Remembering Joe's Shelby Street Diner

For more than 40 years, a simple 1950s-style diner operated on the Southside of Indianapolis walking distance of the campus of the University of Indianapolis and its previous iteration, Indiana Central University.

It was still in operation as of November 2019, based on a customer’s review of the establishment that I found online from that date. But at some point thereafter, it closed. And it did so without fanfare, apparently. I could find no record of news stories documenting its official closure.

While on a recent shoot at UIndy in late June, I drove past the site of the former diner, Joe’s Shelby Street Diner, conjuring memories of the many, many times I'd driven past the place in my years living in Indianapolis. My son Ben and I even stopped there to eat once, sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s. 

When I concluded my recent shoot at UIndy, I decided to grab the photos of the diner that you see in this post. Afterward, I did some research to see what I could learn about Joe’s operation over the four decades that it was open.

I moved to Indy’s Southside in 1983, and in those early years of driving past the diner at 3623 Shelby Street, I remember its name being Shelby Street Diner. 

At newspapers.com, I found a December 2016 obituary for Phillip Joseph “Joe” Long, 73, in which Long (obit picture is shown at right) was identified as the diner’s owner and operator for 10 years. At the time of Joe’s death, he was residing in Port Richey, Fla., and the obit identified him as a former resident of Beech Grove, Ind., an Indianapolis suburb.

And in a late 1990 feature story in The Indianapolis News, the writer said Long had purchased the diner in June of that year and that Joe's son, P.J. Jr., helped his father run the business. Betty Croasmun is identified in the story as a cook at the diner and a former owner-operator. The story said she and husband, Bill, co-owned the diner from 1984-88 and that the Croasmuns decided to sell because they had grown tired of the long, daily hours of work.

Betty went by the last name Harris when she first started working there for Bonnie Webster, whom Harris said had owned the diner for 10 years before Betty and Bill took over in the mid-1980s, according to an interview she gave Rex Redifer of The Indianapolis Star in February 1985. She also told Redifer that the eatery was closed for about a year in the transition before Croasmun and Harris decided to jump-start it again. 

The Star article also says a “local businessman,” Dale Middleton of Greenwood (an Indianapolis suburb), bought the property and spruced it up. At the site of his 2022 online obituary, family posted a memories video containing a montage of life pictures that includes a photo of a package beer and liquor store and Quasar TV that shared space in a building at 3601 Shelby Street on property immediately north of the diner. The photo below is how that property looks today. 

Bonnie Ellen Pratt Webster died in January 2018. According to her online obituary, she had worked in restaurants all her life — at RCA, the Shelby Street Diner (as owner), Dutch Oven and Ryan's Steakhouse in Indianapolis. “Bonnie was an excellent cook,” the obit said. “She enjoyed canning, and many people asked and were after her homemade fudge recipe, better than any fudge you can commercially get.”

The math in the timing of and years of ownership between what the 1985 Star article assigns to Webster and what the 1990 article in The News assigns to the Croasmuns doesn’t quite line up. It’s the later News article that states Joe Long took over in June 1990. 

But all that isn’t too important at this point, given that the eatery has been shuttered ... yet again. That’s  the bottom line.  

In several editions of The Indianapolis Star from 2011, I found a substantial-sized ad for Joe’s Shelby Street Diner in the newspaper’s weekly Dining Guide. The ad details some of the eatery’s top breakfast menu items (pancakes and biscuits and gravy were two items cited as customer favorites). But the illustration with the ad is a large photo of a cheeseburger and fries, which are cited as favorites by customers in restaurant review sites such as Yelp, Trip Advisor, Reddit, The Reflector and LoopNet. 

Said one reviewer in an online discussion board thread in which she had learned Joe’s no longer was open: “I used to go there when I was a little kid. They had awesome chicken sandwiches and vanilla Coke. Dang, childhood memories right there.”

Interestingly, the diner’s Facebook page is still active and contains some pictures of the diner’s 1950s-style decor, right down to its narrow black-and-white-square — and extremely narrow — checkered floor. It contains this promotion for the place:

Looking for an authentic diner experience? Come to Joe’s Shelby Street Diner! It’s a ’50s place! We’re  home to the one-pound burger, the hub cap tenderloin, half-pound footlong hot dog, and much more! We are open Monday thru Saturday 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., serving breakfast, lunch and dinner. We also offer daily lunch and dinner specials.

I was unable to ascertain the diner’s ownership from 2000 thereafter, or in the years before the Croasmuns, but as the photos I grabbed in my shoot in this post attest, the shuttered diner still was using the “Joe’s” name on the signs to the very end. 

Below are close up shots of the animated characters still on the outside windows: