Food Cart
These night wagons served people coming off late shifts or after long hours of work.
They were also known as “owls,” a nickname that reflected their late-night
clientele—people still out for work or recreation after most of Burlington had gone to
bed.
Night lunch carts were not basic, open pushcarts. Burlington required licenses for many
kinds of businesses, and newspapers regularly reported which licenses were granted,
tabled, or denied. Separate licenses existed for night lunch cart keepers, push carts,
restaurant keepers, and even popcorn stands, so distinctions were made among these
food-related enterprises. The night lunch carts were enclosed, and customers could
step inside to eat. In many ways, they were the forerunners of the American diner.
A Feature of the Times
Burlington was not alone in experiencing the rise of lunch carts.
In Boston, then Mayor Quincy vetoed a lunch cart license request in 1896. According to
one newspaper account, the mayor believed that city streets were meant for
“locomotion” and not stationary structures. The same article noted that hundreds of
lunch carts already operated in and around Boston, suggesting that the phenomenon
had spread widely across American cities.
As the article concluded, “The rise and spread of the lunch wagon is a feature of the
times.”
Late-Night Food in a City with Few Restaurants
At the time, Burlington had many places to buy meat, fish, bread, and groceries, but
only a handful of restaurants. The Burlington City Directory from 1890 lists 76
retail grocers, 30 meat markets, 4 fish and oyster dealers, and 5
bakeries—but only 5 dining rooms and restaurants. For late-night workers especially,
the lunch carts filled an important gap.
The Burlington Free Press reported on December 1, 1892, that one of the lunch carts
operating in Rutland had arrived in Burlington the previous night and that “its owner
proposes to stay here, providing the people take kindly to his sort of lunches.”
The article did not describe what was being sold, but other reports offer clues. The
granddaughter of lunch cart owner Samuel Bergman later recalled that her father told
stories of helping his father in the cart and preparing hamburgers, and possibly hot
dogs. Other glimpses of what might have been served come from newspaper accounts
of arrests and robberies in or around lunch carts.
In one case, a lunch cart owned by S. Kabler on Lower College Street was robbed after
closing. Nearly all of the cart’s portable contents—including pies and eggs—were taken,
prompting Kabler to declare that “the cupboard was bare.” A 1920 report of an arrest at
a cart on the corner of Main Street and South Winooski Avenue mentioned that the
person involved had eaten “a sandwich and a glass of milk in the cart.” Outside
Burlington, lunch wagons advertised items such as milk, butter, eggs, bread, pies, clam
chowder, baked beans, sandwiches, and “frankfurts.” In Bennington, newspaper
references to lunch carts included sandwiches, coffee, and even strawberry shortcake.
Taken together, these brief references suggest that Vermont’s lunch carts offered a
varied menu of simple, ready-to-eat foods.
Owners, Licenses, and Locations
City licensing records and newspaper reports reveal the names of a number of
Burlington lunch cart operators or license applicants. These owners were all immigrants.
Between the 1890s and early 1900s, these included Sam Bergman, Mrs. R. Colodny,
Israel Colodny, S. Kabler, Davis Neiburg, Robert W. Reagan, Malcolm Smith, H.D.
Stone, Sem Stone, Mr. Sugarman, Patrick Tierney, H.D. and J.E. Thomas, and Arthur
P.
White.
Most of the carts appear to have been set up in downtown Burlington, especially around
City Hall Park, Church Street, Main Street, College Street, and the then-named
Y.M.C.A.
Their locations mattered. Newspaper coverage treated them as visible parts of
downtown life, and special notice was made when a new lunch cart opened in 1903 in
the northern part of the city, near Interval Avenue and North Street—an area now
known
as the Old North End.
It is not clear whether all of the carts had names. One newspaper mentioned a “Palace”
lunch cart, which was reportedly moved by order of the police in 1893. Samuel
Bergman’s cart was known as “Uncle Sam,” and H.D. Stone’s night lunch by the
Y.M.C.A. was listed as the “White House Café.”
Licenses were required to operate a night lunch cart, and the Board of Aldermen
reviewed and voted on applications. In 1895, a license was granted to D. Neiburg,
whose cart was located near City Hall. At the same meeting, a license request by H.D.
and J.E. Thomas was tabled after one alderman argued that it was unfair to allow a cart
that took up a good deal of public space. In 1905, the Board allowed I. Colodny to
withdraw his application for a lunch cart on the south side of City Hall Park and returned
his license fee, while Arthur P. White was granted a license for that location. In 1909, a
petition to transfer a lunch cart license on Main Street near the Hayward Block from
Harry Reagan to Malcolm Smith was granted, and Smith was also licensed for an all-
night restaurant on North Street.
Late-Night Drama
The lunch carts also appear in newspaper reports about disturbances and other late-
night altercations.
An article in the Burlington Clipper described a “fracas” at a cart run by Mr. Sugarman.
During the disturbance, Sugarman reportedly left the cart to avoid being beaten, and
warrants were later issued for the arrest of the intruders. The article noted that this was
the second disturbance reported at that location.
Some nearby residents complained that the cart had become a gathering place for what
they described as “objectionable characters,” whose loud conversations and profanity
could be heard from the street. One complaint stated that the talk inside could easily be
heard outside and “was not the sort of thing that women and children passing by would
find edifying.”
Such reports suggest that lunch carts could serve as lively gathering places, but that
their late-night presence also sometimes made them controversial.
Sam Bergman’s “Uncle Sam”
Of all the Burlington lunch carts mentioned in newspapers, Sam Bergman’s “Uncle
Sam” seems to have generated the most public attention.
His cart appears repeatedly in reports involving legal disputes, licensing battles, and
neighborhood objections. In one case tried in 1902, Bergman’s cart had reportedly
burned in 1900, and builder Peter L. Gay went to court to recover additional costs he
said were incurred when Bergman requested changes during construction of a
replacement cart.
By 1906, one newspaper remarked that the cart had probably had “more legal
processes served upon it than any other vehicle of its kind in existence.” It had, the
paper said, been through bankruptcy, a chattel mortgage, a sheriff’s sale, a mechanic’s
lien, and various court proceedings. His license was revoked at least once, and in one
incident Bergman was stabbed by an intruder demanding five dollars who had
“brandished a bread knife” picked up from the lunch cart itself.
Yet Bergman stayed in business.
By 1916 he had been granted a license to move his lunch cart to a location just south of
the Van Ness House, at Bank Street off Church. In 1917, after objections were raised to
his continued operation in another location, Bergman appeared before the Board
pleading that he had been in business for than 20-plus years and would be ruined if
denied a license. A petition signed by a large number of citizens supported him. In the
end, his license was extended for another year.
Bergman’s story illustrates that lunch carts could become more than businesses. They
could become fixtures of the street—controversial to some, but valued enough by
customers and supporters that people were willing to speak up on their behalf.
From Lunch Wagons to Diners
These early food carts left a legacy. Lunch wagons were the forerunners of diners, a
distinctly American institution. And with the current popularity of food trucks, Burlington’s
night lunch carts remind us that what appears to be a modern trend is often rooted in
much older traditions.