Walking along Montgomery Avenue between 12th and 13th Streets sits a bold food truck that goes by the name Sexy Green Truck. Celia Jimenez and her family have operated Sexy Green Truck for the past few years. Jimenez has been working in the Philadelphia food industry for the last decade, and she also owns her own catering business on the side.
Jimenez says the best part of working at Sexy Green Truck is being able to see students enjoy her cooking. Working in such a small environment can be challenging, however. Only three people can work inside the truck at a time, and it can get hectic in the small space.
Jimenez and her family are not the owners of the truck, but they ensure its smooth operation. Listen to Celia Jimenez’s dual language interview (English & Spanish) below.
Henry Lam used to be a student at Temple University. In 2023, he opened up a new restaurant, Hank’s, in the 12th street food court on campus. Born and raised in Philadelphia, he worked in the corporate sector for a while before choosing to open up his restaurant. He says he has more free time, and he now has a more balanced life. He’s now rubbing elbows with veterans of the Temple food service industry over at Richie’s, Orient Express, and Fame’s Famous Pizza. He used to eat their food, but now he’s working with them to help the restaurants on the wall grow.
Burger Tank is run by Peter Shin, a man passionate about the people he serves. His parents, Korean immigrants, opened a convenience store when they came to America. Peter’s adventure into the food industry started when he opened a breakfast store on Broad and Girard Avenue.
Peter purchased Burger Tanks and has been running it since 2013. His mother operates the Top Bap food truck just a few trucks over. His sister also graduated from Temple University, so his family has deep ties to the university. He actively works to employ Temple students to help give back to the community.
In this interview, Peter touches on how he’s seen the food trucks and their culture change over the past decade. Peter’s business, like many of the food trucks on campus, was hit hard during the pandemic, and he’s recently faced issues with finding workers to help him keep his truck open to meet the requirements set by the license agreement. He’s been an advocate of vendors at Temple since taking over Burger Tank, but he is concerned about his business’s survival.
Jim Amzovski, with his brother Feim, have been operating Fame’s Famous Pizza since 1985. Born in Philadelphia to Macedonian immigrants, Jim grew up helping his parents operate a hot dog cart down in Center City. After their father passed away, they inherited the family business. They purchased a food truck and moved over to the Temple area. They brought with them their mother’s recipe and were the first original pizza place to offer fresh made pizza, not frozen.
The Amzovski brothers were eventually invited to make their business more permanent, and in 1994 they moved into the 12th Street food court. The food court was on the edge of main campus in the 1990s, and attracting clientele to the outskirts was challenging for the brothers at first. As campus was built around them, Fame’s popularity grew.
The Amzovski brothers have operated Fame’s through different administrations, changing campus culture, and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. As a veteran institution, Jim says he values his relationship with Temple students. He is also considering retiring soon. Listen to Jim’s oral history interview below.
In 1994, the food trucks who typically assembled at 13th and Montgomery were given notice that they’d need to leave: Temple University was constructing a new academic building. The trucks, who had been at that location for twelve years, were considered an integral part of campus culture. The 1994 Templar, the Temple University yearbook, lamented that “it will hardly seem like campus without the trucks in the middle of everything.” The trucks were not given a new location to relocate to, and vendors waited for news of their fates with little communication from the university. Feim Amzovski, owner of Fame’s Famous Pizza and the spokesman for the group of trucks, was concerned that the university was taking advantage of truck owners: “Many of the truck owners are non-English speaking people who could easily be misled by the university.”
“Vendor’s Mall,” a photograph of the previous space vendors inhabited. April 18, 1985. (Courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA)
The University’s answer was not a relocation of the trucks, but instead a new offer altogether. Vendors would be offered a spot in a new university owned and operated food court on 12th street, next to Anderson Hall. Vendors from the original “pad” would be offered right of first refusal, and seven vendors accepted (four of which are still there today- Fame’s, Eddie’s Richie’s, and Orient Express). The costs for the new construction, nearly $715,000, would be recouped by rent paid by tenants. According to the 1996 Templar, owners paid “nearly five times more in rent, as much as $1500, at the new court.”
Construction of the wall in August 1995. (Courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA.)
So why Temple? Why stay? For Jim Amzovski, of Fame’s Famous Pizza, he likes the students, and he likes having off on the weekends. Students are easy customers, he told me, not picky, and understanding when you’ve run out of something: “We have a harder time with the employees.” For the University, the new food court spot was chosen because it drew congestion away from the overcrowded original vendor hub at 13th and Montgomery. But for food truck owners, who suddenly found themselves on the edge of campus instead of its heart, it was disorienting. “At that time, there was nothing on this side [of campus],” Amzovski told me. “They pushed us out of main campus…but eventually [students] learned where we were at and started coming.”
The 12th street food court represents the University’s first attempt to bring food trucks into the Temple bureaucratic umbrella. Food trucks had long been a part of campus culture and have been used in marketing materials for potential students, but with the food court, they became tenants as well. As food trucks, they are definitionally potentially mobile, inconstant. Though many of the trucks on campus are currently immobile and constant, potentially, they could leave. They are not a part of Temple’s official food service offerings, and so as a result cannot be controlled and regulated in the same way. As stationary tenants in a food court, however, Temple can exert greater control over food service offerings and establishments.
The food court’s grand opening in February 1996. (Courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA.)
Though the vendors on the Wall are not technically food trucks anymore, many of them once were, and their stories are relevant in any examination of Temple’s food culture. Temple University continues to exert regulatory influence over food trucks, like in the form of the creation of the Special Vending District surrounding Temple’s campus. The Special Vending District, which was created in 2015, capped the number of vendors who could park trucks and carts on campus. In addition, any vendor who wishes to take time off now must first notify the University and the city. It also changed regulation regarding the inheritance of permits, an issue that remains a difficult subject for many food truck owners.
But for the physical vendors on the wall, Temple University is not just a specter of potential regulation, it is also a landlord. As Temple administrations come and go, Amzovski told me that things could change very quickly, and a responsive and helpful landlord could transform into someone very difficult to work with. While the current administration, he says, is responding to needs quickly and is helping to enact badly needed renovations, during the time the university was closed because of COVID, the previous administration continued to charge vendors on the wall rent. “At times, you’re working for nothing just to try to pay the rent,” Amzovski said. If Temple wants regulatory control over the food trucks and food service on campus, they should accept the responsibilities which come with that regulation and treat vendors and owners like the integral part of campus that they are.
To connect with Clare about her work, please visit our Connect page.
By Jacob Wolff, PhD student and educator at Temple University
In the final issue of the Diamond Club’s monthly newsletter, Jean Brodey warned that it “may be within weeks of a permanent closing.”
Temple University’s private club featured French wines paired with entrées by an in-house chef. Faculty and administrators were free to saunter about the smoke-filled library, billiards lounge or dining room atop Seltzer Hall while a trio played jazz standards. Occasionally, the president would host a gala.
Despite the perks, too few members were taking their meals at the club. Even fewer renewed memberships at all. “Its absence will be felt in many more ways,” Brodey added in the March 1979 newsletter. “Honored guests” would be “entertained at Blimpie’s” or worse, the food trucks.
Administrators intervened shortly thereafter, transferring operations from a nonprofit board to the foodservice vendor under contract with Temple.
Now over forty years later, students and faculty alike line up for a quick lunch from the iconic trucks on campus. Few decried the postpandemic decision to relocate what’s left of the Diamond Club – a lunchtime buffet with a membership option – on the main floor of a dormitory. Why no protest?
For starters, mealtime has never been about the food. It’s about the company you keep.
The original “Faculty Club” was demolished to make way for a residence hall. The rebranded Diamond Club was moved to the corner of Broad and Columbia Avenue, the site of the 1964 protests against police brutality. (Courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA)
When members originally chartered the Diamond Club on 9 January 1967 with the Court of Common Pleas, they promised “to maintain an atmosphere conducive to the free and informal exchange of ideas.” Yet, university leaders imagined an exclusive place segregated from the public they were purported to serve. Temple – to its credit and unlike the University of Pittsburgh, New York University, or Boston University – enrolled a remarkably diverse student body in 1967, estimated at 3,100 local students of Color out of the total enrollment of 34,000 students. But, the bylaws were unequivocal: all undergraduates were prohibited from entering the club, barred even as guests of members. Moreover, only staff “earning the equivalent of an instructor’s salary” were entitled to membership, effectively barring working-class employees who were disproportionately Black or Puerto Rican.
Membership standards, not meal costs, made the difference. For the dwindling Diamond Club patrons, an ambiguous expectation of “cleanliness and neatness” was nonnegotiable with management; whereas, the Club promoted a 50 percent discount on the 50.00 dollar dues in 1978, hoping to win back business. After the university foodservice vendor took over operations in 1979, club dues kept falling (In 2003, dues bottomed out at $5.00 annually!).
In the 1970s, a cheesesteak cost $1.65 at the Diamond Club. Adjusted for inflation, this would cost about $8.11 in 2022. (Courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA.)
No matter the cheapening bill, faculty opted instead to join students over cheesesteak or similar fare at the nearly thirty food trucks that operated on campus by the 1980s. Leo Martella opened the first dedicated food truck on 15 June 1954, selling pizza to Temple students. In 1963, with the federally-backed building boom, more trucks arrived on campus. “You can’t make it with just pizza anymore,” he told a reporter in 1981, “the competition’s too tough.” Wayne’s Deli offered an “Inflation deflator” hamburger special, Maggie’s Oriental Café specialized in MSG-free dishes, and Eddy Eggroll promised “a full line of vegetarian” dishes, including yogurt and fruit juices. Faculty members found more diverse culinary offerings from food trucks than they could on the menu at the Diamond Club.
A food truck operator serves patrons on the Temple University campus. (Courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA.)
Some food history scholars believe that middle-class consumers have become more egalitarian in their choices. Others, like Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann, see “omnivorousness” as “an alternative strategy to snobbery.” In their analysis, diverse rather than exclusive tastes have come to define a cosmopolitan identity. Might the faculty who “slum it” with students and ethnic entrepreneurs reveal a grittier, yet enduring class distinction within our consumer republic?
The answer is probably a bit more complicated.
Dylan Gottlieb, a Temple alumnus (MA ‘13) and historian at Bentley University, reminds us that “we should not mistake [consumer choice] as a substitute for meaningful political struggle.” However, the structural conditions under which university faculty labor have grown more precarious since the original Diamond Club dissolved.
Temple employees were on the vanguard of building a collective movement among knowledge workers. Thomas Paine Cronin, president of the Philadelphia AFSCME district, chaired a summit of all campus labor unions in 1983 at the Diamond Club. “As the bread and butter issues get tougher,” he explained, “I think the issue of democracy in the workplace becomes more and more prominent.” By the fall of 1986, faculty went on strike. “Terms of the contract were not made public,” according to the New York Times, “but sources close to the talks said the settlement amounted to almost an 11 percent wage increase in a two-year contract.” In 1990 faculty walked out again – some undergraduates marched in sympathy until a court order forced faculty back to work. Graduate workers were forced to cross picket lines, for fear of losing funding through the duration of their doctoral training. Despite decades of organizing, only in 2001 did the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board rule that graduate workers at Temple were eligible for union representation. The lead organizer among graduate workers spearheaded a 2019 petition in favor of food truck operator rights.
With annual dues and meal costs averaged $350.00 per person in 1977 (almost $1,800 when adjusted for 2022 inflation rates), and a budding class-consciousness by the 1980s, eligible employees most likely could not afford to join the Diamond Club. Nor did they want to, even after dues dropped. The space, then in the basement of Mitten Hall, was just room available for large gatherings.
No wonder why people hadn’t spilled ink over the 2021 move to Johnson and Hardwick Hall like they did back in 1979. University employees – faculty, staff, adjuncts, and perhaps midlevel managers – no longer want an exclusive space on campus. The food trucks are just fine.
That’s not to suggest private clubs are no longer relevant. Back in the 1960s, the Diamond Club catered to the shared governance of faculty and administrators. Now running a campus is big business. For the select university leaders who can afford it, places like the Union League exist.
