Machines Fed 800,000 New Yorkers a Day at This Restaurant. Then It Vanished | The Automat

You put your nickels in the slot, turned the knob, and a little glass door clicked open on your lunch. For ninety years, the Automat was New York's magic trick — a "waiterless restaurant" where coffee poured from brass dolphin heads, millionaires ate beside shoeshine boys at the same marble tables, and Horn & Hardart served as many as 800,000 people a day: the largest restaurant chain of its era. Irving Berlin wrote it a song. Edward Hopper painted it. Then America got in the car — and the empire that invented fast food was destroyed by fast food. This is the story of the nickel palace: the coffee rule, the nickel throwers, the Depression's free "tomato soup," the Burger King ending no satirist would invent, and the last cup poured on East 42nd Street in April 1991. Where the record is uncertain, we say so. CHAPTERS 0:00 The Last Cup of Coffee 2:40 I. The Waiterless Restaurant 6:01 II. The Nickel Palace 9:34 III. The Great Leveler 13:03 IV. The World That Moved Away 16:46 V. The Last Automat 20:11 VI. The Ghost in Every Machine 23:47 VII. Grand, and Gone SOURCES Smithsonian National Museum of American History · Lorraine B. Diehl & Marianne Hardart, "The Automat" "The Automat" (2021 documentary) · Contemporary press accounts, 1902–1991 This film presents the documented history of Horn & Hardart's Automats. Some scene-setting imagery is AI-generated atmosphere; all photographs of the real places and people are archival or documentary. IMAGE CREDITS Photographs courtesy of the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons contributors. Licensed photographs by: Andy Li (CC0) · Angela George at https://www.flickr.com/photos/sharong... (CC BY-SA 3.0) · At by At (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Christopher Flach (CC BY 4.0) · DanTD (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Derzsi Elekes Andor (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Illegitimate Barrister (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Lallint (CC0) · Miguel Discart (CC BY-SA 2.0) · N509FZ (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Phillip Pessar from Miami, USA (CC BY 2.0) · Ryan Browne, Cook+Fox Architects (CC BY 3.0) · Tadeáš Bednarz (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Tdorante10 (CC BY-SA 4.0) · User:Caulfieldh (CC BY-SA 3.0) · hairyeggg (CC BY-SA 2.0) · mrhayata (CC BY-SA 2.0) (Full source links for every licensed image are in the pinned comment.) #automat #hornandhardart #newyork #history #documentary