By David Freeland

The city’s last-standing Automat appears headed for demolition. The Times recently confirmed that a new development would obliterate one of Manhattan’s last surviving temple to working-class opulence, where coffee was poured out of dolphin spigots and everything from mashed potatoes to chicken potpie could be enjoyed for a nickel. 

The building, located on West 57th Street west of Sixth Avenue, is an Art Moderne treasure, with gentle curves and wide, flat lines that make it look like a giant jukebox. But it’s also in a prime location. 

If the Automat is torn down, New Yorkers will lose much more than a unique building. They’ll also lose an important vestige of a beloved institution, one that entered the popular lore through appearances in everything from an Edward Hopper painting to songs like “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” (“A kiss may be grand, but it won’t pay the rental/Or help you at the Automat). Part of its appeal lay in novelty: the fun of extracting macaroni and cheese from a tiny glass box then watching it reapear, like magic. But Automats were also places where those on society’s fringes could gather for a cheap meal and create a sense of community. Historian George Chauncey reports how in the 1930s flamboyant gay men settled in droves, tolerated by management as long as the tourist rubberneck wagons could be lured by promises of an “authentic” New York scene. For many New Yorkers, the Automat was home. 

In the spring of 1903, newspapers began advertising a “European Novelty Restaurant” at 830 Broadway, with “Delicious Easting” offered by “Self-Serving Machines.” That establishment’s owner died in 1907, but it didn’t take long for the concept to be revived. On July 2, 1912, Horn & Hardart, a Philadelphia company, opened the Automat Lunch Room on Broadway between 46th and 47th Streets. Traces of that building seem to remain, buried beneath heavy alterations and signs, on the rapidly dwindling block that housed the city’s last Howard Johnson’s. The new Automat was a sensation: By the 1930s, Horn & Hardart had opened 40 others in Manhattan alone, including the flagship location on West 57th Street. 

Automats really came into their own during the Depression, when they became gathering spots for the newly impecunious—many who would never have dreamed of eating there before. In the 1932 Broadway musical “Face the Music,” Irving Berlin satirized this phenomenon: “See Mr. Whitney passing by, putting mustard on a Swiss-on-rye… There’s Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, saying, ‘That’s my place, I got there first.’” 

Rising fortunes after the war led to a decrease in patronage, and the Automat gradually fell out of fashion, acquiring something of a threadbare reputation. With the passing decades Horn & Hardart devised increasingly elaborate schemes,
like the 1966 “Windomat” (with sidewalk service), rock concerts, bingo games, and Parcheesi, but the bloom had faded. Fast food drove the nail into the coffin: In this sense, the Automat sowed the seeds of its own demise, a victim of the concept it had helped create. By 1988, Horn & Hardart had joined its competitor’s camp through acquisition of Burger King and Tony Roma’s outlets, but it kept the last New York Automat, on East 42nd Street, sputtering along for three more years. Its closing in the spring of 1991 garnered a few mentions in the press but otherwise went unnoticed. 

But the Automat deserves to be remembered and preserved. More than just another example of big development crowding out old-school idiosyncrasy, it’s important for New Yorkers to retain a visible link to a humble past. Most of us never lived in a Fifth Avenue mansion, or the Old Merchant’s House, or the Morgan Library. The places where we laughed and loved are often excluded from the goals of the modern preservation movement. 

Fortunately, help may be on the way: The Landmarks Conservancy has taken up the Automat’s case, and preservationist Michael Perlman has started a petition to the New York Landmarks Commission (go to http://petitiononline.com/1938gem/petition.html). For much of the 20th Century, the Automat gave space to the dreams of everyday New Yorkers; now it needs our help.