Abandoned Rosie's Diner, Two Years Later: Cedar Springs, Michigan

WARNING: Under no circumstances should you enter this property. By doing so you risk bodily harm and/or prosecution for trespassing on private property.

Those old 1970s commercials for Bounty paper towels featured Nancy Walker as wisecracking Rosie the waitress, who was always cleaning up some rube customer's mess with her handy roll of paper towels.

Those commercials were shot in an actual diner called the Farmland Diner in Little Ferry, New Jersey. It was built in 1946 and opened as the Silver Dollar Diner. After the commercials became a part of pop culture and popular, owner Ralph Corrado Jr. re-named the restaurant “Rosie’s Diner”.

Get our free mobile app

After retiring the diner, it was offered to the Smithsonian Institute as an historic pop culture item, the institute turned it down. Kinda snobby of them, I feel.

Michigan artist Jerry Berta bought the diner in the 1990s and took it to Cedar Springs, where it currently sits along with some other old diners. Out back is a deserted mini-golf course, overgrown with giant food replicas (seen in the gallery below) and even three things that suspiciously look like coffins!

Rosie’s was re-sold, re-bought, and re-opened in 2006. The golf course remained closed, and now all the fun figures are rotting and overgrown - but that's what makes it fun to walk through.

Rosie’s closed again in the fall of 2011 and so far remains shut.

The gallery below shows how it looks in 2024....then see the gallery I posted two years earlier and see the extra damage that has been caused by vandals in that short time.