The Automat

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.

Of course, when you say Automat

or Horn and 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?

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?

Even though Horn and 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 and 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.

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.

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 and 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.

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?

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.

After a little while,

they opened another restaurant,

and then another restaurant.

Around the time Horn and 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.

So wait, you're an Automat historian.

How did you pick that for your PhD dissertation?

That's not a...

So that...

I chose the Automat as a... as a topic.

I was studying to become a historian of technology.