On his first day in America, the new immigrant went straight to the automat, where he was seen feeding one nickel after another into the cherry pie slot. “Are you crazy?” his cousin asked him. “You already have a dozen pieces of pie!” The greenhorn replied, ”What’s it to you if I keep winning?”
— William Novak and Moshe Waldoks, The Big Book of Jewish Humor
This joke captures the egalitarian promise of the 20th-century New York melting pot — the abundance, the high-speed commerce and triumphant consumption of machine-age capitalism. And of course there’s the Jewishness of the joke, the wry tribalist spirit of an old New York which makes the automat, that bygone restaurant structure, a natural fit for the documentary arthouse circuit.
Lisa Hurwitz’s The Automat is an anecdote-heavy nostalgia trip that’s most remarkable as a feat of filmmaking for wrangling so many interviewees so close to death: Carl Reiner (“It was cheap!”), Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Colin Powell. Mel Brooks, still kvetching strong at 95, gamely dredges up memories of taking the BMT into the city from Williamsburg, changing a dollar bill for 20 nickels, and getting coffee from a dolphin-head dispenser in one of Horn & Hardart’s grand Beaux Arts cafeterias, with its high ceilings, marble floors, and spotless coin-operated brass or stainless steel windowed compartments containing creamed corn, roast beef sandwiches, slices of pie.
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Though Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart’s “automatic restaurant” chain began in Philadelphia, it’s most associated with NYC. In clips and photographs, we see how H&H locations provided the chrome-plated novelty of eating out, a place to linger indoors, especially for career girls living in SROs and dormitories, in the roaring ’20s and plucky ’30s, before midcentury glitz and bustle gives way to the final location’s much-mourned closure amidst the reascendant chain-brand Midtown of the late ’80s.
The Automat’s (frequently off-topic) talking heads include antiquarians and historians of food and New York, as well as celebrity clients and descendants of H&H founders and executives. But it provides barely any testimony from the people who worked there. This “great man” angle on history is a baffling choice for a movie about a place where a first-generation working stiff could famously get a three-course meal and coffee for 25 cents. We hear vaguely about how tense labor actions during the Depression were resolved due to the family-like “loyalty” of workers and management. (In truth, Horn & Hardart did not institute the 40-hour workweek until 1947, and did not allow its Black employees to be seen handling food, among other policies.) In one sequence, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz recalls his childhood belief that there was a “magician on the other side” at H&H. Of course, the chain relied on central commissary kitchens in New York and Philadelphia, with final prep and restocking done from kitchens behind the automat’s windows. But Schultz seems to have used his youthful sense of wonder as inspiration for the “storytelling” that still goes on at non-unionized Starbucks locations worldwide.
The automat died out as postwar suburbanization took workers out of the city, and frozen food and microwaves brought industrial convenience to the family dinner table. White flight lowered the standing of living for the poor and working-class who remained in New York — Automat interviewees’ jarringly insensitive memories of “bums” hanging out in Horn & Hardart evoke the dingy all-night cafeterias of Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver. But the automat’s spirit lives on, in less populist form form. Its natural heir is the food-delivery app; the new nickel in the slot is the button on your phone. It’s the same old labor of making and serving food, rendered invisible behind a new cutting edge.
The Automat is now playing in select theaters.
Source: Hyperallergic.com