-old grandson Elliott, of Ascutney. Elliot has a fascination with heavy equipment and wore a bright blue T-shirt with a crane on it to mark the occasion. He’d spent the previous night at his grandmother’s house so they’d be ready when the crane began lifting the 28½-ton diner into the sticky early morning air.
“As you can tell, he’s really into equipment,” Cannistraci, 50, said. The pair had come prepared with a backpack of provisions. “Water bottle, snacks, cranes, what else do you need?” she said.
Elliott’s attention was rapt as crane operator Greg Blanchard, owner of Blanchard Contracting, guided the diner onto an awaiting flatbed. Elliott held a toy crane while his grandmother snapped his photo with the diner in the background.
“It’s amazing they can do that,” Toni Kendall, 82, said about the diner’s move.
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Kendall and her husband, Bruce, 80, were among the first dozen people to arrive before 7 a.m. to witness the move. Equipped with a selfie stick and a portable charging pack, Kendall took videos to share with her son who lives in Arizona.
The Kendalls, who reside in Ascutney, were regulars at the diner and have been following its plight.
And what a plight it has been.
It was never Taylor’s intention to move the diner, which she’s owned for 17 years. But her plans changed suddenly in January.
The diner was scheduled to shut down for a few weeks so workers with Blanchard Contracting, a Windsor company, could pour a new concrete floor and install a new furnace in the basement.
Soon after starting the job, however, workers made an unpleasant discovery. The diner’s foundation was crumbling and the load-bearing walls holding up the structure were cracking.
Blanchard had an idea: The Guy B. Vitagliano Foundation, a nonprofit that he founded to assist Windsor residents, owned what was now a vacant lot at 161 Main St. The Vitagliano Foundation had purchased the 0.3-acre property in 2024, according to Windsor tax maps. The foundation demolished its dilapidated structures. The town assessed the property at $77,960 in 2024.
Blanchard and Taylor started devising a plan to move the diner. In late April, the town’s Development Review Board unanimously granted conditional use and site plan approval for the project.
“I think what’s special about (the Windsor Diner) is it’s a gathering place for the community,” said 77-year-old Bill Ballantyne, who chairs the Development Review Board and was on hand for moving day. “It means a lot emotionally. Everyone is excited for this. It means hometown.”
The move didn’t happen overnight.
Demolition and prep began this spring. Blanchard Contracting posted videos and photos of the work on its Facebook page. Taylor kept people up to date in various Facebook groups where excitement — expressed through supportive comments, shared memories and emojis — continued to grow ahead of Wednesday’s move.
Taylor made it a point to reply to comments, thanking people for their support and reasserting her commitment to keeping the diner in downtown Windsor. “This is the longest I’ve ever been away from it; six months,” Taylor, 51, said.
She wore a bright yellow Blanchard Contracting T-shirt with her name on it and a white hard hat with “food boss” printed on its side that Blanchard had custom-made for her. Throughout the morning, she’d cross the bright orange barrier staked along the sidewalk to get a closer look before returning to the crowd.
As excited as she was about the move, she wasn’t quite sure what to make of leaving the location she’d gone to almost every day for 23 years.
“I haven’t really processed all of it, I don’t think,” she said. “We have a lot of support. It helps.”
Taylor came to the diner after a long history in food service. As a child, her dad, Fred Borcuk, frequently brought Taylor and her siblings to the Tumble Inn Diner in downtown Claremont, where he did maintenance work in exchange for food credit.
“I used to watch the cook,” Taylor said. “I was 6 or 7 and I was fascinated.”
At 15, she got her first food service job at the former Pleasant Street Restaurant on Opera House Square in Claremont. She was hooked. She dreamed about someday having a restaurant of her own.
When the Windsor Diner went up for sale in the early 2000s, Borcuk purchased it. The pair started working there and Taylor bought the diner from her father in 2008.
In the years since, she’s become integrated in the community. On Wednesday, people talked about how she helped feed Windsor residents during the COVID-19 pandemic through Vermont’s Everyone Eats program and Thanksgiving dinners she put together for residents living in senior housing in town. She donated food to area food pantries.
“It’s not just making money,” Apryl Bruder, one of Taylor’s five employees, said as her daughter Tryniti Berencsi, 3, twirled around her. “She treats us like family.”
Taylor hired Bruder, 35, after observing her customer service skills at the Cumberland Farms convenience store down the street. Tryniti regularly visited her mom at the diner and loves the French toast, which she calls “donut cake.”
Bruder, of Windsor, had only been working at the diner for four months when it was forced to close.
“We were all devastated,” when the diner closed, said Bruder as she chatted with Taylor and fellow employee Chantelle DeRobertis, of Ascutney, on the lawn outside Old South Church.
The last six months has been tough for the staff and many have taken other jobs in the meantime. Taylor herself opened a thrift and gift shop in downtown Claremont and is in the process of opening a coffee shop there. Bruder started a cleaning business and DeRobertis worked in sales, but they both missed their days at the diner.
“I can’t wait to get back,” DeRobertis, 42, said. “I love the high pace, the good energy.”
DeRobertis and her co-workers also missed the regulars, including Pieter van Schaik. The 82-year-old Windsor resident stopped by about three times a week for home fries and conversation since moving to town three years ago.
“She has a marvelous recipe,” said van Schaik, who was filming parts of the move on his tablet.
He is eager for the diner to reopen and get back to his regular helpings of home fries. On Wednesday, Taylor checked in on van Schaik, passing him a bottle of water as he leaned against a tree on the lawn.
People checked in on Taylor as well. Throughout the morning, they asked how she was doing and congratulated her on the move (she quickly yielded the credit to Blanchard). They asked about when the diner would reopen and told her how much they miss it.
She hopes to reopen in October. The roughly 800-square-foot diner car will have a kitchen and bathrooms built off the back, nearly doubling its size. Her favorite feature is the kitchen. Instead of being in the basement, it will be on the same level as the rest of the diner, which seats 36 patrons comfortably, Taylor said.
“I am not going to have to run stairs anymore,” Taylor said. On a typical day, she estimated she’d go up and down the stairs at least 60 times.
The undertaking cost around $300,000, though Taylor stressed it was a rough estimate. She’s funding it with her savings and personal loans. She didn’t intend to ask for donations, but after people kept asking — or in some cases, insisting — she began accepting them.
Those gathered Wednesday also discussed their favorite meals (with an emphasis on her home fries) and all the changes in downtown Windsor.
Peggy Ogilvy, 67, talked to a 7-year-old boy who told her how much he liked the diner’s cheeseburgers. One of her favorite parts of the day was observing how many people with a personal connection to Windsor or the diner turned out to watch the move.
“I don’t know the stories, but I feel the palpable energy” of those in the crowd, Ogilvy, of Windsor, said. “I’m very excited to see the community out.”
By 11 a.m., the diner had been placed on a flatbed truck and the roughly half-dozen workers started to dismantle the crane and the supports underneath it to move it down Main Street. The crowd of around 100 dispersed, with instructions to return in a couple hours to see it placed on the foundation at 161 Main St.
Around 1 p.m., a couple dozen spectators lined the sidewalks and lawns near the new site, the largest group at the Windsor Elks Lodge. The move was supposed to be completed by that hour and the street reopened, but there was still more work to do.
The work continued slowly. The tightness of the site with buildings nearby and power lines above the sidewalk near the diner’s new home left little room for error. They moved deliberately, taking time to stop and measure before moving equipment in place.
A little after 3:30, a worker driving the flatbed made his way from near Old South Church to the lot. He backed the vehicle up and workers reattached the straps used to move the diner to the structure. They attached the crane to a sling around the diner and then Blanchard slowly lifted the historic structure into the air before settling it on the new foundation. The excitement in the crowd was still palpable, but also somewhat subdued. At one point, the crowd swelled to around 50 people, many of whom had their phones out to take pictures or record it.
Taylor herself was streaming the scene on Facebook Live as she stood on the sidewalk, watching as workers moved it an inch at a time.
Shortly before 5 p.m., project manager Jeff Solsaa walked up to Taylor. “The Eagle has landed,” he told her, quoting astronaut Neil Armstrong said after the first moon landing in July 1969.
“It feels nice, relieving,” Taylor said. “It’s a done move.”
She took a moment to appreciate it, then she started thinking about everything left to do before she can get behind the grill again.
Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.