The Blue Top Diner

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Walking along Boston Street, people will run into a small store called “Canton Market.” Acting as both a convenient store and sandwich shop, Canton Market serves up a variety of sandwiches such as their cheese steak sub and their turkey club. Canton Market is not the first locally owned casual dining spot in this location. Before Canton Market, this lot was home to the Blue Top Diner. 

Bill Tangires, former owner of the Blue Top Diner, started his career working for his father’s business called “Jim’s Lunch.” Bill Tangires continued to work in the food industry and prepared meals for industrial plants. Afterwards in the mid 1960s, Bill Tangires founded the Blue Top Diner.  The Blue Top Diner served diner classics from burgers and vegetable-beef soup, to coffee and chocolate meringue pie. The Blue Top Diner was even recommended in a Baltimore Sun Article alongside the famous Double-T Diner. 

The Blue Top Diner served a variety of people until the year it closed, including “factory workers, truck drivers, dock hands, business people” and even then Maryland senator Barbara Ann Mikulski. In the late eighties, Bill Tangires sold the diner property to Alan Katz, a restaurant chain owner. A Baltimore Sun article detailing the closing of the Blue Top Diner stated, “An avid investor, he [Bill Tangires] hopes to become a stock analyst with a discount brokerage house, perhaps with the First National Bank company.” Although Bill Tangires left the restaurant business to pursue finance, the property of the diner still remains a part of the food business today.