Downloaded from YTS.MX
[cheery music]
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
[coffee trickling]
♪ ♪
[soft rumbling]
- Lisa.
You're trying to make this a documentary?
What are you trying to do with it?
- It's gonna be a documentary
trying to figure out what happened to the Automat.
- So how it began, how it blossomed,
and how it-- how it ended, right?
- Yeah.
- The big thing is the nickels,
the little windows--
that's the big thing.
It's the Automat.
You can drift a little
to the good old times back then,
but you've got to concentrate on the Automat.
- Yes.
- I-I will, you know--
I'm gonna give you what I can
in terms of time and effort, you know,
and I'll try to write the song for you,
but let's get some other names,
other people who remember about the Automat,
'cause it's important.
- Okay.
[wondrous music]
♪ ♪
- Of course, when you say Automat
or Horn & Hardart,
very few people know what you're talking about,
but one of the greatest inventions
in insane centers of paradise
were these places that had little glass windows
framed in brass with knobs.
And if you put two nickels into the slot
next to the windows, the windows would open up,
and you could take out a piece of lemon meringue pie
for 10¢, and you could eat it.
And that was called the Automat.
♪ ♪
I suggest you do some narration
at the beginning just-- to frame
what you're gonna talk about, you know, with pictures.
You have enough pictures of Automats?
- [chuckles]
How you doing, kid?
Let me see if I can help you out.
- See that? - All kinds of stuff.
- Let me see. - Look at that.
- I didn't know he had all this stuff.
- Where did you get all of these photos?
- Every time we built something,
we always saved all the pictures.
- Sure, but what possessed you?
You're about 11.
What--what made you even think
about doing a show about the Automat?
[projector whirring]
- Even though Horn & Hardart only operated in two cities,
in its day and for many decades,
it was the largest restaurant chain in America
by any measure.
The number of restaurants it had,
the number of people it served every day,
the number of people it employed.
It was a true phenomenon of its time.
- Well, how about the Automat?
I heard a lot about that place.
- It was what Philadelphia was all about.
When you said Philadelphia, you said Horn & Hardart.
They were interchangeable.
- When you thought of the Automat,
you thought of New York, and vice versa.
It was a tourist destination
on par with the Statue of Liberty.
[horn honking]
- The little cubicles that the food would come out of...
- Allow me.
- I mean, I've never seen anything like it.
- It was the excitement, discovery, surprise,
and delight on my first visit as a young boy
that inspired me to think about the experience
I wanted to create at Starbucks Coffee Company.
- Is there anything else that you want?
- Yes, I'd like another cup of coffee.
- At your service.
[light music]
♪ ♪
- I didn't realize how good it was until, like,
there were no more Automats, and I miss them.
You might be-- where would you show this?
There are film festivals all over,
but do they show this kind of thing?
It'd have to be over an hour for it to be a documentary
in a--in a theater, you know?
Is there anybody alive from Horn & Hardart?
- I'm standing at the corner
of Third Avenue and 42nd Street.
This location was the last Automat that existed.
- Do you remember when the last Automat closed?
- Oh, yes.
I closed it. I'm the one who closed it.
- The Automat closing, unfortunately,
said something about the way that the world was going to be.
They had been the most optimistic imaginable places.
[indistinct chatter]
But an original Automat converted to a Burger King.
This was exactly the opposite.
- I would like to give you a turn button
from the very last Automat.
The employees were able to take pieces of remembrance.
I loved the Automat.
♪ ♪
Has anyone given you any indication
of what their thoughts were as to why
this whole demise of the Automat came about?
♪ ♪
- Now, what do you wanna know?
- What's your earliest memory of going to the Automat?
[soft music]
- Well, I was born in 1926 in Williamsburg.
That's Brooklyn.
My brothers:
Irving, firstborn,
there in the back,
Lenny, Bernie, and me, Melvin.
♪ ♪
We were little boys in Brooklyn,
but if you take the BMT and you go across the bridge,
you can get into this paradise,
this wonderland called New York.
We--we never called it Manhattan.
We called it New York.
We were Brooklyn, and they were New York.
And we lived--all of us lived to get to New York
so that we could visit the Automat.
♪ ♪
There is a thin-- I got a book at home.
There is one little book about the Automat.
All about starting in Philadelphia.
♪ ♪
- So who wants to do--
Probably you should if she's--
- Okay, I'll do--I'll do Horn. Right. Okay.
Well, Joe Horn came from Philadelphia.
His two brothers were in the restaurant business,
and he wanted a restaurant, too,
so he goes on a cross-country trip
all over the country to just sort of figure out
the kind of restaurant he wanted.
One day, he's in Boston
and he goes to Thompson's Spa for lunch,
and he sees the way the place is working,
and he sees these people being served coffee.
The whole choreography that just enchanted him,
and the--the bulb clicked in his head, and he said,
"This is exactly the kind of place I want to open."
So he put an ad in the paper
saying that he needed someone to co-partner with him,
and enter Frank Hardart.
- My great-grandfather, Frank Hardart,
he spent his youth in New Orleans
working in the kitchens of restaurants.
- At the time, New Orleans was the only city in the country
that was making French pressed or French drip coffee.
He understood how special it was,
and he knew that once he got the rest of the country
to taste it, they would appreciate it too.
- So Frank came up to Philadelphia
on this mission to get working in a restaurant
and bring that coffee from New Orleans
to the city of brotherly love,
but he faced continual rejection
until, as folklore has it, he saw an ad in a newspaper.
- And the rest is history. - And the rest is history.
- Yeah, exactly.
They opened their first place at 39 South 13th Street,
but they didn't have Automats yet.
Frank was in the back doing the cooking,
and Joe was out front tending to the customers.
- For Joe Horn, courtesy was the word.
He was the one driving home how to create an environment
that was all about treating people well.
- And Frank was focused on making sure
that everyone got to taste that wonderful
New Orleans coffee, and it worked.
[bell dinging]
After a little while,
they opened another restaurant,
and then another restaurant.
- Around the time Horn & Hardart were opening
their first restaurants in Philadelphia,
the automatic restaurant was showing up
in various parts of Northern Europe.
These restaurants were basically dumbwaiter systems
where you would order something in a dining room upstairs,
and that order would be conveyed to people downstairs
who'd prepare the food and then send it up
via a small dumbwaiter.
Frank Hardart discovered this Automat in Germany
and arranged to import the entire Automat
along with some engineers to install it
in what was then
the first automatic restaurant in America.
[swanky music]
♪ ♪
- So wait, you're an Automat historian.
How did you pick that for your PhD dissertation?
- That's not a--[laughs]
So that--
I chose the Automat as a--as a topic.
I was studying to become a historian of technology.
I needed a topic for my dissertation,
and I was in Amsterdam at the time
when I stumbled across the Automatiek.
That triggered this vague memory
because my parents took me to one of--this restaurant
that I thought had had the same sort of machine,
and when I returned, I started researching,
and only to discover that
that wasn't just any restaurant.
That was Horn & Hardart,
and I had my chance to, like any other kid,
choose from the dozens and dozens of boxes.
This was the last Automat,
the fourth generation of that machine.
The first generation was the one
that Hardart himself brought back from Germany.
- What is, in effect,
the first Horn & Hardart cafeteria
was not really efficient.
Fortunately, Horn & Hardart
had a chief engineer named John Fritsche.
- Fritsche developed a lot of patents
related to the Automat technology.
He introduced the fundamental innovation of the drum.
He found ways to make them hold both hot and cold food.
He changed the way the coin slots worked.
- Fritsche came up with the vending machine wall
and all the little doors.
- America at this time had a real fascination
with machine-age technology,
and anything that acted like that had a big attraction.
And very quickly, Horn & Hardart's new Automat
was a success in Philadelphia.
[bright sweeping music]
And the decision to expand to New York was an obvious one.
It was the next really large industrial urban center.
♪ ♪
- And that was the beginning of one
of the most successful restaurant chains
in America ever.
♪ ♪
- My big brother, Irving, used to come at the beginning
when I was very little,
and he would dole out whatever it was,
five nickels to each of us.
That was our lunch.
We had to figure out what we could get for that,
'cause we were poor, you know?
No money, but that was the great thing
about the Automat.
You didn't need a lot of money.
You needed a lot of nickels,
but you didn't need a lot of money.
[peppy piano music]
♪ ♪
- All right. Recording.
- Okay, Lisa Keller. Take one.
The question is, the Automat
hasn't been an active cultural force in decades,
but it's something that still resonates with New Yorkers,
and why is that?
- Horn & Hardart--oh, okay.
Let me start at the beginning.
Horn & Hardart is a cultural icon in New York.
In the immigration wave from 1880 to 1920,
the immigrants who came to New York
were looking for something American,
and Horn & Hardart served as an Americanization process.
If you could go there, you could feel like
you were part of the larger American stream.
Horn & Hardart, like the subways linked us
and were universally accessible,
didn't matter whether you were rich or poor.
When you had to travel, you took a subway.
When you had to eat, you went to the Horn & Hardart.
We know you don't need English
because nobody has to speak.
In a land of foreigners,
that became a place of identification,
and you feel almost patriotic.
[soft music]
♪ ♪
- At that same time, a new class of clientele
started to come in the cities,
drawn in by the new office work that was being created.
They started flooding into cafeterias
and into the Automats.
- Women were just coming into the workforce.
They were stenographers. They were sales clerks.
They were secretaries.
- Between the 1880s and 1920 or so,
the number of stenographers in New York City
jumped from 5,000 to 300,000.
This enormous growth
in the number of women in the workforce
meant that there was enormous growth in the number of women
who needed to eat lunch out of their homes.
- Well, I've had my lunch. - Good.
- But I'll go with you.
- Not so good.
- Social custom was changing slowly.
Women started being able to go out to eat on their own,
and women of the 1920s went to Horn & Hardart.
It was a place a woman would feel comfortable and safe,
and they had good quality food.
- Yeah, and they didn't have to worry about tipping.
- That was a great thing about the Automat.
You never had to tip.
- It's a very important marriage
between that--the time it came into being
and the sensibilities of women in the workforce.
- At that point, Horn & Hardart in New York,
which had been growing less quickly than Philadelphia,
started growing very rapidly, and before long,
there were a couple of dozen of them throughout the city.
[bright music]
♪ ♪
[soft music]
♪ ♪
- I'll tell you,
the Automat had panache.
The ceilings were big.
- These were enormous buildings.
- Sometimes there was a half balcony.
- Grandiose design.
- The floors were pristine white marble.
- Brass frames on the little windows.
- Those little doors
and those Carrara marble tables.
- When you looked at the interior,
you felt that you could dance in them.
- And those dolphin spouts,
nowhere was there anything like that.
- When did the dolphin heads come about?
- Yeah, well, they were inspired
by Italian fountains with mythological sea creatures.
- Joe Horn, on a trip to Italy,
had happened to spot these statutes and says,
"Oh, that's gonna be my coffee spout."
So that's where they came from,
but I love the fact that these two men,
Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart,
built this beautiful, beautiful space.
All of that beauty so that someone could walk in there
with a handful of nickels
and get themselves a cup of coffee or some food.
[light music]
♪ ♪
- In 1918, through a twist of fate,
just as the Automat came into its own, Frank Hardart died.
♪ ♪
- My great-grandfather Frank left the company to his sons,
Augustin and Frank, in New York City.
So it stayed close in the family.
But at that point, it had really become
the Hardarts in New York and the Horns in Philadelphia
because Joe Horn did not want to come to New York.
Joe Horn did not like New York.
♪ ♪
- Mr. Horn was very much a Philadelphian.
As a matter of fact,
at the end of a long day in New York,
he would look at everybody and say,
"Thank God for the train to Philadelphia."
[laughing softly]
My name is Edwin K. Daly Jr.
I'm the son of the president of Horn & Hardart,
Edwin K. Daly, who was president
in New York from 1937 to 1960.
- On the phone, when you spoke of Joe Horn,
you said you met him when you were young.
- I certainly met him 50 or 60 times.
To be clear, though, he was called Mr. Horn.
Nobody within range of him referred to him as Joe Horn.
He'd have clobbered somebody who did.
Mr. Horn was a very formal man,
very genial, very pleasant,
but very definitely commanding person.
I always found him very nice.
He certainly established the company's tradition
of making certain that Horn & Hardart
was looking out for its employees.
- For Joe Horn,
right from the start, loyalty was a trademark.
- Joseph Horn actually wanted his employees
to bring their troubles to him.
If he could help them in any way, he would.
- The Horns and the Hardarts, they went to the wakes.
They went to the weddings. They went to the funerals.
They had holiday parties.
[upbeat piano music]
You became a member of a family
when you were employed at Horn & Hardart.
- Joseph Horn started a foundation
so that when his employees were short of money,
missed a mortgage payment,
or anything like that, he was there to help them.
- And that inspired loyalty
that went beyond one generation.
- That was the great strength of the company.
People knew they were cared about.
♪ ♪
[utensils clinking]
[indistinct chatter]
- There was a stern woman with a red face,
and her hair piled up,
and she had a little booth,
and the booth had wood, and the wood was very smooth
'cause she used it every day,
changing dollars into nickels.
And when my brother, Irving,
gave her a dollar for all our nickels,
she just reached behind her.
Didn't count a thing.
She grabbed from a bag a bunch of nickels,
and it was always 20 nickels.
Just flipped them.
It was just magic, which thrilled me.
[indistinct chatter]
I said, "I wish I had something like that."
One day, I used to dream, I would have a gift
to stick my hand and come up with 20 nickels.
[projector whirring]
[coins clinking]
- Look at that.
We had a machine that counted the nickels.
- Oh! - Look at this.
- There you go. Cool.
So you had to make sure all of that worked okay?
- Oh, yeah, or they'd lose money.
- Oh, wow.
- Oh, there you go. Up here.
Remember that sign?
- There it is. Sure.
These are all your drums.
- How many years were you? 40 plus?
- 44--45.
- And Dad-- - My father had--
- Was 44?
- Yeah.
My father was one of the first guys
working for the company Horn & Hardart,
and I used to come to New York with him to help him out,
so I learned a lot about the Horn & Hardart equipment
and how it operated.
[projector whirring]
There's--there's the back, see?
- Yeah. - Can you do that?
- Got you. - I guess--
I'm in charge of all those-- all those drums
and stainless steel stuff.
Look at that.
There's--there's your coffee, see?
- Yeah.
- Coming out of my dolphin head.
I have one upstairs.
There's my dolphin head.
It's amazing, huh?
- You put a nickel into a kind of dolphin...
- And you put a cup underneath the dolphin head's mouth...
- And you push the dolphin's tail.
- There's a tube that comes out of the mouth
that goes into the back, to the machine...
- And coffee would come into a thick little cup.
- Very hot. [laughs]
- Then, right at the end, in an unseen little spigot,
milk would come,
and it would just be a perfect cup of coffee.
- It was very tasty coffee.
- I've been to Paris. I've been to Vienna.
I've paid $35 for a cup of coffee.
Not half as good as that nickel Horn & Hardart coffee.
And if I could save enough nickels,
I could have two cups.
[indistinct chatter]
[projector whirring]
- There's--there's the back. See it?
- Yeah. - How it'd do that?
- Yep. Got you.
- It was my responsibility, if any machine broke,
those machines gotta operate right away.
And there's a lot of machines.
[upbeat music]
- These things were made incredibly solidly.
Some of them were made out of solid brass.
Some of them were made out of solid nickel.
Well, I was an architecturals dealer in New York City,
and one day, a scrap dealer pulled up in his van,
and he said,
"Take a look at this. You interested in this stuff?"
♪ ♪
And it was the Automats,
and he had already taken them
to all the architectural dealers,
and some of them bought one.
I told him I'd take them all.
♪ ♪
So I was restoring these machines.
I had six of them in my window.
And on a daily basis,
somebody would walk into my shop
with their jaw hanging down, asking,
"Is that what I think it is? Is that the Automat?"
And so many of them had such strong feelings.
I began to look into the history
as deeply as I could.
♪ ♪
And my responsibility, I think, about the Automat,
has more to do with the--the concept
of the Automat than it does the machines themselves.
It started with a set of principles.
Mr. Horn and Mr. Hardart said,
"You can do something the right way.
"You don't have to compromise.
"It's harder that way, it's more work,
but you can do it, and you ought to do it."
That's what they said,
and then they proved it by doing it.
[projector whirring]
- Around the turn of the century,
Horn & Hardart were already operating
a small chain of stores, vending mostly baked goods.
[pleasant music]
The problem they had was that each store
was making its own baked goods
and they didn't have the consistency
and the high level of quality they wanted
from one store to the other.
This is what drove them to start on the commissary model,
the centralization of the food preparation
for the entire system.
- Oh, the Horn & Hardart bakery,
you remember the bakery, Dad?
- 11th--to 12th Avenue.
That's where all the food came from.
- Not all, let's be clear on that.
There was cooking in the restaurant,
but a great deal of the food was prepared,
and all of the baked goods, of course,
in a central commissary.
- With their commissary,
they could make 2,400 pies an hour.
And what Horn & Hardart realized
was if you did something on a large enough scale,
you could give people prices they could afford.
- But, to be clear, it was all about quality.
They had the sample table every day
in which the management tasted the food
that was coming out of the bakery
to make sure that the public was getting
what the public was supposed to be getting.
- The trucks supplying the restaurants
numbered in the hundreds in each city
and drove something like 2,000 miles a day.
- So everything was fresh and seasonal.
- It was real. - Seasonal was important,
because that's also the way they kept the cost down,
because they could buy seasonal in bulk.
♪ ♪
And that's why, if you didn't have the commissaries,
you wouldn't have a Horn & Hardart Automat.
♪ ♪
- The 1930s brought the Great Depression,
which was damaging to almost every business.
Horn & Hardart was a notable exception.
[indistinct chatter]
[soft music]
- The Automat was a welcoming, warm place
in the worst of times.
It appealed to the poor and downtrodden
because, for a nickel, you could get a lot.
- We were providing good, cheap, quality food
when people didn't have
a whole lot of money in their pockets.
- Because of its economies of scale,
because of its ability
to tap into these values of thrift and abundance,
Horn & Hardart's restaurants became a beacon and light
in what was otherwise a really dark decade.
Irving Berlin captured this by having the Vanderbilts
and others of the very rich dining in the Automat.
- There was Irving Berlin "Face the Music,"
and the great song that came from that was...
♪ Let's have another cup of coffee ♪
♪ And let's have another piece of pie ♪
[upbeat music]
♪ ♪
[crowd chanting indistinctly]
- 1935 in New York,
and you will recall that that was an era
of a good bit of labor unrest to begin with.
There was a unionizing campaign at that time
which involved some Horn & Hardart employees.
It was quite violent.
[somber music]
♪ ♪
In the end, it didn't work.
That's the simplest way I can put it.
Our employees stood by us.
They were loyal to the company.
The company had been loyal to them.
[upbeat music]
♪ ♪
By 1941, Mr. Horn had been ill for quite some time.
♪ ♪
It was very clear he was going to die.
The day before he died,
Mr. Horn said, "Look, I know I'm gonna die.
"Get me a Horn & Hardart beef pie.
I wanna eat that."
And he did.
It helped him die happy.
[soft music]
- Horn had no children, no successors,
but he had been very careful to groom
one man to take over in his place.
♪ ♪
- My father understood financial matters.
He had the training. He had a broad vision.
He was intensely loyal to the company,
and Mr. Horn knew that.
- When Daly took over from Horn
after his death in 1941,
the Horn & Hardart Company expanded
even faster than they had previously.
[light music]
♪ ♪
- This was a period with a great deal of growth.
As a matter of fact, during the Second World War,
Horn & Hardart supplied the food on the troopships.
So when the Queen Elizabeth or the Queen Mary
went out of New York carrying troops,
they were eating Horn & Hardart food.
♪ ♪
- The 1940s and early '50s
was Horn & Hardart at its finest.
♪ ♪
- In 1953, the company served 2,206,000 beef pies,
1,427,000 chicken pies, 10,652,000 dessert pies,
3,388,000 hamburgers, 4,886,000 chopped sirloins,
6,527,000 loaves of bread, 314,000 gallons of baked beans
and 2,355,000 pounds of macaroni.
That's a lot of food.
And they were feeding 800,000 people a day.
- At this time, in terms
of the volume of business that they were doing,
in terms of the number of seats,
the number of people who were being served,
there wasn't anything to compare
with the Horn & Hardart Automat.
♪ ♪
- Looks pretty fancy, Fred.
- Yeah, you get your food by putting coins in a slot.
♪ ♪
- Hey, got a nickel, Mac?
- Huh? Oh, yeah.
- Thanks.
[soft piano music]
♪ ♪
- On Saturdays, I took piano lessons
on West 73rd Street,
and on 72nd Street was an Automat.
I could usually find a table upstairs
where I could read a book or do homework
while eating lunch.
You--you found just the right one.
So the hot table is back here.
On the side, these are all the cubbyholes
with cakes and pastries.
And these are the dispensers
of coffee, tea, hot chocolate.
- When I ask people about the Automat, they light up,
and I'm just wondering, why do you think people love
the Automat so much and remember it so fondly?
- It was a good place to eat.
The food was delicious,
the prices were right,
but more than that, I think it was the fact
that there were all kinds of people,
from poor people to matrons in furs.
- You're sitting at a table with a bunch of people,
one of whom might be a businessman.
Another person might be a worker.
Another person might be an artist.
- It was an unspoken rule that if there was no empty table,
you could sit next to anybody who was already eating.
- It was true.
You'd see--at a table, you'd see a bum
with an empty cup of coffee,
someone on your left, he'd get some hot water,
and he'd put some mustard or ketchup in it,
and he'd have, like, a condiment soup.
- There was no question that the company's policy
was distinctly serve everybody
and serve everybody the same way.
♪ ♪
- It was revolutionary in a way,
very democratic.
- This was a remarkable place.
An amazingly optimistic view of what the future could be.
It said, "There's enough for everybody."
- And it had certain cultural markers
that made it a truly American place,
ironically, for a non-American audience.
- Yes, this is the great USA with people
of all different colors and religions
and manner of dress,
and yet we are all together.
[horn honking]
[indistinct chatter]
- The one we would usually go to is the Automat
that was on 42nd Street.
I never even thought about the fact
that, "I'm a Black kid.
"Should I go into Horn & Hardart?
Is it okay to go to the Automat?"
All the Automats had that beautiful diversity
that didn't exist in most of the rest of the country,
of economic standing, of color,
of ethnicity, of language.
You never knew what you'd run into in an Automat.
- Can I adjust your tie a little to cover your button?
May I? - Sure.
- Okay. You keep scaring me.
- What--what's wrong with a button?
I mean, does it...
- Oh, no, no, no, there's nothing wrong with it.
- Mel Brooks is there looking like a bum,
and--and-- [laughter]
- What is that? C--
- There was just a little-- - Cake?
- I just wasn't-- I don't know.
- Could be. - Were you eating cake?
- Yeah, I just came from Junior's and--okay.
- It's good.
- So should we--
- Come on.
I've got a Colombian ambassador waiting for me.
- Is there any way--
- You gotta get a still of this.
This photo was taken when I was about seven years old
living in the South Bronx,
immigrant family, not making a great deal of money.
So you have to understand,
we almost never went to a restaurant.
I don't ever remember going to a restaurant
anywhere in the South Bronx.
We always ate at home or with a relative.
So going to an Automat was not just the experience
of seeing this mechanized food delivery system.
It was going to a restaurant, and as a kid,
it was such a thrill to walk into this place.
Sparkling. It shone.
I mean, it literally blasted you with the marble
and the tables that were marble.
And there is this wall where little compartments
had the beautiful chrome-rimmed knobs.
And you knew there was somebody
behind those little compartments.
You never saw them,
but you knew they had to be there.
And better than that, the food was good.
The Automat was where I learned
to like creamed spinach.
Macaroni and cheese.
- Automat food became so recognizable,
particularly the signature dishes.
- There's baked beans and baked beans,
and then there's Horn & Hardart's baked beans.
- I really got excited about a Salisbury steak.
- Oh, don't tell my mother this.
I liked the ham and cheese sandwich with mustard.
I think there was an olive stuck in it.
It was great.
I don't know what Carl ate at the Automat.
Did you ask him what he had?
- It always consisted of the same thing.
A ham and cheese sandwich, a cup of very good coffee.
- Carl was much more frugal-- cheap.
Cheaper than I am.
- It was cheap. Very cheap.
- Eggs, bacon.
- Chicken salad.
- I loved the creamed spinach and succotash
and the sweet things.
- One part mashed potatoes, one part baked beans,
and one part Salisbury steak,
and you've gone to heaven without dying.
- For my family, it wasn't just the Automat.
It was Horn & Hardart, because there was also
a retail store in my neighborhood,
and on the weekends, on Saturday,
I would usually get a couple of dollars, and I was told,
"Go get a Horn & Hardart apple pie."
And that was the height of the week's experience.
[light music]
- Can you describe the presence
of the retail stores here?
- The concept of the retail stores is very simple.
The idea was we would sell our food
so that it could be taken home,
and it was a very successful move.
The slogan was "Less Work for Mother."
- Less Work for Mother retail shops.
Everything was fresh.
Everything was made to order. It was breathtaking.
But they also sponsored a television show
that was on Sundays called "The Children's Hour."
- Good morning, and welcome to the famous
Sunday morning "Children's Hour."
- Ed Herlihy, he was the announcer.
- Presented by Horn & Hardart Automat cafeterias
and Less Work for Mother Retail Shops.
Today, as every Sunday morning
for over 26 years, "The Children's Hour"
brings you New York's most talented children.
- I had been a child performer and I knew some of the kids,
and they could do things I couldn't even dream of doing.
- ♪ You belong to my heart ♪
- They auditioned hundreds of children every month.
- ♪ Now and forever ♪
- You'd be surprised how many people got their start
on "The Children's Hour."
Rosemary Clooney, Eddie Fisher, Leslie Uggams,
Arnold Stang, Frankie Avalon,
Bernadette Peters, Gregory Hines, Madeline Kahn.
- No kidding. She never mentioned that.
You know, she was in a lot of my movies
like "Blazing Saddles," "Young Frankenstein,"
and many others.
And, of course, she would come to the Automat.
- This portion of "The Children's Hour"
has been brought to you by Horn & Hardart Automat
cafeterias and Less Work for Mother retail shops.
Complete meals with less work for mother.
- Carl, even though he was, like,
costarring with Sid Caesar on the " Show of Shows,"
when he came in for rehearsals,
he'd been at the Automat having his breakfast.
- Every morning at 9:30, I had my breakfast.
I was there for a half hour because I had to get to work
at 10:00.
Mel was one of these guys who couldn't get to work on time.
So he never had breakfast at Automats.
- I don't remember there ever being breakfast at the Automat.
I don't remember there ever being things like waffles.
There may have been scrambled eggs.
There were a lot of Broadway types.
Not stars, mind you.
Secondary players, bit players.
- We were-- I guess we were actors.
- I'm an actor, not a clown.
- Hide the silverware. Here come the actors.
- To eat or not to eat. That is the question.
- My actor friends and I would go to at least three locations
right near the theaters that I would work at.
We would sometimes go and get napkins
and put ketchup on the napkins
and pretend that we were eating the napkins.
You know, the point being in Horn & Hardart's,
everything tasted delicious, even the napkins.
- Ms. Duncan and I will be lunching here.
Will you pick us up in half an hour--
- Once in a while, there'd be a lighthearted movie,
a love story.
They'd use the Automat.
They had lunch there or something.
- You like chicken pot pie? - 25¢?
- Doris Day, James Garner, that kind of movie.
- Where? - She just went to the Automat.
- See, I thought this was my table.
Mind if I sit down?
- Remarkable. She never makes a mistake.
Fast as lightning too.
- In an average eight-hour day
that girl handles 18,240 nickels.
- Ladies and gentlemen, one of the many pleasures
when a visitor comes to New York
is going to the many fine eating places.
[upbeat music]
♪ ♪
- Hey, you're Bob Hope, ain't ya?
♪ ♪
- In an Automat,
by the early '60s,
the Automat had become incredibly popular.
- Jack Benny liked the Automat.
He decided to launch a TV series there.
He had a reputation for being cheap,
and he invited all the celebrities--Helen Hayes
and people like that in their long gowns in their tuxedos.
And when they got to the Automat,
Jack Benny gave them a roll of nickels.
[indistinct chatter]
[horn honking]
- So you said you even went to Horn & Hardart
in Philadelphia? - I did.
When I was in Philadelphia, I went to the Automat.
Philadelphia had the same thing, the Automat.
- And people who came to it in New York City,
a lot of them don't even know anything about Philadelphia.
In Philadelphia, they were more known as Horn & Hardart.
You're going to Horn & Hardart.
- Over the years, even though to the country, as a whole,
when they thought of the Automat,
they thought of New York.
In Philadelphia,
Horn & Hardart couldn't be more popular.
In 1941, between its restaurants
and its retail stores,
Horn & Hardart was feeding 10% of the population
of the entire city of Philadelphia.
One of the largest cities in America at that time.
♪ ♪
- I moved to Philadelphia in 1954
as a young 16-year-old.
And because there was not a lot of money
in the household,
we used to go to Horn & Hardart's.
For years, I thought
Horn & Hardart's was only in Philadelphia.
Yes, they had good food,
but it was an important place for me and other people.
I can say there were parts of Philadelphia that were
segregated like skating rinks and bowling alleys.
But Horn & Hardart's was a nice place
where African Americans could go and feel dignified.
- Even though Horn and Hardart in the '50s
and early '60s was as big as it had ever been,
they were no longer making money the way they used to.
- In the late '50s,
we were beginning to see competition
from a company called Chock Full o'Nuts.
People could come into Chock Full o'Nuts,
get some coffee, which is what they were chiefly named for.
Get out, spend very little money.
It represented the first serious competition
we'd had in a long while.
I'd call that the first cloud in the sky.
[men grumbling]
- Every time someone buys Horn & Hardart coffee,
it hurts us a little.
Horn & Hardart uses
such ridiculously expensive coffee beans.
We lose money on it.
We could make money by buying less expensive coffee beans,
but then our coffee would be less good.
Horn & Hardart coffee:
it's so good, we lose money on it.
- Horn & Hardart was losing money
on every cup of coffee that they sold.
Post-war inflation made everything more expensive,
and the nickel was no longer worth what it once was.
They waited as long as they could afford to until finally,
Horn & Hardart raised the price of coffee,
but the vending machine couldn't take pennies.
So Horn & Hardart had to go to 10¢.
They doubled the price.
The results were disastrous.
Number of cups of coffee sold immediately
dropped from 70 million a year to 45 million.
[solemn music]
- For some reason, there was this emotional attachment.
- Yeah, they were known for that 5¢ cup of coffee.
- The nickel subway ride was gone.
The nickel phone call was gone,
but when the nickel cup of coffee changed,
it created a very emotional divide between the Automat
that they knew what was coming to them.
- The beginning of the end.
- I mean, it was called the house that nickels built.
♪ ♪
- My father fought that battle to keep it at 5¢,
and when the decision was finally made,
he physically collapsed
and required medical assistance
for several days while he was flat on his back.
The decision drained him so much,
but it had to be faced.
[sweeping music]
♪ ♪
- A quiet revolution has been taking place
for nearly a decade.
More than a million persons each year
have pulled up stakes in the cities...
- In 1957, President Eisenhower
put the interstate highway system in.
The result was to encourage businesses
to locate outside of the center cities.
The center city was no longer going to be what it had been.
That was a major cloud in the sky, and of course,
it became a torrent in the sky.
- We shall build hundreds of thousands of homes
during the post-war return to peacetime activities.
- Everyone was racing toward the suburbs.
Women, for the most part, were raising families now,
so they weren't working in the city.
And men who were working in the city
were not hanging around for dinner here.
They were going home to their home-cooked meals.
- The romance, the adventure of choosing from foods
gathered from the four corners of America.
- Also, tastes in food were changing.
- Frozen foods are the nearest thing
to fresh foods available.
They're convenient, easily prepared, and palatable.
♪ ♪
- The people eating out were younger.
They didn't care about saving money.
They were willing to spend more for a service experience.
Thrift started to become something
that the consumers were actually turned away by.
- We knew that the demographic patterns were changing.
These were worries.
[indistinct chatter]
- March 28th, 1960,
my father unexpectedly died.
My father was a man who cared about people
very, very strongly.
[soft music]
From the time of Mr. Horn and Mr. Hardart and my father,
that's what Horn & Hardart was about.
♪ ♪
Employees and customers cared immensely about the company
because they knew the company cared immensely about them.
I think you've sensed that in the interviews you've had.
Be clear that wasn't just a question
of sitting down at a business school
and saying, "Well, this is a good business practice."
It was done because it was right.
♪ ♪
- Edwin Daly took the company from 1941, when Horn died,
into 1960, when he himself died.
But Daly made a mistake that Horn had not made.
He didn't prepare the company for a successor at all.
In the breaking of the chain of people
with a real commitment
to the Horn & Hardart's original vision
was a big part of what caused the problems that followed.
♪ ♪
- I grew up in Brooklyn, New York,
and as a young boy,
I had always heard about New York City and Manhattan.
I must've been about 10 years old
when my Aunt Shirley took me into Manhattan
for the first time in my life.
She took me to Radio City Music Hall.
It was amazing.
We got out of Radio City, and she said,
"I'm gonna take you to a very special place."
Walked in.
I remember putting money in the window,
and the next thing I knew, the window opened,
and I received an apple pie.
And at that age of ten or so, I was mystified.
How did this happen?
And I remember asking my aunt, and she said,
"There's a magician on the other side,"
and I believed that, and I have never stopped
threading everything we've done at Starbucks
with that initial experience.
When we had 11 stores and a hundred people in 1987
and dreaming about what we would do,
I always had the Automat in my mind's eye.
How do you create that level of theater, excitement,
surprise, and delight?
The Automat was something unique and special.
And really, when I think about my own career,
despite what we've been able to dream about
and accomplish at Starbucks, at the heart of it,
I'm a storyteller trying to create
a sense of discovery and romance.
The Automat for me was a seminal moment
in my childhood,
and I became a merchant
the day that I was in that Automat.
♪ ♪
[quirky music]
- ♪ When you least expect it, you're elected ♪
- These are people who are gonna buy a roll.
[laughter]
Now, you can imagine it's pretty frustrating.
[laughter]
This fellow with a roll-- [inaudible]
[laughter]
He's gonna try again, you know.
He's very, very patient.
Now he tries to return the two plates.
- In the '60s, there was a group that we organized.
We met on the second floor of Horn & Hardart's
at 15th and Market,
where there were ideas about what could happen
if we work hard enough.
And we strategized about
how we would be able to get into politics.
It was the birth
of the Black political movement in Philadelphia
which led to my being able to run for mayor of Philadelphia.
In the 1950s and '60s,
I ate so much Horn & Hardart's meatloaf.
By 1970, I really went off meat.
[laughs]
[solemn music]
- I was in Vietnam in the '60s.
When I went in the army, it was still in the process
of ending segregation.
But I came in from Kelly Street
and Horn & Hardart and the Automat.
So I knew what diversity was all about.
So integration wasn't anything new to me.
I lived in integration.
I was gonna help transform the army
and make it understand diversity.
♪ ♪
- In the '60s, my family had moved out of the city
to the suburbs to escape crime.
I had been the victim of crime.
Horn & Hardarts were beginning to decline.
- As people kept moving to the suburbs,
the breakfast and dinners and the weekend business
that Horn & Hardart had always enjoyed disappeared.
They were no longer serving meals
seven days a week; they were serving them five,
having a huge impact on the amount of sales
each restaurant was able to do.
- We needed to reduce commitment in center cities.
I'm now addressing Philadelphia.
Let's face facts.
- In 1966, Horn & Hardart of Philadelphia
closed their central city commissary
and opened a new one in the suburbs
that had access to superhighway routes
and would give them a broader reach.
But for some reason, instead of shrinking,
they built themselves for enormous volumes of food,
and that cost sunk them
into debt from which they never recovered.
- It was a blunder. It was overbuilt.
It was badly located.
It was just wrong.
- Horn & Hardart system, the commissary model,
had been a brilliant system.
It worked fantastically well,
as long as everybody went and ate there,
but when they started to suffer a drop in volume,
things couldn't be scaled back.
♪ ♪
- My father became president
of Horn & Hardart at a very difficult time.
I remember my mom saying it was sort of like
taking over the helm of the Titanic.
I don't think those last several years
were pleasant for him in any way.
There was a major recession in the country,
but especially in New York City,
and Horn & Hardart was a ship that was taking on water.
♪ ♪
- The neighborhood declined very badly
around Union Square.
It was full of homeless and bums,
but we'd go down to meet my grandfather at the Automat.
Grandpa liked the Automat. He was a poor man.
He was a garment worker.
He would sit there and talk about
how much he hated the Vietnam War
in Yiddish to his friends who would meet him there.
[soft music]
♪ ♪
- One of their hallmarks was that you could go
and spend a lot of time there, have a cup of coffee,
meet interesting people,
but the problem was people were coming and squatting.
So you started to get homeless people and vagrants
in the Horn & Hardarts,
and so they went from being these beautiful, clean,
art deco cathedrals to dirty and smelly
and not a pleasant place to be.
♪ ♪
- I was the busboy at Horn & Hardart 15 Park Row.
My first time really seeing homeless people
was when I was working down in that Wall Street area.
The Horn & Hardart was the place where you could go
and nobody would bother you.
Where you could stay warm and get out of the cold.
So they would just sit there all day.
And I would at first try to get 'em out,
but there was a policy to just leave people alone.
In fact, sometimes I would sneak some leftover food
over there--I would do that.
This is me. I had the fro back then.
And this was my grandmother, Sarah Perez.
We worked at the same Horn & Hardart.
She was a nickel thrower.
You know, Horn & Hardart really cared for people,
and that was something that just stuck with me.
In fact, I recently retired after 26 years
of social services in New York,
besides all the other things I've done in my life.
But that's what I'm most proud of.
So I loved Horn & Hardart,
and I loved it since I was a child
because they had Christmas parties
for the employees' children.
♪ ♪
My grandmother took my brother and me.
We couldn't wait to go
because they would have all kinds of entertainment
and things for the kids.
Got to see Santa, sit on his lap,
and get these great toys.
We loved Horn & Hardart,
even in the '60s when it was kind of rough.
In fact, my grandmother, she got an award called
"I'm not fancy, but I'm good" award,
which was an advertising slogan back then.
- How did the campaign get its name?
- It was the age of the fancy coffee shop.
And so they were fancy and not very good,
and Horn & Hardart, the food was wonderful,
but the experience that people had in there
was not always the best.
There's a story about a Southern girl
who came to New York.
She said, "I went into a Horn & Hardart,
"and I tried the baked beans, and mmm, they were fine,
"and the--the candied sweet potatoes,
"they were just like down home.
"And then I had some of that lemon meringue pie,
"and--and then the man sitting across the way from me,
he--he flopped it out right in my pie."
- [snorts]
- Hey, Barn, disturbance in the Automat over on Tenth.
- What kind of disturbance? - Some guy's raising hell.
- The Automat on Tenth?
- Yeah, he took his clothes off.
He's running around naked.
- Charming.
- Well, that was the story of Horn & Hardart.
You know, you'd go in there, the food would be great,
and then you'd have someone do something like that.
So I came up with this campaign
for a product that had its flaws.
- These days, it's not enough to have a restaurant
with good food and low prices.
You have to have atmosphere too.
Trouble is, this junk costs money,
and to pay for it, you have to raise the prices
or cut the quality of the food.
But if you don't have quality chandeliers
or canned music,
wallpaper,
you can put the money you save into better quality food.
We think that's more important.
You can't eat atmosphere.
- I was born in the Bronx.
I grew up in Horn & Hardart's,
and it was always a great treat for me
to go into those places.
So this campaign,
it had an extra level of meaning for me.
You know, we tried to resurrect it.
We did what we could.
[solemn music]
This campaign was the closest thing to self-expression
that I could ever have in advertising,
I think, because it meant so much to me.
♪ ♪
It was absolutely the closest to my heart because...
♪ ♪
'Cause it's New York.
♪ ♪
- It was a sad day when I would go
and look for Horn & Hardart's
and saw a sign-- "We're closing."
- The closing of the Automat located at 818 Chestnut Street
marks the passing of the old and the advent of the new.
- $271,000. Hold on!
- America's first Automat
today was put on the auctioneer's block.
The building and most of the equipment, that is.
- $271,000. Hold on!
Once, twice, third and last time.
Hold on!
Right there. - There it goes!
[soft music]
- For my father, it was the family company,
and it had his family name on it,
and it had been around for a very long time.
So to be in a position to do that
must've been really difficult for him.
♪ ♪
- Horn and I used to have lunch once in a while,
and I can still remember him calling me and saying,
"John I'm gonna be packing up."
- The real estate became the most valuable thing
that Horn & Hardart had.
Great real estate throughout New York City,
and they leveraged that real estate by franchising.
I think he felt like the company and its core
and its soul was being gutted, and its spirit.
♪ ♪
- It had been not just a business,
it was a point of view.
It was almost a philosophy,
which these gentlemen, Mr. Horn and Mr. Hardart,
had embraced and projected through these places.
Not just making money for themselves,
but really providing the public
with what they needed at the same time.
And I think the Automat proved that there doesn't have to be
a contradiction between those two notions,
and these people expected this to last forever.
♪ ♪
- I came in at the tail end of the Automat.
I had gone to the Automats many times during my lifetime,
and here I was in the position of being the undertaker
converting the Automat into Burger Kings
and other restaurants.
- Horn & Hardart, Burger King, Arby's.
- Yup. - Bojangles.
- Bojangles, I remember.
- Mark Twain and Goodbody's. - Hmm.
- There I am, and this is my little crew, right here.
- John was in charge of maintenance.
He was in charge of construction.
He was in charge of everything.
And John was sort of reluctant about moving forward
because he had a sentimental attachment.
What he had before was beauty.
What he had before was elegance,
versus what I was creating.
I was creating nuts and bolts, and he was wine and flowers.
But the people that were now sitting around the table
making decisions were not Automat people.
They were fast food people.
I was moving ahead, and I was part of progress.
I appreciate the old, but you have to move forward.
- The Automat was archaic at this point.
[somber music]
♪ ♪
- They date way back to 1912.
They were the place where nickels went for lunch.
They were the Automats, and now there's only one,
the last Automat.
Horn & Hardart's on 42nd street
where the Third Avenue El used to cast a shadow.
- My mother brought me here when I was a little girl.
I brought my children here.
- I had one friend who--who loved the macaroni and cheese.
She was a little bit hefty.
- I used to sit there, and at nighttime, all night,
because I had no place to go.
You know, I was one of the homeless,
and I used to sit in there,
but they never threw us out or anything.
- Oh, forget about it, are you kiddin' me?
Baked beans were the best. A nickel, no?
You don't get nothing for a nickel today.
- These days, the Horn & Hardart Company
is mainly concerned with its much faster food franchises,
operating more than 250 Arby's, Burger Kings,
and Bojangles.
- People think the Automat was a precursor to fast food.
I wouldn't have called it fast food.
Fast food is more simplified, and that has to do with speed.
The Automat was about many things,
but it was not about speed.
- Horn & Hardart, you knew what you were going to get.
Fast service? Yes.
But Horn & Hardart was not fast food.
We were above all about good quality.
You don't go to McDonald's for top-quality food.
And Horn & Hardart also had a much wider range of foods.
I'm sure you've heard in your interviews,
people thinking about Horn & Hardart beef pies
or Horn & Hardart creamed spinach
or Horn & Hardart chocolate pudding,
to Horn & Hardart this, that, or the other thing.
A vast variety of...
- Carl liked baked beans. We both loved baked beans.
He loved cream spinach, I liked cream spinach,
but mostly, we really loved the pies.
♪ ♪
The strawberry rhubarb-- great crust.
Great tartness in the rhubarb.
The strawberries were sweetened with sugar.
- If we didn't have that, we settled for an apple pie,
which was also very good.
- Lemon meringue not only looked big,
but you could smash your face into it.
- Chocolate pudding pie, which only came in the winter.
- Carl mentioned, probably, the chocolate pudding pie
with the--with the cream.
He liked that.
- We waited patiently
all year for it.
That was the best pie.
- Really, it was nothing like their coconut custard pie.
It was truly heaven.
I mean, how could anybody even think
of putting together the coconut and the custard
and the cream and-- coconut custard pie.
God made that.
[swanky music]
♪ ♪
- I think this was the very last Automat.
- That's the one on 42nd Street and Third Avenue.
The last place I closed out.
They said close that one down yourself personally.
And that completed my cycle.
- The door's slammed shut on a piece
of New York restaurant history as Horn & Hardart
closed the last of its famous Automats in Midtown Manhattan.
In years past, there were more than 40 Automats
scattered all around town,
but as fast food restaurants proliferated in Midtown,
the popularity of the chain lost favor with the public,
and now it's gone forever.
[solemn music]
♪ ♪
- That was the end, and it was too bad,
because it was such a great experiment.
♪ ♪
It had some style, and it was different.
The marble, the brass, the floors, the pillars,
the chatter, the coffee.
It was the Automat.
And even though it was beautiful,
it--it can't work again
because of the logistics and the economics of today.
Won't allow anything that simple, naive, and eloquent
and beautiful to flourish again.
♪ ♪
It was part of my youth that I really loved.
I loved the Automat.
I wish somebody could bring it back,
but I don't know--
that lady isn't there anymore
who can give you 20 nickels, so...
♪ ♪
- They should have never closed.
I had a warehouse loaded with the equipment
with the key.
I think I have a key.
I wonder if the stuff is still there yet.
I'm talking about a load.
[wondrous music]
♪ ♪
- Life changes. Things change.
We all get a little older,
but the older you get,
the more you reflect back on,
you know, what came in the beginning,
and the Horn & Hardarts and the Automats of the world.
It was a remarkable institution
that meant a lot to those of us
who are New Yorkers or those in Philadelphia
that had the same experience.
- It took a while for society to get it right.
Even when I moved to Washington, D.C. in 1980,
many of the clubs were closed to women.
So my practice was, I wouldn't speak at any venue
that didn't admit people
without regard to race, gender.
People from all walks of life.
- One of the great things about being
a historian of the Automat
is the reaction that people have when I mention it.
Big smile blossoms across their face
as, suddenly, they're cast back to the days
when they were getting their pie
or a cup of coffee out of that dolphin head.
- Those little knobs and doors were a gimmick,
but the place became something different.
From Edward Hopper's painting of the isolated woman
to my grandfather sitting in the Horn & Hardart,
it became a place that everybody could go to.
- The generosity of spirit was sublime,
and people got that.
And as a result, they owned the Automat.
They felt a very strong affection for it.
- Horn & Hardart was about the people,
and I'm glad to have been part of it
and part of this documentary.
High five.
Horn & Hardart rocks. [laughs]
- It seems very much like
the--the Automat was a melting pot
and kind of an equalizer of its time,
and I--I thank you so much
for taking the time to--to meet with me.
- You're more than welcome.
I think this is a wonderful project.
- So I wonder if you think it-- if it still lives on,
and I wonder of what you think--
what the message or the lesson can be learned from this.
- You know my feelings.
I remain very loyal
to the concept of what Horn & Hardart was.
- Could you maybe think of some modern reincarnations?
Where--where do you see that kind of idealism today?
- Well, I think the idealism was infused
into the lives of the people who experienced the Automat.
In terms of institutions today, I wonder.
Starbucks?
- This is a picture of the Automat
that I keep on a wall in my office
as a constant reminder of the theater, the romance,
and the sense of discovery that existed in the Automat.
♪ ♪
- I think the principles that they pioneered
and the ideals that they had are still alive today.
Anybody can do anything
and embrace the notion that you can be successful
by being as inclusive as possible,
as democratic as possible, as generous as possible,
and still make it.
[sweeping music]
♪ ♪
- Well, I wish you great good luck
with this adventure.
Use everything I've said.
I'm popular, I'm famous,
and make me the spearhead
of selling this meshugganah documentary.
- Thank you so much.
- All right, I'm leaving you now.
- Thank you.
- And I'll be in touch.
I'll be calling every once in a while.
"Anything happen?"
♪ Some people just adore martinis ♪
♪ Others love iced tea ♪
♪ In Venice, they all go for Bellinis ♪
♪ But coffee ♪
♪ Ah, that's for me ♪
♪ I've tasted every kind of brew ♪
♪ At every coffee shop ♪
♪ Some were good, and some were great ♪
♪ But this one was the top ♪
♪ ♪
♪ There was nothing like the coffee at the Automat ♪
♪ Its aroma and its flavor was supreme ♪
♪ From a silver dolphin spout, the coffee poured right out ♪
♪ Not to mention, at the end, a little spurt of cream ♪
♪ There was nothing like the coffee at the Automat ♪
♪ Nothing fancy or pretentious like today ♪
♪ You have to understand ♪
♪ They had no latte grande ♪
♪ No quizzical baristas in your way ♪
♪ There was nothing like the coffee at the Automat ♪
♪ You would find a seat, hang up your coat and hat ♪
♪ And for just a shiny nickel ♪
♪ Your taste buds you could tickle ♪
♪ With that wonderful, magnificent, unbelievable ♪
♪ Awesome coffee ♪
♪ At the Automat ♪
♪ ♪