Combining elements of a cafeteria with a vending machine, entrepreneurs Joe Horn and Frank Hardart opened the first Automat in 1902 in Phiadelphia, following it with New York City’s first such restaurant ten years later on Times Square.
The concept was simple. Small, glass-doored comparments lining the walls were chilled, heated or neither, depending on the single serving of food nestled inside. Each compartment had a corresponding coin slot, and patrons shuffled down the line with a tray, inserting nickels to unlock the doors and remove the food of their choice. Unseen staff working on the other side of the walls refilled empty compartments. Coffee, tea and other beverages were dispensed by placing a cup under a spigot, then inserting a coin. Customers with laden trays then gathered silverware and seated themselves. Automats were fine places for quick, cheap meals and to overhear snatches of only-in-New-York coversation among the establishment’s thrifty patrons.
Automats hit paydirt during the Great Depression, by which time there were more than 42 in the city, collectively serving hundreds of thousands of meals to cash-strapped patrons daily. Irving Berlin wrote two odes to the Automat in 1932: “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee,” which became a jingle for Horn & Hardart, the chain name now synonymous with Automat, and “Lunching at the Automat,” which imagined New York’s social elite reduced to rubbing elbows with commonfolk at mealtime:
Times are not so sweet,
But the bluebloods have to eat,
So the best of families meet
At the Automat.. . . .
The Morgans and the Whitneys
And the other big shots
Change dollars into jitneys
And drop them in the slots.
Although meals could be had for nickels, grifters paid even less with substitutes ranging from slugs, purchased 15 for a dime, to foreign currency valued at far less than five cents but equal in shape. Five-pfennig and two-sou coins worked well.
In 1936, Berenice Abbott photographed the dessert section of the Automat at 977 Eighth Avenue just south of Columbus Circle, popular among area musicians, cabaret-goers and other nighthawks.
This Otto Soglow cartoon published in The New Yorker a few months later suggests how the Automat had worked itself into the popular imagination.
For World War II rationing efforts, Horn & Hardart hired “Sugar Girls” who doled out the sweetener that used to be kept in bowls at every table. Customers purchasing coffee or tea had to tell the Sugar Girl how much they wanted, limited to a maximum of two teaspoonfuls per cup.
Automats began to disappear during the following decades as fast food chains rose in popularity and inflation made nickel-only purchases obsolete. By the early ’60s, there were only six items at the Automat that still cost five cents: three varieties of buttered roll, servings of buttered bread or toast, and a doughnut.
While campaigning for Nixon’s 1960 presidential bid, multimillionaire New York governor Nelson Rockefeller showed he was a man of the people by lunching on a cruller and coffee at the Automat on Union Square. I like to think Irving Berlin got a kick out of that, just as he would have been saddened to hear that the city’s last Automat, located on Third Avenue and 42nd Street, closed in 1991.
(automat photo via The New York Public Library Digital Gallery)