It’s been nearly 60 years since the Blue Star Diner was trucked to Newport News from its original spot in the Shenandoah Valley.

But after its longtime owner, Fannie Blentson, died 11 years ago, the historic Hilton area eatery has sat vacant and in disrepair.

A Northern Virginia real estate company, Belleville Diners LLC, purchased the old-school restaurant near the Hilton Village neighborhood in 2010, with a plan to refurbish it and bring back its old charm.

But owner Michael Lessin says that while he hasn’t lost any passion for a diner he loves, he’s decided to put it on the market.

The drives back and forth to Newport News from outside Washington, he said, have become “enormously personally draining” — and getting the iconic diner open would require many more trips and perhaps longer term stays here.

“I’ve probably driven back and forth 200 times, and I’m not even exaggerating,” he said.

“I was torn — very torn,” Lessin said. “Do I sell it? Do I not sell it? Frankly, my girlfriend said, ‘You need to choose’ — either choose the diner or choose her. She said, ‘Is the diner going to keep you warm at night?’”

It’s only the second time the Blue Star has been on the market since the original owners brought the restaurant to Newport News some 58 years ago.

Lessin, 45, said he’s poured lots of time and “more than six figures” of renovations into the eatery, though the work may not be obvious to those who drive by.

“When we bought it, the place was in bad shape,” he said. “And I think with all the work and time and money that we’ve put into it, I think now it’s in a good position that somebody can finish it off — finish the renovation and open it up.”

Situated on a busy section of Warwick Boulevard — between Newport News Shipbuilding and Hilton Village — Lessin says the Blue Star is in a “perfect spot for a community diner.”

With the original dining booths, Formica counter tops, classic spinning stools, terrazzo floors and stainless steel fixtures, it’s an eatery straight out of the 1950s.

“I love the diner,” Lessin said. “I think the location is great. I think its potential is fantastic.”

The asking price is close to $1.27 million, which includes the diner itself, the attached rear kitchen area, and a side building that Lessin had once envisioned for more dining and events.

The Blue Star features a freestanding neon sign with a star at its top.

They vintage sign also touts in large lettering that the diner is “air conditioned” — a restaurant luxury in the early 1960s. The sign needs some work, Lessin said, but “is repairable back to its original condition.”

The city of Newport News has assessed the properties — just over 3,600 square feet of space on two-thirds of an acre — at $321,500 for 2021.

But Lessin maintains that the actual value is far higher, saying that a recent appraisal from a commercial lender — including a “full analysis of the what the property could rent for” and its cash flow potential — “came in close to a million dollars.”

1957 diner trucked from Woodstock

According to Daily Press archives, the Blue Star Diner was built in 1957 by the Manno Dining Car Company of New Jersey. Two Greek immigrants, Angelo Blentson and his wife, Fotini “Fannie” Blentson, bought the diner in 1961 for $50,000.

They initially set it up in Woodstock — a Virginia town west of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Shenandoah Valley — and named it after a diner that Angelo knew from New Jersey.

Business was brisk in the summer, but they did poorly in the winter “because of the frequent snow,” the Daily Press archives said.

In May 1963, on the advice of relatives in Newport News, the Blentsons paid a trucker $3,000 to haul it 250 miles — in two pieces — to its current spot at 9955 Warwick Boulevard. They backed it against a converted garage — once an auto upholstery shop — that became the main kitchen.

The Blentsons later added another building — which Lessin believes was once a World War II military hut — and rented it out as a furniture store. They also added a new dark blue slanted roof.

Down-home cooking, good prices

Over the years, the Blue Star was known for serving down-home cooking at a reasonable price.

Meatloaf, country style steak, corned beef and cabbage and chicken and dumplings were among the mainstays. The daily specials came with a dessert, such as Fannie’s own rice pudding.

“Hungry diners came ... for Fannie’s ample helpings of delicious food at a most reasonable cost,” a Daily Press community news article said.

“It wasn’t weight watcher fare, but it was mighty satisfying, especially the lamb dinners that this nice, hard-working lady always prepared around the time of the Greek Easter.”

Columbia Pictures rented the Blue Star in 1987 to film scenes for “Zelly and Me,” with filmmakers describing it at the time as the “perfect quintessential diner.”

Angelo Blentson died in 1991 at the age of 59 after a battle with leukemia.

Fannie Blentson ran the restaurant for another 16 years after that, with she and her children living in a home on Rivermont Drive, just behind the diner.

A 1996 book called “Blue Plate Special, The American Diner Cookbook,” featured a recipe and a brief history of the Newport News eatery.

Open for holidays

The Blue Star was also known for staying open on Thanksgiving and other holidays. “We stay open to feed those people who don’t have families, or families nearby — single men with no one to cook for them,” Fannie Blentson told the Daily Press in 2001.

The restaurant stayed open during storms, often till the power went out. High winds from Hurricane Floyd blasted a crack in the diner’s front door in 1999, which remains that way because the chrome door frame was hard to replace.

A down point came in December 2005, when a kitchen fire that began with “butter on a stove” caused thousands of dollars in damage.

The Blue Star was never quite the same after that.

When it reopened a year and a half later, in May 2007, Fannie Blentson leased it out under new management, though she still cooked the daily specials and her patented yeast rolls.

She became ill in 2009 and died in September of that year, at 77. The restaurant served its last meal in January 2010, with Fannie’s children putting the Blue Star on the market soon after that.

Blue Star changes hands

Lessin closed on the property five months later.

“Someone who knew I was into diners emailed me about it,” he said. “And then I immediately went down there. I think it was on the market for like a week before I made an offer on it.”

His company paid $390,000 in a package deal for the diner, the attached buildings and the Blentsons’ brick home on Rivermont that was later sold off.

Belleville Diners got a good deal, he said, not only because it came as a package deal, but also because it was the height of the global financial crisis, when commercial real estate markets were in a downturn.

When Lessin bought the property in May 2010, he told the Daily Press he planned to reopen the diner within “six months to a year.” He said the buildings needed about $200,000 in work, and promised a historically accurate renovation.

“We would love to get as many old photos as possible, just so we can see how it used to look to make sure that all the restoration that we do is historically correct,” he said at the time.

City threatened demolition

But 11 years on, the renovation still isn’t complete.

By 2015, the city was accusing Lessin of sitting on the property and doing nothing with it. Officials at the time threatened to condemn the building and tear it down.

“Just because it’s historic doesn’t mean it can just sit there and decay,” Harold Roach, the city of Newport News’ director of codes compliance, told the Daily Press at the time.

That was when Lessin said he “seriously considered picking up the whole building and moving” the Blue Star out of Newport News. But though he’s done that seven times elsewhere, he said, it comes with a steep downside.

“The disadvantage is that when you move a diner, you lose its link with the community,” he said. “Open the Blue Star in Mequon, Wisconsin, and you’ve kind of severed that 60 years of history. It’s still a cool building at the new location, but we’ve broken that link with the with the prior community.”

Lessin said everything involved with the Blue Star — from getting the blueprints completed and approved to finding the contractors — proved more complicated than he initially thought.

“With a lot of the roofing contractors, the job was either too complicated or too small for them to even want to do,” he said. “Just every aspect of it took a lot more time than expected.”

When the city talked of demolishing the diner, Marc Wagner, a historian for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, made a pitch to save it, calling the Blue Star the last classic diner in Hampton Roads.

“We only have about 10 surviving diners (of that time period in Virginia), and this one is a gem,” he told the Daily Press in 2015.

Lessin eventually got the city to back off its demolition plans after demonstrating to city officials that the building was safe — and began to submit plans for the building work.

Renovation work began

Significant renovation work was done between 2016 and 2018.

That included installing a new roof on the rear kitchen building, which turned out to be a complex task because of new energy efficiency standards.

The problem, Lessin said, was that the exhaust hoods on the Blue Star’s stoves didn’t provide enough clearance to add insulation between the ceiling and roof. Contractors ended up adding eight inches above the roof, including foam insulation and a rubber membrane top.

They also raised the kitchen floor to even it with the dining area that had been two steps higher, then created an opening in the cinderblock to pass meals through. An old garage door in the rear kitchen wall was filled in, and the entry to the employee bathroom was moved off the kitchen.

The pandemic put some other planned improvements on hold last year, and the construction hasn’t resumed.

‘Getting close to the end zone’

Included in the offer to sell the Blue Star property, Lessin said, are all of the renovation blueprints, a registered domain name, bluestardiner.com, and a registered trademark from the U.S. patent office.

The process to get the diner added to the National Registry of Historic Places is also well underway.

“I think we’ve really done 80% of it,” Lessin said of bringing the Blue Star Diner back. “We’ve done the hard stuff. So in terms of moving the ball down the field, I think it’s getting close to the end zone. For somebody to finish it off won’t be that difficult.”

Peter Dujardin, 757-247-4749, pdujardin@dailypress.com