The beloved Gateway Diner in Westville NJ closed in October 2023, and today demolition crews were on site to take down the building.
The closing and demolition of the Gateway Diner is due to an effort to rebuild the adjacent Route 47 bridge, which is also intended to address flooding that occurs at the base of the bridge near the diner.
In my visit today around 3:30pm, the majority of the two dining room areas were already gone in the L-shaped diner, and the main kitchen area really hadn’t been touched yet by the claw excavator.
I visited the site several times this year and crews have actually been working in the kitchen area of the diner for several weeks, having previously removed all the roofing aspects just in that section. While I don’t know if this is for certain… it makes me think that the kitchen area had unique demolition concerns that the crews took extra weeks to complete ahead of the full demo effort.
Today I took photos from the street level (River Drive) and also put the drone up.
River Drive is the side street where the main diner counter/stool area was located, and that dining area and counter were completely gone by this afternoon, leaving the remaining diner aspects full exposed.
In my images you can see the bathroom outer wall is gone and the banged up bathroom stall doors are visible. The entrance doorway into the kitchen is open with a hand sanitizer dispenser still on the wall, and several decor stainless steel panels that lined the back wall of the counter area can be seen.
But beyond that basically everything was already destroyed and moved out of the way.
Back in October the Gateway Diner owners announced on social media that Sunday October 22nd would be their last day operating.
The owners stated that they tried everything they could to keep the doors open, and cited eminent domain led to the the property being purchased by the New Jersey Department of Transportation.
The diner is not the only building coming down for the project as directly across from the diner (across Route 47/Delsea) is a small two-story office building, and at a later point in the project cycle that will also be demolished.
A main reason for the removal of these two buildings is because Rt 47/Delsea Drive will be raised significantly in this area, to raise roadway higher than the high tide point which would flood at that base of the bridge.
Keep reading to learn more about the plans for how this effort will address road flooding in the area of the Gateway Diner and If you’re interested to understand more about all of the Flooding efforts around the Brooklawn Circle area please check out my article from February of this year. I also have plans to do a video on this soon.
Route 47 Bridge Rebuild
Adjacent to the Gateway Diner is the Route 47 (Delsea Drive) bridge which travels over top of the Big Timber Creek connecting Westville and Brooklawn (at the Eastern Brooklawn Circle)
NJDOT describes it as a $47.8 million Federally funded project that will replace the superstructure of the Route 47 bridge, as well as raise the profile of the bridge by 7 feet. The project started earlier this year and is expected to be completed by the summer of 2027.
There are actually two bridge rebuilds in this area, with the “sister” Route 130 bridge also being rebuilt. That effort started about 18 months ago.
Both the Route 130 and Route 47 Bridges connect Brooklawn and Westville (over the Big Timber Creek) and both will be fully under construction at the same time! NJDOT states that travel will be maintained on the bridges throughout most of the projects.
For the Route 47 bridge project, on the Brooklawn side workers have recently removed guardrails and cleared out brush from a large segment of the bridge.
On the Westville side of the Route 47 bridge at its base alongside the Gateway Diner back parking area, the roadway reaches a low point… which is significantly lower then the rest of Route 47 surface road.
This low point position in the roadway is below many high tide levels (particularly when the waterways are more full from rain storms or moon events)… and the adjacent Big Timber Creek in just doing its “Mother Nature” thing of rising to a higher tide… will flood the roadway at the bridge.
This roadway flooding causes a variety of issues for traffic, which many times is simply cars driving through several inches of water, to other times vehicles being impacted by significant water damage as their cars become stuck… and it’s also very common that the flooding is high enough that traffic is simply stopped from moving through.
So the core simple solution to this aspect of roadway flooding is to raise Rt 47/Delsea Drive as it approaches the bridge to be higher than most high tides.
I’ve reviewed the engineering diagrams and it appears to me that at the current lowest point at the base of the bridge, Route 47 will be raised 6 feet higher!
Honestly, considering all of the efforts that are taking place to improve the flooding in the Brooklawn area, this one seems the most logical and with the highest possibility for long term success. Well at least in my mind.
So that is part of the reason for the need to tear down the Gateway Diner as that raised roadway will need grading which will extend down wider than the roadway of course, and into the general area of the diner building.
The second aspect that I can see in the diagrams is a significant number of new drainage grate inlets will be installed along 47/Delsea Drive and those inlets will be channeled to a collection area to be located on the former Gateway Diner property. A longer channel will then be created to direct that collected water back to the Big Timber Creek.
