Andy Satter '75 restores photos he took in the 1970s for a 64-page book — Walk-Ins Welcome — and a homecoming exhibition.
If you're a certain age, you likely have boxes of old photographs — friends and family, places — fading on paper and in memory. Occasionally, you dig them out to revisit the past.
That's what happened to Andy Satter '75 in 2023 when searching for some old family pictures to show his son Max, who was visiting from overseas. Instead, he found a different box — one filled with images from Russ' Kitchenette Diner, a 12-by-36-foot railcar-style diner in East Cambridge, Mass., where he spent a brief but meaningful part of his life.
Satter discovered Russ' diner in 1974 while studying photography at Imageworks in Cambridge.
It was 1974 out on the sidewalk — and 1947 inside the diner. It was love at first sight.Andy Satter '75
Satter went back every day that summer and then once a week until he moved to New York City in 1977. After that, he put the pictures in a box and never looked at them again. He moved five or six times before settling in New Paltz 30 years ago and says he thought the pictures were lost in one of those moves.
Until recently, that is — when he stood in his basement, opened the unmarked box, and showed them to Max, who knew nothing about the pictures or the project.
"Dad, these are [expletive] amazing!" Max exclaimed. "What are we going to do with these?"
Max, it turns out, was onto something. Satter reached out to Nadine Lemmon of the Center for Photography at Woodstock, who introduced him to curator Adam Ryan. Both recognized the significance of the images.
Satter digitized the negatives, and the restored photos have been published in a 64-page book, Walk-ins Welcome, released on March 20, 2025, featuring a foreword from Ryan. Nine days later, the photos were put on display in "The Diner Project — Remembering A Time Passed But Not Forgotten" at CambridgeSide Galleria, which was built on the very site where Russ' stood from 1937 until 1978.
"It was a magical place," Satter says. Even at the callow age of 20, he knew discretion was the critical factor in getting the pictures he wanted. He gently walked the narrow floor, staying out of the line of conversation and using only the available light inside the diner. Never a flash.
The exhibit featured black-and-white images of Russ, the owner, dressed in his white diner uniform, hat pushed back on his balding head, leaning against the counter; and Charlie the cook — "He became like a father to me," Satter says — perched over a bucket peeling some of the 100 pounds of potatoes he peeled six days a week, starting at 3:30 a.m.
Other images include: the waitress, Geri, in contemplative profile; a wall adorned with photos of great Boston sports legends Ted Williams and Rocky Marciano; and the regulars — cops, firemen, plumbers, electricians — leaning against the counter, smiling, laughing, eating.
"I knew that the denizens of the diner had to be comfortable with me," Satter says. "I had to be present in a way that was respectful and nonthreatening for them. Because I learned how to do that, they let down their guard and allowed me to see them in a way that other people didn't see them."
Satter apprenticed at a commercial photography studio that summer, which gave him access to a professional darkroom. "I stayed up all night processing diner film and making prints. Then, I took them into the diner in the morning," he says.
Once the workers and the customers saw the pictures, Satter began to win their confidence. Russ started to thumbtack Satter's prints to the wall. Then the customers asked for portraits and gave him the nickname: "The Kid." Eventually, he had full access — which improved the quality of the work.
Satter moved to New York in 1977 and has, for many years, run an eponymous executive coaching firm in the health care business. When he left Boston, he lost touch with Russ, Charlie and Geri and never went back to the diner. Until this past spring.
It's come full circle. To have the photographs come home to where they were taken, a half-century later, has allowed me to come home to my relationship with photography.Andy Satter '75
The Diner Project continues to be exhibited in venues up and down the East Coast, and many of its photographs are now in private collections.
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