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From: Mike <>
Subject: Automat's Golden Age
Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2003 09:01:12 -0500

NEW YORK TIMES
April 8, 2003

The Automat's Golden Age

By FRANK J. PRIAL

Nov. 29, 1950, was fateful for the restaurant business; the price of
the automat's coffee went to a
dime from a nickel.

Horn & Hardart, which owned the famous automat chain, had agonized over
a coffee price increase
for several years. Since the first New York automat opened in Times
Square on July 2, 1912, a nickel
had bought a cup.

But now the company was losing 3 cents on every cup of coffee it sold.

An extra nickel does not seem like much now. But the automats sold 70
million cups of coffee in the
year before the price increase; they sold 45 million in the first year
at 10 cents a cup. The automats
soldiered on for 40 more years — the last one, at 42nd Street and Third
Avenue, closed its doors
exactly 12 years ago today — but the golden age of the famous restaurant
chain was over.

Automats were essentially giant vending machines with dozens of hot and
cold foods in slots behind
glass doors. Depositing the right number of nickels — two for baked
beans or macaroni and cheese,
three for an egg salad sandwich — allowed the patron to open the doors
and take out his choice.

Automats are the subject of an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New
York that runs through
Sunday and of a companion book, "The Automat: The History, Recipes and
Allure of Horn &
Hardart's Masterpiece," by Lorraine B. Diehl and Marianne Hardart, a
great-granddaughter of the
co-founder (Clarkson Potter).

Joe Horn and Frank Hardart began their business as a lunchroom in
Philadelphia in 1888, and opened
their first automat there in 1902.

Their timing was great. According to Adrian Shuldiner, a historian of
technology who has studied the
automats, the numbers of white-collar workers were exploding. In 1880,
Mr. Shuldiner found, there
were 5,000 men and women employed as typists and stenographers in the
United States; by 1910,
there were 300,000. Most of them worked in the large cities, employed by
banks, insurance
companies, government agencies and the big new department stores.

These city workers could not easily go home for lunch and they were not
tempted by the saloons, ale
houses and oyster parlors favored by an earlier, all-male work force. It
was as though the automats,
modern, clean and attractively priced, had been invented just for this
newly minted clientele.

Open seven days a week, automats also became the restaurants of choice
for newcomers to the city.
One did not have to speak English — or anything else — to eat at the
automat, which the playwright
Neil Simon called "the Maxim's of the disenfranchised." Given a handful
of nickels at the age of 8 and
the chance to choose his own meal was a lesson in finance "that not even
two years at the Wharton
School could buy today," Mr. Simon said.

Horn & Hardart prospered in the darkest days of the Depression. By 1937,
it owned and operated 89
restaurants, 61 retail shops and four "day-old" shops in Philadelphia
and New York that served some
500,000 patrons a day.

Automats began to appear in supporting roles on Broadway. In "Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes," in 1949,
Carol Channing observed:


A kiss may be grand but it won't pay the rental

On your humble flat, or help you at the automat.

The first of many movies involving the automat may have been "The
Beautiful City," a 1925 silent with
Dorothy Gish and William Powell. He played a small-time gangster who
steals the nickels.

In the darkest days of the Depression, hungry New Yorkers made a drink
by mixing the free water
with the ketchup and Worcestershire sauce on the lazy susans at each
table. The jobless often sat out
cold winter days nursing a single cup of automat coffee for hours. The
truly down and out became
scavengers, slipping into a seat and finishing someone's leftovers
before the table was cleaned.

The nickels that opened the automat's tiny doors were a charming
innovation for decades; then they
became a trap. Because of them, the coffee price could not be raised to
6 or 8 or anything less than 10
cents. Later, when two-nickel baked beans and even five-nickel
sandwiches became financially
impossible, the automat changed the slots to accommodate their 40- and
75-cent tokens. But the
magic was gone.

What remains are memories of a different time and a different city. "Ah
yes," W. C. Fields drawled, "I
eat at the automat. But I pick my teeth in front of the Hotel Astor."

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