Penn Diner (Phillies)

This a view of the diner that most closely matches the Edward Hopper painting titled "Nighthawks".

Here is the copy of Hopper's original I used as a template. Clearly I've made way too many compromises to claim a convincing copy. The lady in red is out of the room. The rear wall with the yellow door is out of the field of view (for purely real world, geometric reasons). The facade across the street is wrong and too far away but I wanted to both use Hopper's "Early Sunday Morning" facade and make the street wide enough to accommodate rails for a locomotive or street car. The street light has to be in the shot to both support the street car's high voltage feed wire and to cast enough light across the street. Hopper's celing seems to be a surface radiating light while I have to have attached fixtures. And don't ask me to explain how I can be fairly close on the perspective of objects within the diner and then have the angle of the background street be so "off". At any rate, if I do say so myself, I think my lighting has better "middle of the night" atmosphere. Let's just call it an homage to the original.

A long shot of the entire building on the backlot.

A close-up of the interior. That curved window was too nice a detail to leave blank. I named it the Penn Diner since I plan to have the Pennsylvania railroad station just down the street. As you can see, the rear wall has the yellow door but the only you can see it from Hopper's perspective is if the rear wall is moved up until it is an arm's length from the coffee urns.

A close-up of the entrance. The price of the specials come from a Web image of a menu of the proper vintage.

The diner under a sunny blue sky, my preferred environment.