In its heyday, Fall River, Massachusetts, was a factory town par excellence. And that’s just the sort of place where the need for economy meets the imagination of restaurateurs to produce some of the most innovative and inexpensive casual eats. Just as ballplayers of old seemed to spring full-formed from the soil of America’s farms, some of the wackiest contributions to American handheld cuisine spring from the creativity of grill cooks and chefs of the country’s lunch counters and diners.

And Fall River has some great ones, as we detailed this past Sunday in the Boston Globe‘s travel section. (Read the story here.) It doesn’t spoil the fun to hint at the menu. It includes the chouriço and fries sub at Nick’s Coney Island Hot Dogs, the grated and melted cheese sandwich (with or without meat sauce) at J.J.’s Coney Island, and the chow mein sandwich from Mee Sum Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge. At the top of this post, Kelley Benjamin delivers our chow mein sandwiches. We chose to devour them open-faced, which is the less messy approach.