I can’t help offering one last thought on the Thru-Way Diner in New Rochelle. I’ve passed it a couple of times since it closed Sunday, and the site of the building gone dark — the building that for so long was lit round the clock — strikes a melancholy chord.

About as long as the Thruway has cut through New Rochelle, the Thru-Way Diner served food and coffee. The latest incarnation, built in 1990, was a baubel of sorts. Call it lovably tacky, the exterior crowded with mirrored steel, stone granite to a shine and tilted, tinted windows. And then there were the letters standing above the structure, spelling out the name: “Thru-way.”

The guy whose company built it, Phil DeRaffele of DeRaffele Manufacturing Co. in New Rochelle, said it marked a change in the look of diners. It’s a look that has become familiar.

Now the door is locked. A handwritten sign in the window that says “We are officially closed.”

Maybe it’s a stretch for me to talk about the restaurant and it’s half-century-plus of service in a transportation blog, but really, the diner began partly to serve people coming off the Thruway, which in this case was Interstate 95. And, hey, it’s a diner. For my money, in the American psyche, diners and cars go together.

What I was not able to mention in Monday’s article was this: I’ll miss the place, too.

Almost 21 years ago, I began working for the papers that would become The Journal News. (The New Rochelle edition was The Standard-Star.) I also helped out at a theater, East Coast Arts, that operated in the Wildcliff stone cottage overlooking Long Island Sound by Hudson Park.

There was one friend in particular I became close to at that time, and we would spend many late nights talking about life over fried calamari at the Thru-Way. It was big, it was bright and I could have talked all night.

I still remember those nights often when I drive by the place.

I love diners. You’ll find me often at some of the others — the Nautilus, the Larchmont, the Olympia and the Mirage. But I also believe what Diane Potente said in Monday’s article; “There ain’t nothing like the Thru-Way Diner.”