How Automats Worked

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's not here, but Chuck is.
And Chuck's new nickname is Poopy McGee.

Speaker 2 Actually, Pukey McGee.

Speaker 1 Not both?

Speaker 2 No. Well, that's good.

Speaker 2 Here's the story, everybody. I went to Mexico City again and got sick again, thankfully at the end.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I couldn't record yesterday, but we were in danger of missing a published date for the first time.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 In 17 years.

Speaker 1 Grave danger, I would say. Like, it's Wednesday at 3, and we need an episode for tomorrow at 5 a.m.

Speaker 2 Right. And we've never cut it this close.
So, first of all, my friend, thank you for your flexibility.

Speaker 1 Thank you for not throwing up long enough to record this episode.

Speaker 2 I last threw up about an hour ago.

Speaker 1 Man.

Speaker 2 And the main problem is it's just, I've been in like a fugue state, man. I have nothing in my body for three days now.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So I'm just like spacey and can, I told you on the email, you guys will love this, that like, I'll go 30 minutes where I just like, I'm just so zoned out, I can't have a, I don't even have a coherent thought for a half hour.

Speaker 2 I know. Josh said, well, that part sounds kind of nice.

Speaker 1 It really does.

Speaker 1 Man, to be able to just turn it off.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but

Speaker 2 you know, I love that city. I'm going to keep going back.

Speaker 2 I'm going to maybe next time drink only bottled things and not even cocktails with ice. I'm trying to figure out what's triggering me.
It may just be my biome and some of the food. I don't know.

Speaker 1 You need to learn four words in Spanish. I'll have that neat.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 It's not a bad idea. But I'm still going to go back.
I'm going to try it again.

Speaker 2 This may have also triggered my diverticulitis.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 2 So that may be why it's extending here into day three. I don't know, but I'm here.
And this gives us, dude, a rare opportunity to do anything newsy or like current, if you want to mention anything.

Speaker 1 Well, that's what we're doing. We're doing an episode on automats.
There's nothing more newsy or current than that.

Speaker 2 That's right. Automats.
And we need to give a big shout out to a documentary called The Automat from director Lisa Hurwitz

Speaker 2 because it's great. And I saw it a couple of years ago, and that's what inspired this episode.

Speaker 2 But I wanted to, I don't want to like right on the heels of this great doc, you know, kind of swoop in and do a podcast episode about it. But

Speaker 2 a great documentary. It's streaming on Macs.
Highly recommend it. She did a great job.
I can't wait to see what she does next. And it was a big help here.

Speaker 1 We have another huge shout-out to give. This is the first episode we're doing with help from our new writer, Laura Clausen.

Speaker 2 So yeah, welcome aboard, Laura. Laura came to us through Livia, which is all the recommendation we needed, right?

Speaker 1 Right, exactly.

Speaker 2 And she's been great.

Speaker 1 I've been thinking, Chuck, a lot of our writers have good nicknames. Okay.
Laura spells her last name like Claw, C-L-A-W's son.

Speaker 1 So I think we should call Laura Dr. Claw.

Speaker 2 Okay, I thought you were going to say the Clauster.

Speaker 1 No, Dr. Claw.
It's an Inspector Gadget reference. Dr.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay. I never watched that.
That was good. I actually have seen it.
So, if you don't have cable, but you have an antenna over the air antenna,

Speaker 1 there's a station called Me TV, and they just play all sorts of great reruns and everything. Well, they just launched a whole new channel called Me TV Tunes, and they show some deep-cut tunes.

Speaker 1 I mean, like Beetlejuice, the cartoon. There's Scooby-Doo on at 6 p.m.
Eastern every day, which makes me very happy. But they show Inspector Gadget, too.

Speaker 1 And I was like, this is actually a much better cartoon than I remembered.

Speaker 1 Where

Speaker 2 is this in your off-grid panic room? Like, where are you watching antenna TV?

Speaker 1 Oh, no,

Speaker 1 I've got a really high-tech setup.

Speaker 1 I have hijacked the coaxial cables throughout my house, and I connected my outdoor antenna to the indoor cable feed so I can connect TVs throughout my house to get the reception from the outdoor antenna.

Speaker 2 That is the Josh Clarkiest thing I've ever heard.

Speaker 1 It works really well. Yeah, I love it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So there you go. You don't need to just stream, you can also get free TV.

Speaker 2 Heck yeah, man. I've had free TV for many, many, many, many years.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, you need to be watching Me TV Tunes, Chuck.

Speaker 2 All right. I'll check it out.

Speaker 2 Should we talk automats or did you have another announcement?

Speaker 1 No, no, I don't have any announcements, but I do have a question for you. Okay.

Speaker 1 Chuck,

Speaker 1 have you ever eaten food?

Speaker 2 By the way, this is going to be a tough one for me to get through for obvious reasons.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Because in the first paragraph, I saw the words oyster stew earlier and I almost vomited in my mouth.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 same here, and I don't even have diverticulitis.

Speaker 2 I have not eaten food in three days, but I used to eat food.

Speaker 1 Oh, nice. Okay.
Well, Chuck, then I think you would have enjoyed a trip to the Automat.

Speaker 2 That's right. And we've been at it for six minutes.
We might as well go ahead and say that the Automat was a

Speaker 2 grouping of chain restaurants, self-serve restaurants, sort of like a cafeteria, but instead of being served in a line where people would dump food on a tray, they had these

Speaker 2 walls filled with glass-fronted compartments.

Speaker 2 And you would put in some money and a slot and you would open the door and get your piece of pie or your chicken pot pie or your pot roast or whatever have you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, your oyster stew.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but you got to, you would walk up and you'd just sit there with your finger like on your lower lip, looking from case to case, trying to figure out what appealed to you right then, very much like you were looking at the menu, but you were looking at the actual food you were going to consume instead.

Speaker 1 So you didn't even need to be able to read to know what you wanted at this

Speaker 1 automat. And then, like you said, you put your money in and you get your food out and you'd go sit down.

Speaker 1 And to people who first went to the automat, Chuck, we're talking like this is the turn of the last century when they started to take off. This was as high-tech as anything got.

Speaker 1 Because it's really important to point out

Speaker 1 in like the first third at least of the 20th century, a lot of people in the United States didn't have a refrigerator.

Speaker 1 They might have had an ice box, but they certainly didn't have anything pumping Freon through it. No, no cable TV.
No, no cable TV, not even over-the-air antennas in some cases. Yeah.

Speaker 1 No Betelgeuse, the cartoon. And they also might not even have electricity in their homes.

Speaker 1 So the idea of this futuristic serve yourself out of a glass case that's lit kind of experience was a really big deal.

Speaker 1 And what's even more remarkable is, so, okay, you're like, yeah, everybody in the 1910s was just a yokel by definition, right?

Speaker 1 These things lasted until the 1960s, and they were still viewed as these amazing places to go eat.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, the last one, this is remarkable, the very last one in New York closed in 91,

Speaker 2 which is hard to believe.

Speaker 2 They saw a couple of sad decades, a few sad decades before that, but we'll get to all that. But should we go to the beginning?

Speaker 1 Yeah, let's start at the beginning. That seems appropriate.

Speaker 2 And where else are we going to go? But our old friend, Germany.

Speaker 2 Because the first automat popped up in Berlin in 1895, and the word automat was just more of a general term for a vending machine in Germany.

Speaker 2 But it won a gold medal a couple of years later at the Brussels World Fair.

Speaker 2 Europe kind of got into them a little bit, and they spread around Europe over the next five or so years before making the leap to the United States.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and it took a little

Speaker 1 college try, I guess, the first few times for it to make that leap across the Atlantic.

Speaker 1 And it was two guys, Joseph Horne and Frank Harder, whose last names would become synonymous with automats.

Speaker 1 In fact, depending on what city you were in, you would probably refer to the Automat as a Horn and Hardart. That's just,

Speaker 1 they were like the Kleenex of Automats, essentially, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 They were already in business together. They owned a chain of cafeterias in Philadelphia.
And they said, what's next? What will the future bring?

Speaker 1 And they figured out the best way to predict the future was to build it themselves. And I think they actually made a trip to Germany and found out about the Automats.

Speaker 1 And they decided they wanted to bring it back to the United States. And like I said, it took a few attempts for them to actually get it to work, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, their first one in Philly, which was the first one overall, was 1902. But the equipment, you know, because it started in Europe, was in Europe.

Speaker 2 And they tried to get some of the stuff shipped over there, you know, these big beautiful cases with the coin slots and the little windows and everything.

Speaker 2 And the ship sunk in the Atlantic. So they lost all that gear.
They tried again, and these were victim to a warehouse fire, but but salvageable. They repaired that stuff.

Speaker 2 They got them up and working, and

Speaker 2 they beat out their closest competitor. There was one card, Harkomb,

Speaker 2 in New York that went out of business. I think it was a little fancier.

Speaker 2 And H ⁇ H definitely leaned toward, as we'll see,

Speaker 2 serving just sort of solid,

Speaker 2 affordable comfort food to the masses.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And so

Speaker 1 Horn and Hard Arts Automats, I think, like you said, started in Philadelphia. And then after Harkomb went out of business,

Speaker 1 Horn and Hardart kind of muscled in on that market, which is actually pretty brave because somebody had already proven that automats may not work in New York. Good point.

Speaker 1 But I guess they had faith in their food. They were like, have you tried this oyster stew? It's amazing.
Got to stop saying that.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 they hit New York, I think, in 1912. And by 1932, 20 years later, they had 42 automats in New York City, another 20 in Philadelphia.
Amazing.

Speaker 1 And HH became the largest restaurant chain in the entire United States. The United States was big at the time.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And this is like,

Speaker 1 that's funny, by the way.

Speaker 2 This is like during the Great Depression, like people were going out of business right and left. And they actually, HNH thrived during the Depression because, again, everything was really cheap.

Speaker 2 It was comforting stuff.

Speaker 2 as you'll see the coffee was great the food was was fresh and um well maybe not more than anything but additionally it was uh it was it was a great place to go they were beautiful places generally uh they were clean and they were safe and and we'll get to a bunch of other ways that they were inclusive as we go on They were also known because they were clean and safe and you could get really good coffee for a nickel.

Speaker 1 They became places where you would just go sit and like rest your dogs or take a load off for a little while or catch your breath, whatever you wanted to do for a little while.

Speaker 1 And one of the reasons why people did that was because part of the allure of the Automat was that there was no front of house staff generally.

Speaker 1 There were no servers, there was no maitrade, there was no manager.

Speaker 1 If there was a manager, they were in the back.

Speaker 1 So you didn't feel like hustled or rushed or like anybody was judging you for sitting there as long as you want, nursing a single cup of five-cent coffee.

Speaker 1 And so like Automats kind of got that reputation where you could just go chill out.

Speaker 1 And as big of a deal as they were in New York and Philadelphia, they actually didn't take off everywhere, even though people tried because Horn and Hard Art were so successful.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, that's kind of hard to believe in a way because they were so successful there.

Speaker 2 You would think, and the other places, like, of course, the obvious ones, they went to Chicago, Boston, D.C., and Detroit

Speaker 2 and some other places. But, you know, those are big cities.
And it's just odd that they didn't take off there. But we do have a quote here from New York history from a guy

Speaker 2 or an idea rather from this guy named Nicholas Brommel, who basically was like, you know what, in New York, it's so dense.

Speaker 2 And they really concentrated the restaurants around offices, like in the garment district, in the financial district, in Midtown, where people were either shopping or like going to work, far less in like, you know, the quieter neighborhood streets and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 So it was just so densely packed. And everyone knows how busy New York foot traffic is around those places.

Speaker 2 And that was at least Nicholas Brommel's take on why they took off in New York and Philly.

Speaker 1 I have my own take. Let's hear it.
At the very least in Detroit, it didn't work because of the name they used for the restaurant. The automat in Detroit was called Automatic Lunchroom Number One.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's like the, that's like... The cereal.
It's like a plain white box that says bran flakes and just black font.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Or beer, like that beer can you got me that time. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, I kind of like the off-brand stuff, but yeah, that's definitely weirdly vague.

Speaker 1 That's not off-brand, that's off-brand.

Speaker 1 Awful.

Speaker 1 You want to take a break?

Speaker 1 Yeah, let's take a break. We'll be right back.
Take a break so you can go throw up.

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Speaker 1 It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast too.
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Speaker 1 See Capital One.com/slash bank. Capital One NA, member F D I C

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Speaker 2 Okay, we're back. I did not throw up.

Speaker 2 I think I'm good. It's been subsiding every day in the afternoon, and I feel fine.

Speaker 1 Good.

Speaker 2 And then in the morning again, I'm nauseous. So that's why I think it's a diverticulitis.

Speaker 1 Man, that is awful. Are you going to be able to record tomorrow? We'll see.
All right.

Speaker 2 No, I'll be okay. I'll be fine.
Good. I'm going to do a lot of studying after this.

Speaker 1 Okay, good.

Speaker 2 All right. So we were talking about the busyness of New York and why it worked out there.
And one of the other reasons it was really popular, because like I mentioned, it was a very clean place.

Speaker 2 They prided themselves, at least in the heyday decades, they did go downhill and kind of fall into a little bit of shabbiness.

Speaker 2 But in the heyday, they were known as being really, really, really clean, safe places.

Speaker 2 And believe it or not, at the time, there were a lot of cafeterias that, like, if you were an unaccompanied woman, they would not serve you.

Speaker 2 You had to be in there with your husband, or they just served men, like businessmen. So a woman could go in by herself.
Children could go in, and it wasn't like a seedy thing.

Speaker 2 Families could feel safe and like they were in a clean place with good food. And also a lot of these were really, really beautiful restaurants on the inside.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they were like, there was a really low likelihood that one customer was going to expose themselves to the other customers. It just wasn't that kind of place, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And like you said, they are gorgeous. They were Art Deco, which was the trend at the time.
Beautiful.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 they would have, some of them had like two-story facades.

Speaker 1 There was a lot of marble, stained glass, bronze everywhere. They had big windows that let in tons of light.

Speaker 1 Some of them had a mezzanine upstairs dining area. Like they were huge.
And then they also paid attention to details, too, like that famous coffee that you were talking about.

Speaker 1 You would put your nickel in this cool little dispenser, and the coffee came out of like an Italianate dolphin's mouth.

Speaker 2 It's a beautiful, like I would love to find one of those on eBay.

Speaker 2 They're there. Oh, you can buy those?

Speaker 1 How much are they? I didn't see, but I'll get you one just as a present for recording today. How about that?

Speaker 2 Well, I think in the, I mean, it's been a while since I've seen the dock, but I think there was someone that is getting like the automatic machines too and collecting and storing them.

Speaker 1 Wow, nice. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Pretty cool.

Speaker 1 Kind of like the Merv Griffin set. They just found him out back of a Burger King.
What? I never heard of that.

Speaker 1 You remember in Seinfeld when Kramer found the old Merv Griffin set and he started hosting the Merv Griffin show in his apartment? That's right.

Speaker 2 Burger King will come back again in this episode, believe it or not.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 So you said they were rigorously clean. That was one of the things they were known for.
The other thing they were known for was that their food was like

Speaker 1 really fresh.

Speaker 1 I couldn't think of a non-offensive way to put it, but it was a really fresh take on food.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think it was as fresh as food could be for that format.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 2 Let's say that.

Speaker 2 The coffee was super fresh. Like after 20 minutes, they would throw the coffee out and put new coffee in.

Speaker 2 The food they did not sell the next day.

Speaker 2 And if you're thinking, God, what a lot of food waste because they're pre-making this stuff. And, you know, we'll get to that in a sec.
But

Speaker 2 a little bit of genius here is they had three different day-old shops in lower income neighborhoods in New York. So the the next day they would sell the food there at a discount.

Speaker 2 So even if you didn't have the nickel for the piece of pie or whatever, you might be able to get it for like two or three cents the next day.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Or two and a half cents.
Yeah. If you could find a half cent.

Speaker 2 I'll eat a pie for a week. So I'm fine with that.

Speaker 1 For sure. As long as it hasn't fallen on the street in public.

Speaker 1 For sure. No street pie.

Speaker 1 And they were also known for that really good coffee, right, that came out of dolphins' mouths.

Speaker 1 So at the time, if you were in America, the coffee you drank, and this is the, I don't know, the 1910s,

Speaker 1 it was boiled. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And there was no filter, no nothing. So, like, grounds would come out, so your coffee was gritty.
There was no filter, again, to take out any of the oils, any of the tastes.

Speaker 1 It was harsh, harsh coffee. And that's what people drank.
And you liked it, and you didn't complain because the coffee would punch you in the face if you did. It was that kind of coffee.

Speaker 1 Well, Horn and Hard Art had a different take. They had French drip, right? Which is still makes pretty good coffee.
But at the time, you had to go to New Orleans to get coffee like that.

Speaker 1 And Horn and Hardart serving the stuff in New York and Philadelphia at all of their 60-plus auto mats for a nickel. And every 20 minutes, they throw out the old coffee and bring in fresh stuff.

Speaker 2 That's right. They sold so much coffee that they ended up losing money on it because they kept it locked into that nickel price for

Speaker 2 38 years.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I did the math in 1912, which is when they hit New York, a nickel was worth $1.60 today.

Speaker 1 By 1950, it was worth 64 cents. So they started definitely losing money over time on that coffee.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure. So they were losing money.
They eventually had to raise the price. The only thing they could do was double it to 10 cents.

Speaker 2 because their slots took nickels and their sales dropped a lot from 70 million cups a year to 45 million. They still came out on top revenue-wise if you do the math.

Speaker 2 But I remember watching the documentary and they were talking about this.

Speaker 2 I wondered, and I haven't found a way to wrap my head around how to actually do this topic, but something about change, like coins, and how they established

Speaker 2 so much commerce, like a coin slot only taking a nickel. The only thing you can do is double it.
So what does that mean to the economy?

Speaker 2 Like there's something there, but I'm just not quite sure how to frame it. So, maybe somebody could help me with that.

Speaker 1 Maybe we can tie it into that idea that I had about why everything is so much more expensive now, even relatively

Speaker 1 speaking than it used to be.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because I mean, the idea of like

Speaker 2 doubling the cost of something is crazy. Even if it's a nickel to a dime at the time, like doubling your price is just insanity for a business, but there was nothing else it could do.

Speaker 1 But even still, even doubling the price from a nickel to a dime in 1950s money, that was still 20 or so cents less than what they were getting for it in 1912,

Speaker 1 adjusting for inflation. So it sounds like to me the bigger problem is that they just doubled it overnight.
And again, that's all they could do because their slots only took nickels.

Speaker 1 So that's what they had to deal with. But like you said, even still, they came out on top revenue-wise.

Speaker 1 But I get the impression that there were probably a lot of grumblers over that kind of thing who really just took super good cheap coffee for granted. And frankly, shame on them.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 They also sold a lot of pie. And I do remember this from the dock.
Pie was a very big deal at H ⁇ H

Speaker 2 in 1964. Here's a pretty fun stat.
They sold an average of 822 pieces of pie in New York City between 8 and 11 a.m.

Speaker 2 And there are some people who said,

Speaker 2 some historians that have said that, I don't know about this, but maybe, that there was a desire for people to do things like eat pie for breakfast.

Speaker 2 But if you had to order it from a server, you might be like, oh, you know, I can't order apple pie for breakfast.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Because they'll have the pancakes with apples on them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. But at the automat, you could just do it on, you know, on the down low and be quiet about it.
I just, I didn't know people would be judgy like that back then, but maybe.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think every, yeah, because they were pretty proper back then, too, you know. Pie for breakfast?

Speaker 1 Even today, though, I went and looked. I was like, okay, surely our attitudes have changed.
No, no, they haven't. If you look up breakfast pies, it's all like,

Speaker 1 you know, breakfast stuff, but in like a pie shell or something like that, there's no one out there eating actual pie for breakfast. It's insane.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because it's a dessert. It's a little weird.
For sure. I mean, I like the idea, but it is a dessert.

Speaker 1 You can make the case that almost all breakfast foods are desserts in the United States, man.

Speaker 1 Have you heard of like IHOP?

Speaker 2 So after your steak dinner, you get a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit?

Speaker 1 Exactly. I would.

Speaker 2 That sounds good.

Speaker 1 Although I don't like biscuits very much as a sandwich. I like a biscuit on its own.
Like, say, a cracker barrel, if you get biscuits and honey,

Speaker 1 really good. But if you take that biscuit, cut it in half, and put anything like an egg or cheese or something on it, I'm like, this is grody.

Speaker 1 Give me an English muffin. Make it a mitt.
Wow. Okay.
First shit.

Speaker 1 Never knew that. All right.

Speaker 2 Still getting to know each other after all these years. All right.
So let's talk a little bit about

Speaker 2 the nickel throwers, because if you're going to require a bunch of nickels, you're going to have to have a bunch of nickels. And you don't often come in with a bunch of nickels as a consumer.

Speaker 2 So they had change people. They were women, basically.
They called them nickel throwers. And they just sat there all day long shoving nickels.

Speaker 2 across the counter just like when i would go to the 99 cent movie when i was a kid uh they had a big stack of tickets and a big stack of pennies,

Speaker 2 and they would just shove it back to you in the window. And it was always a lot of fun, I thought.

Speaker 1 That's funny. So, I guess they decided that that 99-cent price really brought people in more than a $1 movie would, huh?

Speaker 2 Maybe. And I'm curious how much they would lose in a year on those pennies.

Speaker 1 I don't know. You know?

Speaker 1 One of the things, though, Chuck, did you see, I guess, in the documentary, the nickel throwers and like the bubble,

Speaker 1 the glass bubble-fronted things that they said, and they look like fortune tellers. Yeah, it's pretty funny.
But it was part of that whole ornate look to everything.

Speaker 1 Like, it's just the whole, most of those places were really pretty.

Speaker 2 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 And, you know, like you said, it conveyed a sense of the future. Like,

Speaker 2 kids loved it for that reason, because they were, it was like being in the Jetsons or something.

Speaker 2 But kids also loved it because that gave them a sense of autonomy to go in there and get a couple of nickels from their parents and to be able to walk up and pick something out.

Speaker 1 You got to read that Neil Simon quote. It's great.
Neil Simon.

Speaker 2 I take issue with this quote or the end of it.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay.

Speaker 2 Neil Simon, the great Neil Simon, said this when he was a child about going there, or as an adult, about going there as a child.

Speaker 2 To have your own stack of nickels placed in your tiny hands, to be able to choose your own food richly on display like museum pieces, to make quick and final decisions at the age of eight.

Speaker 2 That was a lesson in financial dealings that not even two years at the Wharton School could buy today.

Speaker 1 And he was all hyperbole

Speaker 1 You think that's hyperbolic?

Speaker 2 Yeah, probably so.

Speaker 1 But it is a pretty great quote for

Speaker 1 one of the things though is including people like Neil Simon and other people who are interviewed in the Automat documentary, people tend to remember the food as like good.

Speaker 1 And it's entirely possible it was for a while. But the older,

Speaker 1 the longer you go along in the history of the Automat, the worse the food probably got for a little while. So it's not entirely clear that the food was actually good toward the end.

Speaker 1 And we can't really say because, again, the last one closed in 1991. And I'm guessing by the time that one closed.
It probably wasn't too good. Right.

Speaker 1 You shouldn't really compare the food in general over the course of the history of the automat to that last one.

Speaker 1 But I'm guessing it was probably pretty decent for a while based on some of the stuff I'm reading.

Speaker 2 I bet it was pretty good, if for no other reason, than in the 1920s and 30s and 40s 40s and 50s, they used real food

Speaker 2 and real ingredients, and it wasn't like it is today. So I just think by virtue of that, it was probably not bad, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm with you. So, Chuck, I say we talk about how automated the automat really was, because it turns out, not really.
It was really a facade.

Speaker 1 Literally, it was a facade of food that seemed to be mysteriously

Speaker 1 conjured out of nowhere, possibly by robots.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and that was one of the selling points that, you know,

Speaker 2 another

Speaker 2 piece of pie on a tiny plate would pop into that window when

Speaker 2 one went out. It's not like it just stayed empty.
I guess if they ran out of pie, it would. Or they probably put, you know, something else in there.
But they had a huge,

Speaker 2 actually a few different central commissaries in the city where they would make all the stuff. They would ship it over there.

Speaker 2 And they had tons and tons and tons of worker bees behind the scenes doing all that stuff.

Speaker 2 They had these rotating drums that would do the work of filling the actual slots, but there had to be someone filling those drums. So it wasn't a bunch of robots back there.
It was not George Jensen.

Speaker 2 It was just a bunch of people plating stuff up and putting it in the drum to put in the window.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So say that you went up and you're like, I'm going to have that delicious bowl of bubbling, greasy oyster stew that's just sitting there looking at me in the face.

Speaker 1 I think one of those oysters might still be alive. That's how good it was, right? And you put your nickel in and you pulled a lever, correct?

Speaker 2 I don't remember if it was a lever, but that sounds about right.

Speaker 1 Or like you pulled, like you were buying cigarettes as a kid when you were 14 in a coin-operated machine. That kind of lever is what I'm talking about, right?

Speaker 2 Well, I didn't like you did, but sure, I saw the bad kids doing that.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 So you would do something like that, and then either it would open, like it would allow the little glass compartment window to open up so you could get your oyster sewer or what have you from inside, inside.

Speaker 1 Or it might rotate a drum, like you were saying, so that that oyster stew was now available to you and you'd open the window.

Speaker 1 And then there would be an open compartment in the back of the drum that somebody who was working the back of the automat cases would see was empty and would put a new thing of oyster stew in there and then the whole thing would just continue.

Speaker 1 I also saw that some of them had a photo of the food and that, yeah, you would like open the case and just pull it out and then the people in back would notice that that one was empty.

Speaker 1 But suffice to say, however, the food came out, there was a way to see in the rear that that compartment needed refilling.

Speaker 1 And one of the things Horn and Hard Art was known for was employing armies of people who made sure that that food was there, that the compartments were full, and that the food was fresh too, that the Salisbury steak wasn't getting jiggly.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 I'm struggling.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 I know you're doing it on purpose. It's all fun.

Speaker 1 That last part wasn't on purpose.

Speaker 2 For a while there, they didn't have hot

Speaker 2 windows. They just had the cold windows.
So the hot food was served from a steam table.

Speaker 2 But it was not too long until they had the hot windows and the cold windows or the hot cases probably.

Speaker 2 How they treated their workers is a matter of debate.

Speaker 2 They struck a couple of times. 1937, they struck.

Speaker 2 They had 3,000 employees at the time. That failed.
That organizing effort did not hold.

Speaker 2 Then again, in 1952, they struck again.

Speaker 2 And eventual New York State Supreme Court Justice Melvin Barash

Speaker 2 was one of the people trying to organize at the time in 1952. And in 1991, he said the conditions were straight out of the 19th century.

Speaker 2 That effort failed. Other people, if you watch the documentary,

Speaker 2 the son of the president of the company company said, no, it was great. We had company picnics and Christmas parties and like every, it was really, really, really great.

Speaker 1 Daddy loved the Warcos. Yeah, exactly.
There was also an actor named Apache Ramos, who is best known for playing one of the orphans in the Warriors,

Speaker 1 but also is lesser known as having managed the Fat Boys in the 80s.

Speaker 2 Oh, the Warriors, That Warriors.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like, come out and play Yay.

Speaker 2 Apache Ramos.

Speaker 1 Okay, I'll have to check that guy out. Oh, man, he had a magnificent Afro

Speaker 1 in that movie.

Speaker 2 Yep, I totally know exactly the guy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, what a great Afro. Yeah.
But he also managed the Fat Boys. Like, the Fat Boys Are Back

Speaker 1 in the 80s.

Speaker 1 He worked at an Automat, and so did his grandmother. I'm assuming one or the other got the other one the job.

Speaker 1 But he remembered that the Horn and Hard Art would throw holiday parties for the workers' children around like Christmas time.

Speaker 1 And oh man, can you imagine how beautiful those places looked when they were decorated for Christmas parties in like the 50s and 60s? Like,

Speaker 1 you know, people are like, if you could ever go back in time, what would you do? I would go to that Christmas party.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 This reminds me of a childhood trauma that I suffered because

Speaker 2 growing up, My sister had a best friend whose father worked for Kraft Foods, and they had a big craft, like

Speaker 2 they rented Six Flags or something. It was some big thing every year.
Wow. My brother's best friend worked for Coca-Cola, and every year they had the big Coca-Cola picnic thing.

Speaker 2 I had nobody, and I never got to go. And every single year, I had to watch Scott and Michelle go to the Kraft event and the Coke event.

Speaker 1 Man, that's terrible.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it just, it still sticks with me after all these years.

Speaker 1 Your friend Richie was like, well, my dad owns the tire shop, so you can come to that.

Speaker 1 We don't really have a party, but we stand around.

Speaker 2 Should we take another break?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 All right, we'll take another break and talk about the inclusivity of the Automat right after this.

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Speaker 1 Okay, Chuck, just before we took a break, you nailed it on the head.

Speaker 1 You said we were talking about the inclusivity of the Automat, and in particular, the Horn and Hardar Automat, which again, they were synonymous with Automats.

Speaker 1 They were one of the earliest chain restaurants in the United States to integrate, not discriminate against their clientele.

Speaker 1 Not just, you know, like unescorted women, God forbid, but also racially speaking, economically speaking, like whoever came to a Horn and Hard Automat to eat was treated equally. And that was huge.

Speaker 1 I mean, we're talking starting in the 1910s. That was an enormous deal.
And that's something that, I mean, my hat's off to them for that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure. They had a motto, which was serve everybody and serve everybody in the same way, which is a great quote.

Speaker 2 And Colin Powell, former Secretary of State, is in the documentary. And it's a great, really sweet interview.
And he said, the one we would usually go to is the Automat on 42nd Street, 42nd Street.

Speaker 2 I never even thought about the fact that I'm a black kid. Should I go into Horn and Hard Art? Is it okay to go to the Automat?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You never knew what you'd run into in an Automat.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's pretty cool.

Speaker 1 There was also a historian named Lisa Keller, I believe in the documentary, pointed out that if you were an immigrant, this was a great place for you to go because you just went and looked at the food and put your nickel in.

Speaker 1 You didn't really have to be able to read or speak English and you could still get a good meal of oyster stew.

Speaker 1 I can't wait to see what Aaron Cooper does with this.

Speaker 2 They were also known for their celebrity

Speaker 2 fans.

Speaker 2 There was one very famous Esquire spread. And of course, this is for Esquire, so it was all set up.

Speaker 2 But in 1951, Audrey Hepburn was photographed for esquire so cute shopping at an automat very cute but in the documentary um reiner and brooks you know carl reiner and mel brooks love the automat and they they talk with great adoration about uh their childhood of going to those restaurants yeah and james dean his favorite baked beans in the world were horn and hard arts baked beans james bean more like that's right he really knew what he was talking about too that's how he died in that car accident he was eating some baked beans at the time and lost control of the steering wheel.

Speaker 2 God.

Speaker 1 That's not true, everybody. We did a short stuff on it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Don't at me.

Speaker 2 So I guess we're at the sad point, like so many of these episodes that we do on A Cool Thing from the Past, where the decline begins. Right.
The 1960s is when that started.

Speaker 2 Although they were still like a huge deal culturally, you know, everyone knew about the automat.

Speaker 2 And I don't think we mentioned, you know, at a certain point in New York City, they were so famous that it was like when you go to visit New York, you would go to an automat just for that experience.

Speaker 1 Right. Like how, like, when we were kids, you went to that city's like Hard Rock Cafe to get the t-shirt.

Speaker 1 Remember that? Oh, man, totally. Yeah.
You wear it with your Panama Jack sunglasses, and everybody at home would be like, you had a great summer, obviously.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. My band did one gig at the Hard Rock Cafe here in Atlanta one time.

Speaker 1 Wow, we, you know, did they put your guitar up under a glass case afterwards? They did. That'd be pretty sweet.
They should.

Speaker 2 But the 60s is where things really started to struggle, even though they were, again, still popular culturally.

Speaker 2 Stockholders were involved by that point, obviously.

Speaker 2 Just revenues started dropping.

Speaker 2 The suburbs was a big cause of it, you know, when people started moving out to the suburbs. Offices and office complexes started getting built in the suburbs.

Speaker 2 And people started shopping at malls in the suburbs. And there were fewer and fewer people

Speaker 2 just, you know, walking around New York doing things like shopping and going to their office.

Speaker 2 So it just, it started to sort of slowly drop and slowly drop until they got a little weird with some of their ideas, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, a Wild West room. I could not find a picture of that, but apparently one of the automats, this one in Times Square, they put a Wild West room in in 1966.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm sure people would have gone crazy for that in 1966.

Speaker 2 Not a wild restroom.

Speaker 2 That's every restroom in New York City.

Speaker 1 There's like a ton of potted plants and a tiger in there.

Speaker 2 Right. They also also tried a beer garden.
They tried the roller skate waiters thing. They tried

Speaker 2 live bands and dancing and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 But eventually, Horn and Hardert looked at each other and they said,

Speaker 2 well, this has clearly seen its best days. The silver lining is, is we are sitting on a bunch of really valuable real estate.

Speaker 1 I know like 40 buildings in Manhattan. Yeah, so they're.

Speaker 2 Don't feel too bad. They were doing okay.

Speaker 1 No, but instead of selling them, they said, hey, I've got an idea.

Speaker 1 Let's remove the auto mat and put burger kings in instead of franchises so that's where you would have gotten your old auto mat cases is in the back of a burger king i was just about to improvise one of those terrible terrible terrible terrible burger king commercial songs that's that's one of the big drawbacks to watching uh me tv tunes oh is that on there too there's this one burger king ad that keeps playing over and over and over again i had to hit myself in the knee with a hammer to get it out of my head.

Speaker 2 Well, it's this whole new campaign with a guy that's singing

Speaker 2 that can't sing.

Speaker 2 Please don't do it. No, no, no.

Speaker 1 That's like my oysters too.

Speaker 1 Well, I guess I won't do a song right now. Automats.

Speaker 1 Actually, I know exactly why. Now we're even.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 1 So, yeah,

Speaker 1 I guess you can just, if you can mute

Speaker 1 the TV fast enough, then you can keep watching me TV tunes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. All right.
So Burger Kings went in.

Speaker 2 Automats were going downhill. Another thing that happened was as they started going downhill,

Speaker 2 a different kind of shopper started coming in there.

Speaker 2 People that were itinerant, people that were unhoused, people that were vagrants and just sort of coming through town who knew that they could hang out there for that nickel cup of coffee for hours and hours and hours.

Speaker 2 And when that starts happening, families stop coming in and it just creates this sort of vicious cycle where your clientele is different and it's not seen as that safe middle-class space any longer.

Speaker 1 No, and those same families that are like, oh, let's go down to the automat, step in, and they're like, oh, it's seedy here.

Speaker 1 So they stopped coming in, which just reinforced the ability of like the homeless population to hang out in Horn and Hard Art.

Speaker 1 Horn and Hard Art's whole thing was serve everybody and serve everybody the same way.

Speaker 1 So as far as I ever saw, they weren't exactly rousting vagrants who were hanging out, drinking like a cup of coffee.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it just was basically the same story as the inner city in the United States in the 60s and 70s.

Speaker 1 Once the suburbs rose and everybody moved out of there, and the neighborhoods and the communities that did survive had U.S.

Speaker 1 interstates built right through their neighborhoods, things just took a turn for the worse. And the Automat was not immune to that whole thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, another big part of that is like these huge central commissary kitchens where they were cooking all this stuff is an excellent, excellent, efficient way to do it when you are booming with business.

Speaker 2 Right. Once business drops and you're not cooking, you're not needing to cook as much, all of a sudden

Speaker 2 the economy of scale isn't there any longer. And you have these huge places with fewer employees and less food being pumped out.
And it's just, it was just a downward spiral. It's very sad.

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 1 So the other thing, too, is

Speaker 1 it's interesting, and I think it's kind of appropriate that Horn and Hard Art got into fast food franchises because the Automat kind of helped lay the foundation for that.

Speaker 1 But rather than hundreds of different dishes, which is apparently what Horn and Hard Art offered at each of their Automats,

Speaker 1 you know, fast food has like 10.

Speaker 1 And like, yes, you can have it your way, but really, you can have it your way choosing from these five ingredients or whatever.

Speaker 1 And there were much like downscale

Speaker 1 surroundings. It was just like the Automat's

Speaker 1 vision with all of the glitz and idealism removed from it. Then you have fast food franchises.

Speaker 2 Yeah, basically.

Speaker 2 That last one that closed in 91, it was the last one starting in 1977 at 200 East 42nd Street. So right there, you know, sort of near Times Square.
Sure. And it lasted 14 years.

Speaker 2 on its own as a as a nostalgia piece basically um before becoming a gap That's right.

Speaker 1 It's a gap. What else?

Speaker 1 So, like you said, if you went to New York, like you would go to the Empire State Building, you might go see a Broadway play, and you would go eat it in an Automat.

Speaker 1 That's just how iconic it was, right?

Speaker 1 It popped up, like anytime you're trying to get across how New York

Speaker 1 your movie was, like, there would be a scene in an Automat or something like that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Francis Ford Coppola apparently directed a movie in the 60s that featured an automat called Automat Now

Speaker 1 that showed up in... I'm kidding.

Speaker 1 It showed up in the middle. I get it now.
I'm a little slow.

Speaker 1 Hey, I think you're doing magnificent for considering what you've been through the last couple of days, man.

Speaker 2 I've been through apocalypse now.

Speaker 1 Bugs Bunny went to an automat and the hair grows in Manhattan. That's right.

Speaker 2 The Flintstones? They even had a Flintstone automat in a 1962 episode.

Speaker 1 And there's a book that I think I've heard of, but I'd never read from the mixed-up files of Mrs. Basil E.
Frankweiler.

Speaker 2 That sounds familiar.

Speaker 1 Well, the thing that sounds familiar to me is that these kids hide out living in the Met, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's Royal Tannenbaums.

Speaker 1 That's, yeah, I guarantee that it was an homage to that thing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But anyway, in this children's book, these kids are runaways and they live in

Speaker 1 Met.

Speaker 1 That's the Met, right? The Met isn't the opera house, it's the art museum.

Speaker 2 The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the Met, yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay, right. Well, one of the things that they do is they feed themselves by going to the automat.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's fun. And I did not know.
He totally, yeah, let's call an homage. You're kinder than I am.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Wes Anderson does not rip stuff off.
He lovingly pays homage to it.

Speaker 2 That's right. That's right.
Pat Boone tried his version of the Auto Mat called The Dyno Mat in 1962, which was frozen food that was then microwave. That did not work out too well.
That's surprising.

Speaker 2 But there were a few other things over the years that were tried like this that did not take off like the Automat did.

Speaker 1 My favorite was the Andy Mat. Yeah, what's up with that? Andy Warhol, this is just what an artist he was.
He could just talk about it.

Speaker 1 He just mentioned something in passing, and people are still talking about it 50 years later.

Speaker 1 But he said that he was going to come up with the chain of Andy Mats, which are like auto mats, but instead of having to go get your food from a case you would sit down on like a red mohair banquet and order through a pneumatic tube and

Speaker 1 you would order frozen food and champagne that's what he was going to offer at the Andy mat oh that's funny but that never happened at all right just an idea no it didn't but there's some people who are trying to revive it Yeah, I mean, there are things like this.

Speaker 2 I mean, Japan has stuff like this, right?

Speaker 1 They have what's called katenzushi.

Speaker 2 Okay, what's that?

Speaker 1 It's the sushi that comes around in a conveyor belt no but they i've seen little windows as well of things it may not be hot food maybe it's other things yeah i'm sure that they do i remember going to toledo hospital to visit my mom when she was at work and they had basically automat sandwiches like i always just thought it was like a um like a vending machine yeah vending machine yeah but they no it was an automat basically Yeah, there's a place in Brooklyn called the Brooklyn Dumpling Shop.

Speaker 2 I think there are like 12 of them here in Canada. And they, I just looked up a picture of them and they, they have these little automat kind of like cubbies that you order through an app,

Speaker 2 like a locker system.

Speaker 2 And I've also seen, I think it was a Shark Tank product that I ended up seeing in a hotel where it's like a machine that gives you like a cheeseburger or a pizza, like, but made to order.

Speaker 2 So like you can say what kind of pizza you want and it'll, it's just got this machine inside that'll, you know, load it up with whatever and then bake it and then it spits it out in 15 minutes or whatever.

Speaker 2 So things kind of like this, but not truly automatic stuff.

Speaker 1 One of the things you can choose for that pizza maker is I don't want the cheese to scald the roof of my mouth.

Speaker 1 And the pizza machine's like, yeah, yeah, sure, sure. Definitely not.

Speaker 2 And then they have a hidden camera on you.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 And spit out a picture of you going, ah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Damn it.

Speaker 1 You got anything else?

Speaker 2 I have nothing else. I don't think I have to puke.
I think this is the best I've felt in a few days.

Speaker 1 So hopefully that holds That makes me feel good about the effect I have on you.

Speaker 2 Yeah, just

Speaker 2 a little Josh, a little side cup of oyster stew. I'm back on my feet again.

Speaker 1 There you go.

Speaker 1 Well, since Chuck's back on his feet again, obviously anyone who's ever listened to this show before knows that he just unlocked the listener mail.

Speaker 2 That's right. This is short and sweet.
This is kind of fun because it's a

Speaker 2 this is coming out tomorrow and it's a correction on an episode that was just out.

Speaker 1 Awesome.

Speaker 2 So maybe for a change we won't get like 400 emails from crafters.

Speaker 1 Okay. Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 Hey guys.

Speaker 2 R.E., the High Times episode and Martha Stewart. Hodge Podge is a big jumble of things that don't go together.
Mod Podge is the craft supply.

Speaker 2 Just don't want you to embarrass yourselves at the craft store. That is from Kelly.

Speaker 1 Modge Podge is what you use to glue together a big jumble of things that don't go together. Exactly.
That's great, Kelly. Thank you.
And to the other thousand of you who wrote in.

Speaker 1 It's nice to know that there are people out there still using Modge Podge.

Speaker 2 It's fun.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, it's fun to say.
And it's got a cute label, too.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Mod Podge is really a lot of fun. I enjoy it.

Speaker 1 For sure. And we heard from Martha Stewart, too.
She said, yes, I have Mod Podge laying around.

Speaker 1 Jerry got in touch with her and asked. That's right.

Speaker 1 Well, if you want to be like who?

Speaker 2 Kelly.

Speaker 1 If you want to be like Kelly and write in to gently correct us, we love that kind of thing. You can send it via email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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