Hill’s Snappy Service
by Pat Sides
This small diner opened in 1941 at Main Street and Riverside Drive, not long before this photo was shot. It housed Hill’s Snappy Service restaurant, part of a popular Midwest chain that had begun to expand into Indiana cities in the 1930s. The building’s distinctive style and diminutive size contrasted starkly with the older, more traditional commercial structures surrounding it. Hill’s replaced a building that was damaged by the Great Flood of 1937, and the diner’s tiles and curves resembled the Art Deco style of the Greyhound Bus terminal at Third and Sycamore, which had opened two years earlier. Hill’s was already operating three other restaurants in Evansville when the location on Main Street opened.
