January 23, 2025 • 48 mins
Once upon a time no visit to New York was complete without eating at an automat. Putting a nickel in a slot and pulling your own ham sandwich from a lit glass case thrilled people to no end. Eventually the novelty wore off and automats faded into history.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's not here, but Chuck is Chuck's Your
nickname is Poopy.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
McGhee, actually Puky mcke not both. Now let's here's the story, everybody.
I went to Mexico City again and got sick again,
thankfully at the end, and I couldn't record yesterday, but
we were in danger of missing a pubblished date for
the first time, yes in seventeen years.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Grave danger. I would say, like, it's Wednesday at three
and we need an episode for tomorrow at five am.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Right, and we've never cut it this close. So first
of all, my friend, thank you for your flexibility.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Thank you for not throwing up long enough to record
this episode.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
I lasted up about an hour ago, man. 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, so I'm just like spacey and
can I told you want to email you guys still
love this that like, I'll go thirty minutes where I
just like, I'm just so zoned out. I can't have
(01:22):
a I don't even have a coherent thought for a
half hour. And Josh said, well, that part sounds kind
of nice.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
It really does man to be able to just turn
it off.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Yeah, but you know, I love that city. I'm gonna
keep going back. I'm gonna 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 2 (01:49):
You need to learn four words in Spanish. I'll have
that neat.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Okay, it's not a bad idea, but I'm still gonna
go back. I'm gonna try it again. And this may
have also triggered my diverticulitis. Oh so that may be
why it's extending here in to 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
(02:16):
want to mention anything.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Well, that's what we're doing. We're doing an episode on automats.
There's nothing more newsier current than that.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
That's right, automats. And we need to give a big
shout out to a documentary called The automat By from
director Lisa Hurwitz, because it's great and I saw it
a couple of years ago and that's what inspired this episode.
But I wanted to I don't want to like write
on the heels of this great doc you know, kind
of swoop in and do a podcast episode about it.
But great documentary. It's streaming on Max. Highly recommend it.
(02:47):
She did a great job. I can't wait to see
what she does next. And it's a big help.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Here. We have another other huge shout out to give.
This is the first episode we're doing with help from
our new writer, Laura Claus.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
So, yeah, welcome aboard Laura. Laura came to us through Libya,
which is all the recommendation we needed right.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
Right exactly, and she's been great. I've been thinking, Chuck,
a lot of our writers have good nicknames. Okay, Laura
spells her last name like claw claw Son, So I
think we should call Laura doctor Claw.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Okay, I thought you're gonna say the Clauster.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
No, doctor Claw. It's an inspector, gadget reference doctor.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Oh okay, I never watched that.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
That was good. I actually have seen it. So if
you don't have cable but you have an antenna over
the air antenna. Oh yeah, 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.
(03:51):
I mean, like Beetlejuice the cartoon. There's Scooby Doo on
at six pm Eastern every day, which makes me very happy.
But they show Inspector Gadget and I was like, this
is actually a much better cartoon than I remembered.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Uh, where is this in your off grid panic room? Like,
where are you watching antenna TV?
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Oh no, I've got I've got a really high tech setup.
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 1 (04:27):
That is the Josh Clarkiest thing I've ever heard.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
It worked really well. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, So
there you go. You don't need to just stream. You
can also get free TV.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Heck yeah, man, I had free TV for many, many,
many many years.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yeah, well, you need to be watching me TV tunes.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Chuck, all right, I'll check it out. Should we talk
auto match or did you have another announcement?
Speaker 2 (04:48):
No, no, I don't have any announcements, but I do
have a question for you.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Okay, Chuck, mm hmmm?
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Have you ever eaten food?
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Right? By the way, this is gonna be a tough
one for me to get through for obvious reasons.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Yeah, because in the first paragraph I saw the words
oyster stew earlier and I almost vomited in my mouth.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Yeah. Same here, And I don't even have diverticulitis.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
I have not eaten food in three days, but I
used to eat food.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Oh nice, Okay, well, Chuck, then I think you would
have enjoyed a trip to the Automat.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
That's right, and we've been at it for six minutes,
we might as well go in and say that. The
Automat was a 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 walls filled with glass fronted compartments, and
(05:45):
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 2 (05:55):
Yeah, your oyster stew. Yeah, but you got to you
you would walk up and you 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, So you didn't even need to
be able to read to know what you wanted at
(06:18):
this at an automat. And then, like you said, you
put your money in and you get your food out,
and you go sit down. And two 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.
Because it's really important to point out the in like
(06:39):
the first third at least of the twentieth century, a
lot of people in the United States didn't have a refrigerator.
They might have had an icebox, but they certainly didn't
have anything pumping free on through it. No no cable TV,
not even over the air antennas in some cases, no
Beetlejuice the cartoon, and they also so might not even
(07:01):
have electricity in their home. So the idea of this
futuristic serve yourself out of a glass case that's lit
kind of experience was a really big deal. And what's
even more remarkable, it's so okay, you're like, Yeah, everybody
in the nineteen tens was just a yokel by definition, right,
These things lasted until the nineteen sixties, and they were
(07:24):
still viewed as these amazing places to go eat.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Yeah, I mean the last one, this is remarkable, The
very last one in New York close in ninety one. Yeah,
which is hard to believe. 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 2 (07:44):
Yeah, let's start at the beginning. That seems appropriate.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
And where else are we going to go but our
old friend Germany, Because the first automat popped up in
Berlin in eighteen ninety five, and the word automat was
just more of a general term for a ventding machine
in Germany, but it won a gold medal a couple
of years later at the Brussels World Fair. Europe kind
of got into them a little bit, and they spread
(08:08):
around Europe over the next five or so years before
making the leap to the United States.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yeah, and it took a little college try, I guess,
the first few times for to make that leap across
the Atlantic. And it was two guys, Joseph Horn and
Frank Harder, whose last names would become synonymous with automats.
In fact, depending on what city you were in, you
would probably refer to the automat as a Horn and
hard Arc. That's just like they were like the Kleenex
(08:36):
of automats essentially, right. Yeah, 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? 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, and
they decided they wanted to bring it back to the
(08:56):
United States. And like I said, it took a few
attempts for them to actually get it to work, right.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Yeah, Their first one in Philly, which was the first
one overall, was nineteen oh two, but the equipment, you know,
because it started in Europe, was in Europe, 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, and the ship sunk
in the Atlantic, so they lost all that gear. They
(09:23):
tried again, and these were victim to a warehouse fire,
but salvageble. They repaired that stuff. They got them up
and working, and they beat out their closest competitor. There
was one card Harcomb in New York that went out
of business. I think it was a little fancier. Yeah,
(09:43):
and H and H definitely leaned toward, as we'll see,
serving just sort of solid, affordable comfort food to the masses.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Yeah. And so Horn and Hard Arts automats, I think,
like you said, started in Philadelphia, and then after Harcombe
went out of business, the 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, But I guess they had
(10:14):
faith in their food. They were like, have you tried
this oyster stew? It's amazing, God of stuff saying that
and so they they hit New York I think in
nineteen twelve. By nineteen thirty two, twenty years later, they
had forty two automats in New York City, another twenty
in Philadelphia. Amazing, and H and H became the largest
(10:35):
restaurant chain in the entire United States. The United States
was big at the time.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Yeah, and this is like, uh, that's funny. By the way,
this is like during the Great Depression, like people were
going out of business right and left, and they actually
H and H thrived during the depression because again, everything
was really cheap. It was comforting stuff. As you'll see,
the coffee was great, the food was fresh and well,
(11:04):
maybe not more than anything, but additionally it was it
was it was a great place to go. They were
beautiful places. Generally, they were clean and they were safe,
and we'll get to a bunch of other ways that
they were inclusive as we go on.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
They were also known because they were clean and safe
and you could get really good coffee for a nickel.
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, and one of the
reasons why people did that was because part of the
allure of the automat was that there was no front
(11:39):
of house staff. Generally, there were no servers, there was
no matred, there was no manager. They if there was manager,
they were in the back. Yeah, 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, and so like, Automat's
kind of kind of got that reputation where you could
(12:01):
just go chill out. 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 Hardart were so successful.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Yeah, I mean that's kind of hard to believe in
a way, because they were so successful there, you would
think in the other places, like of course the obvious ones.
They went to Chicago, Boston, DC, and Detroit and some
other places. But you know, those were 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 or an idea rather from this guy
(12:33):
named Nicholas Brammel, who basically was like, you know what,
in New York, it's so dense, and they really concentrated
the restaurants around offices like in the garment district and
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. So it
(12:54):
was just so densely packed. And everyone knows how busy
New York foot traffic is around those places. And that
was at least Nicholas Brammel's take on why they took
off in New York and Philly.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
I have my own take. 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 lunch
Room Number one. I mean that's like, that's like the Cereal.
It's like a plain white box that says brand flakes
(13:25):
and just black font yeah, or beer like that beer?
Can you got me that time?
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:32):
I mean I kind of like the off brand stuff,
but yeah, that's definitely weirdly vague.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
That's not off brand, that's off brand awful. You want
to take a break.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
H yeah, let's take a break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Take a break so you can go throw up.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Okay, we're back. I did not throw up. I think
of good. It's been subsiding every day in the in
the afternoon and I feel fine, and then in the
morning again I'm nauseous. So that's why I think it's
a diverticulitis.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Man, that is awful. Are you going to be able
to record tomorrow?
Speaker 1 (14:33):
We'll see right, No, I'll be okay, I'll be fine.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Good. I'm gonna do a lot of studying after this, okay, kid,
all right.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
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 it was a very clean place. They prided themselves,
at least in the in the heyday decades, they did
go downhill and you know, kind of fall into a
little bit of shabbiness, but in the heyday they were
known as being really, really really clean, safe places. And
(15:03):
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 had to be in there
with your husband, or they just served men like businessmen.
So a woman could go in by yourself, children could
go in and it wasn't like a seedy thing. Families
could feel safe and like they were in a clean
place with good food. And also a lot of these
(15:25):
were really really beautiful restaurants on the inside.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
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,
And like you said, they are gorgeous. They were Art Deco,
which was the trend at the time, beautiful, and they
would have some of them had like two story facades.
(15:51):
There's a lot of marble, stained glass, bronze everywhere. They
had big windows that led in tons of light. 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. You
would put your nickel in this cool little dispenser and
(16:12):
the coffee came out of like an italianate dolphin's mouth.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
That it's a beautiful like I would love to find
one of those on eBay just there there. Oh you
can buy those? How much are they?
Speaker 2 (16:25):
I didn't see, but I'll get you one just just
as a present for recording today. How about that?
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Well, I think in the I mean it's been a
while since it's seen the doc, but I think there
was someone that is getting like the automat machines too
and collecting in the.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Oh wow, nice, pretty cool, kind of like the MERV
Griffin set. They just found them out back of a
Burger King. What you remember in Seinfeld when Cramer the
old MERV Griffin set and he started hosting the MERV
Griffin Show in his apartment.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
That's right, Burger King will come back again in this episode,
believe it or not.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
That's right. 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, like really fresh. I couldn't think of a
non offensive way to put it, but it was a
really fresh take on food.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Yeah. I think it was as fresh as food could
be for that format.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Let's say that the coffee was super fresh, like after
twenty minutes, they would throw the coffee out and put
new coffee in the food they did not sell the
next day. And if you're thinking, 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 a little
bit of genius here is they had three different day
(17:41):
old shops in lower income neighborhoods in New York. So
the next day they would sell the food there at
a discount. 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.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Day, yeah, or two and a half cents. Yeah, and
you can find it.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
I'll eat a pie for a week, So I'm fine
with that.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
For sure, as long as it hasn't fallen on the
street in public, for sure. And they were also known
for that really good coffee, right that came out of
dolphin's mouths. So at the time, if you were in America,
the coffee you drank and this is the I don't know,
the nineteen tens, it was boiled, yeah, and there was
(18:25):
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.
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. Well, Horn and Hardart
(18:45):
had a different take. They had a French drip, right,
which is still mixed, pretty good coffee, but at the
time you had to go to New Orleans to get
coffee like that, and Horn and Heartart serving the stuff
in New York and Philadelphia at all of the sixty
plus automats for a nickel and every twenty minutes they
throw out the old coffee and bring in fresh stuff.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
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 thirty eight years.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Yeah, and I did the math. In nineteen twelve, which
is when they hit New York, and nickel was worth
a dollar sixty today. By nineteen fifty it was worth
sixty four cents. So they started definitely losing money over
time on that coffee.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
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 ten cents. Because their slots
took nickels and their sales dropped a lot, from seventy
million cups a year to forty five million, they still
came out on top revenue wise, if you do the math.
But I remember watching the documentary and they were talking
(19:53):
about this. I've wondered and I haven't found my way
to wrap my head around how to actually do this topic.
But something about change like coins and how they established
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? Like there's something there,
(20:15):
but I'm just not quite sure how to frame it.
So maybe somebody could help me with that.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Maybe we could tie it into the idea that I
had about why everything is so much more expensive now,
even really maybe speaking than it used to be.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Yeah, because I mean the idea of like 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 they could do.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
But even still, even doubling the price from a nickel
to a dime in nineteen fifties money that was still
twenty or so cents less than what they were getting
for in nineteen twelve, Yeah, 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. Yeah, so that's
(21:03):
what they had to deal with. But like you said,
even still they came out on top revenue wise. 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.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, they also sold a lot of pie, and I
do remember this from the dock. Pie was a very
big deal at H and H in nineteen sixty four.
Here's a pretty fun stat They sold an average of
eight hundred and twenty two pieces of pie in New
York City between eight and eleven am. And there are
(21:37):
some people who said, 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, 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 2 (21:52):
Right, pancakes with apples on them?
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Yeah, exactly. But at the autumat you could just do it,
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, uh.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Yeah, I think everybody, yeah, because they were pretty proper
back then too, you.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Know, pie for breakfast.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
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, 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 1 (22:29):
Uh yeah, because it's a dessert. It's a little weird.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
First.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
I like the idea, but it is a dessert.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
You can make the case that almost all breakfast foods
are desserts in the United States. Man, have you heard
of like I hop.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
So after your steak dinner you can get a bacon,
egg and cheese biscuit exactly.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
I would that sounds good, although I don't like biscuits
very much as a sandwich. I like a biscuity on
its own, like say cracker barrel. If you get biscuits
and honey, okay, really good. But if you take that biscuit,
cut it in half and put anything like a a
cheese or something on them, like this is grody. Give
me an English muffin, make it a mist Wow.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Okay, never knew that. All right, still getting to know
each other after all these years. All right, So let's
talk a little bit about the nickel throwers. Because if
you're gonna require a bunch of nickels, you're gonna have
to have a bunch of nickels. And you don't often
come in with a bunch of nickels as a consumer.
So they had change people. They were women, basically. They
(23:34):
called them nickel throwers. Yeah, and they just sat there
all day long shoving nickels across the counter, just like
when I would go to the ninety nine cent movie
when I was a kid. They had a big stack
of tickets and a big stack of pennies and they
would just shove it back to you in the window,
and it was always a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
I thought, that's funny. So I guess they decided that
that ninety nine cent price really brought people in more
than a one dollar movie would. Huh maybe.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
And I'm curious how much they would lose in a
year on those pennies.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
You know.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
One of the things though, Chuck, did you see I
guess in the documentary the nickel throwers and like the bubble,
the glass bubble, Yeah, fronted things that they said and
they look like fortune tellers.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah, it's pretty funny, but it was part of.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
That whole ornate look to everything, like its just the
whole Most of those places were really.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Pretty Yeah, absolutely, and you know, like you said, it
conveyed a sense of the future. Like kids loved it
for that reason because they were it was like being
in the Jetsons or something. But kids also loved it
because that gave him 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 2 (24:44):
You got to read that Neil Simon quote.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
It's great Neil Simon. I take issue with this quote
or the end of it. Oh you okay, 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, 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.
(25:08):
That was a lesson in financial dealings that not even
two years at the Wharton School could buy today.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Maybe you look there, you think that hyperbolic. Yeah, that's
probably so, but it is a pretty great quote for
it's very sweet. So one of the things though, is,
including people like Neil Simon and other people who were
interviewed in the Automat documentary, people tend to remember the
food as like good, and it's entirely possible it was
(25:39):
for a while. But the older, 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 that the food was actually good toward
the end. And we can't really say because again, the
last one closed in nineteen ninety one, and I'm guessing
by the time that one.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Closed it's probably wasn't too good.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Right, You shouldn't really compare the food in general over
the course of the history of the automat to that
last one. But I'm guessing it was probably pretty decent
for a while based on some of the stuff I'm reading.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
I bet it was pretty good, if for no other
reason than in the nineteen twenties and thirties and forties
and fifties, they use real food, right, and real ingredients,
and it wasn't like it is today. So I just
think by virtue of that, it was probably not bad.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
You know. 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. Literally,
it was a facade of food that seemed to be
mysteriously conjured out of nowhere, possibly by robots.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
Yeah, and that was one of the selling points that,
you know, another piece of pie on a tiny plate
would pop into that window when one went out. It's
not like it just stayed empty. I guess if they
ran out of pie, it would or they'd probably put
you know, something else in there. But they had a
huge actually a few different central commissaries in the city
(27:05):
where they would make all the stuff. They would ship
it over there, and they had tons and tons and
tons of worker bees behind the scenes doing all that stuff.
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. It was
(27:26):
just a bunch of people plating stuff up and putting
it in the drum to put in the window.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
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. 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 pull the lever correct.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
I don't remember if there was a lever, but that
sounds about.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Right, or like you pulled the like you were buying
cigarettes as a kid when you were fourteen in a
coin operated machine, that kind of lever what I'm talking about, right.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Well, I didn't like you did, but sure I saw
the bad kids doing that exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
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 stew or what have you from inside, 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, and then there would be an open
(28:27):
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.
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 backwood notice that that one was empty. But
(28:49):
suffice to say, however the food came out, there was
a way to see in the rear that that compartment
needed refilling. And one of the things Horn and Hardart
was known for was 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
(29:10):
steak wasn't getting jiggly. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
I'm struggling.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
I know you're doing it on a purpose. It's all fun.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
That last part was purpose.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
For a while there they didn't have hot windows. They
just had the cold windows, so the hot food was
served from a steam table. But it was not too
long until they had the hot windows and the cold windows,
or the hot cases. Probably how they treated their workers
is a matter of debate. They struck a couple of times.
Nineteen thirty seven they struck. They had three thousand employees
(29:47):
at the time. That failed. That organizing effort did not hold.
Then again in nineteen fifty two they struck again, and
eventually New York State Supreme Court Justice Melvin Barash was
one of the people trying to organize at the time
in nineteen fifty two and in nineteen ninety one he
said the conditions were straight out of the nineteenth century.
(30:09):
That effort failed other people. If you watch the documentary,
the son of the president of the company said, no,
it was great. We had company picnics and Christmas parties
and like every it was really really really.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Great that I loved the workers, Yeah, exactly. There was
also an actor named Apache Ramos, who is best known
for playing one of the orphans in The Warriors, but
also is lesser known as having managed the Fat Boys
in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Oh the Warriors. That Warriors.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Yeah, like, come out and play a patchie ramos.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
Okay, I'll have to check that guy out.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Oh man, he had a magnificent afro in that in
that movie.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Yep, I totally know exactly the guy.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Yeah what a great Yeah. But he also managed the
Fat Boy like the Fat Boys are back, uh huh.
In the eighties, he worked at an automatic and so
did his grandmother. I'm assuming one or the other got
the other one the job. But he remembered that the
horn and Hardart would throw holiday parties for the workers
children around like Christmas time. Oh man, can you imagine
(31:19):
how beautiful those places looked when they were decorated for
Christmas parties in like the fifties and sixties. Like I
if 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 1 (31:33):
Yeah, yeah, for sure. This reminds me of a childhood
trauma that I suffered because growing up, my sister had
a best friend whose father worked for Craft Foods and
they had a big craft like 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
(31:56):
year they had the big Coca Cola picnic thing. I
had nobody an never got to go in. Every single
year I had to watch Scott and Michelle go to
the craft event in the coc event.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
Man, that's terrible.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Yeah, it just it still sticks with me after all
these years.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Your friend Richie was like, well, my dad owns the
tire shop. So you come to that. We don't really
have a party, but we stand around.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Should we take another break? Yeah, all right, we'll take
another break and talk about the inclusivity of the automat
right after this.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Okay, Chuck, just before we took a break, you nailed
it up on the head. You said, we're talking about
the inclusivity of the automatic and in particular the horn
and Harder automat, which again they were synonymous with automats.
(33:09):
They were one of the earliest chain restaurants in the
United States to integrate, not discriminate against their clientele, not
just you know, like unescorted women, God forbid, but also
racially speaking, economically speaking, like like whoever came to a
horn and hard are automat to eat was treated equally
(33:32):
and that was huge. I mean we're talking starting in
the nineteen tens. Yeah, that was an enormous deal. And
that's something that I mean, my hat's off to them
for that.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Yeah, for sure. They had a motto which would serve
everybody and serve everybody in the same way, which is
a great quote. 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 automat on forty second straight, forty Sive Street.
I never even thought about the fact that I'm a
(34:02):
black kid. Should I go into horn and hardart? Is
it okay to go to the automat? 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. You never knew what you'd run
into in an automat.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Yeah, that's pretty cool. 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. You didn't
really have to be able to read or speak English,
and you could still get a good meal of boysters too.
(34:40):
I can't wait to see what Aaron Cooper does with this.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Yeah. They were also known for their celebrity fans. They
had those one very famous Esquire spread. Of course, this
is for Esquire, so it was all set up. But
in nineteen fifty one, Audrey Hepburn was a photograph for Esquire.
So cute shopping at an automat, very cute. But in
(35:02):
the documentary Reiner and Brooks, you know, Carl Reiner and
mel Brooks loved the automat and they talked with great
adoration about their childhood of going to those restaurants.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Yeah, and James Dean his favorite big beans in the
world were horn and hard arts big.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Beans, James bean more like, that's right.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
He really knew what he was talking about too. That's
how he died in that car accident. He was eating
some big beans at the time and lost control of
the steering wheel. God, that's not true, everybody. We did
a short stuff on it, so, yeah, exactly, don't at me.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
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. The nineteen
sixties is when that started, although they were still like
a huge deal culturally. You know, everyone knew about the
automat 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
(35:58):
New York, you would go to an auto that just
for that experience.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
Right, Like how like when we were kids, you went
to that city's like hard rock cafe to get the.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Yeah sure remember that, oh man, totally Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
You wear with your Panama Jack sunglasses and everybody at
home would be like, you had a great summer obviously.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Oh yeah, my band did one gig at the hard
Rock Cafe here in Atlanta one time.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
Wow, wed they put your guitar up under a glass case?
Speaker 1 (36:23):
They did.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
It'd be pretty sweet.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
But the sixties is where things really started to struggle,
even though they were again still popular culturally. Stockholders were
involved by that point obviously, just revenues started dropping. The
suburbs was a big cause of it. You know, when
people started moving out to the suburbs, offices and office
(36:46):
complexes started getting built in the suburbs, and people started
shopping at malls in the suburbs, and there were fewer
and fewer people just you know, walking around New York
doing things like shopping and going to their office. So
it it started to sort of slowly drop and slowly
drop until they got a little weird with some of
their ideas.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Right, yeah, 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
inn in nineteen sixty six. I mean, I'm sure people
would have gone crazy for that in nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
Not a wild restroom. That's every restroom in New York City.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
There's like a ton of potted plants and a tiger
in there.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Right. They also tried to beer garden, They tried the
roller skate waiters thing. They tried entered you know, live
bands and dancing and stuff like that. But eventually Horn
and Hardert looked at each other and they said, well
this has clearly seen its best days. The silver lining
is as we are sitting on a bunch of really
(37:48):
valuable real estate.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
I know, like forty buildings in Manhattan.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Yeah, so they don't feel too bad.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
They were doing okay, no, but instead of selling them,
they said, hey, I've got an idea. Let's remove the
automat and put burger Kings in instead. They have franchises,
So that's where you would have gotten your old automat
cases is in the back of a burger King.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
I was just about to improvise one of those terrible, terrible, terrible,
terrible Burger King commercial songs.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
That's that's one of the big drawbacks to watching Me
Trevy tunes.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Oh oh, is that on there too?
Speaker 2 (38:21):
There's this one Burger King that keeps playing over and
over and over again. I had to hit myself in
the knee with the hammer to get it out of
my head.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
Well, is this whole new campaign with a guy that's singing, Yeah,
that can't sing.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Don't don't do it. No, no, no, that's like my oysters too.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
Well, I guess I won't do a song right now.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
Actually I know exactly why now we're even exactly so yeah,
I guess you can. Just if you can mute the
the the TV fast enough, then you can keep watching
me TV tunes.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Yeah, yeah, all right, So burger Kings went in, Automats
were going downhill. Another thing that happened was as they
started going downhill, a different kind of shopper started coming
in there. People that were itinerant, to people that were unhoused,
people that were vagrants and just sort of coming through
(39:14):
town who knew that they could hang out there for
that nickel cup of coffee for hours and hours and hours.
And when that starts happening, families stopped 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 2 (39:31):
No, in those same families, they're like, Oh, let's go
down to the automat step in and they're like, oh,
it's ced here, So they stopped coming in, which just
reinforced the ability of the homeless population to hang out.
And Horn and hard Art. Horn and hard Art's whole
thing was serve everybody, and serve everybody the same way.
So as far as I ever saw, they weren't exactly
rousing vagrants who were hanging out drinking like a cup
(39:53):
of coffee. And it just was basically the same story
as the inner city in the United States in the
sixties and seventies. They once the suburbs rose and everybody
moved out of there, and the neighborhoods and the communities
that did survive had US interstates built right through their neighborhoods.
(40:14):
Things just took a turn for the worse, and the
automat was not immune to that whole thing.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Yeah. Another big part of that is, like these this
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. Once business drops and
you're not cooking, you're not needing to cook as much.
All of a sudden, your the economy of scale isn't
(40:41):
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 2 (40:49):
Yep. So the other thing too is it's it's interesting
and I think it's kind of appropriate that Horn and
Hardart got into fast food franchises because the automat kind
of helped lay the foundation for that. But rather than
hundreds of different dishes, which is apparently what Horn and
hard are offered at each of their automats, you know,
(41:11):
fast food has like ten and like yess, you can
have it your way, but really you can have it
your way choosing from these five ingredients or whatever. And
there were much like downscale like surroundings. It was just
like the Automat's vision with all of the glitz and
idealism removed from it. Then you have fast food franchises.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Yeah, basically that last one that closed in ninety one.
It was the last one starting in nineteen seventy seven
at two hundred East forty second Street. So right there,
you know, sort of your time square. Sure, and it
lasted fourteen years on its own as a nostalgia piece
basically before becoming a gap.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
That's right, it's the gap.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
What else?
Speaker 2 (42:01):
So, like you said, if you went to New York,
like you go to the Empire State Building, you might
go see a Broadway play and you would go eat
it in an automat. That's just how iconic it was, right.
It popped up like anytime you're trying to get across
how New York your your movie was like, there would
be a scene in an automat or something like that. Yeah.
(42:22):
Francis Ford Coppola apparently directed a movie in the sixties
that featured an automat called Automat Now then showed up
and I'm kidding it showed upga it Now I'm a
little slow dog. Hey, I think you're doing magnificent for
considering what you've been through the last couple of days.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
Man, I've been through apocalypse now.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Bugs Bunny went to an automat and the hair grows
in Manhattan.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
That's right. What the flintstones? They even had a flintstone
automat in a nineteen sixty two episode.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
And there's a book that I think I've heard of,
but I'd never read from the mixed up files of
this is Basil E. Frank Weiler.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
That sounds familiar.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
Well, the thing that sounds familiar to me is that
these kids hide out living in the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Oh, that's the Royal Tanne Bombs that's.
Speaker 2 (43:16):
Yeah, I guarantee homage to that then. Yeah. But anyway,
in this children's book, these kids are runaways and they
live in MAT That's the Met, right. The Met isn't
the opera house, it's the art museum.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the Met.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
Yeah, okay, right, Well, one of the things that they
do is they feed themselves by going to the automat.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
Oh that's fun. And I did not know he totally Yeah,
let's call him homage. You're kinder than I am.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
Oh yeah, Wes Anderson does not rip stuff off. He
lovingly pays homage to it.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
That's right, that's right. Pat Boone tried his version of
the automat called the Dino Matt in nineteen sixty two,
which was frozen food that was then microwave. That did
not work out too well, that's supprising. 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 2 (44:08):
My favorite was the Andy Matt.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Yeah, what's up with that?
Speaker 2 (44:12):
Andy Warhol. This is just what an artist he was.
He could just talk about it. He just mention something
in passing and people are still talking about it fifty
years later. But he said that he was going to
come up with the chain of Andy Matts, which are
like automats, but instead of having to go get your
food from a case, you would sit down on like
a red mohair banquette and order through a pneumatic tube
(44:36):
and you would order frozen food and champagne. That's what
he was going to offer at the Andy Matt.
Speaker 1 (44:42):
Oh, that's funny, but that never happened at all, right,
just an idea.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
No, I didn't, but there's some people who are trying
to revive it.
Speaker 1 (44:49):
Yeah, I mean there are things like this. I mean
Japan has stuff like this, right.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
They have what's called katain zushi.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Okay, what's that.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
It's the sushi that comes around in a conveyor belt.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
Now, but they I've seen little windows as well of things.
It may not be hot food, maybe it's other things.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
Yeah, I'm sure that they do. I remember going to
Toledo Hospital visit my mom when she's at work, and
they had basically auto sandwiches Like I always just thought
it was like a like a vending machine, a vending machine. Yeah,
but they know it was an automat basically. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
There's a place in Brooklyn called the Brooklyn Dumpling Shop.
I think there are like twelve of them and here
in Canada and they I just looked up a picture
of them, and they they had these little automat kind
of like cubbies that you order through an app like
a locker system. 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
(45:43):
you like a cheeseburger or a pizza like but made
to order, so like you can say what kind of
pizza you want and it'll it's just got this machine
inside it'll, you know, load it up with whatever and
then bake it and then it spits it out in
fifteen minutes or whatever. So things kind of like this
but not not truly automat stuff.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
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, right, And the pizza machines like, yeah, yeah, sure, sure,
definitely not.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
And then they have a hidden camera on you, right
and spit out a picture of you going, ah.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
Yeah, yeah, damn it, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (46:21):
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. So hopefully that.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
That makes me feel good about the effect I have
on you.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
Yeah, just a little josh, a little side cup of
oyster stew. I'm back on my feet again.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
There you go. 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 1 (46:48):
That's right, this is short and sweet. This is kind
of fun because it's a this is coming out tomorrow
and it's a correction on an episode that was just
out awesome. So maybe for a change we won't get
like four hundred emails from crafters.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
Okay, oh yeah, hey guys, are the.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
High Times episode In Martha Stewart, hodgepodge is a big
jumble of things that don't go together. Modgepodge is the
craft supply. Just don't want you to embarrass yourselves at
the craft store. That is from Kelly.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
Modgepodge is what you use to glue together a big
jumble of things that don't go together.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
That's a great Kelly. Thank you, and to the other
thousand of you who wrote in. It's nice to know
that there are people out there still using modgepodge.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
It's fun.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
Yeah, I mean it's fun to say, and it's got
a cute label too.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
Yeah, magpodge is really a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
I enjoy it for sure. And we heard from Martha
Stewart too. She said, yes, I have Modgepodge laying around.
Think Jerry got in touch with there and asked, that's right. Well,
if you want to be like who Kelly? If you
want to be like Kelly and right in to gently
correct us, we love that kind of thing. You can
send it via email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's not here, but Chuck is Chuck's Your
nickname is Poopy.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
McGhee, actually Puky mcke not both. Now let's here's the story, everybody.
I went to Mexico City again and got sick again,
thankfully at the end, and I couldn't record yesterday, but
we were in danger of missing a pubblished date for
the first time, yes in seventeen years.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Grave danger. I would say, like, it's Wednesday at three
and we need an episode for tomorrow at five am.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Right, and we've never cut it this close. So first
of all, my friend, thank you for your flexibility.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Thank you for not throwing up long enough to record
this episode.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
I lasted up about an hour ago, man. 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, so I'm just like spacey and
can I told you want to email you guys still
love this that like, I'll go thirty minutes where I
just like, I'm just so zoned out. I can't have
(01:22):
a I don't even have a coherent thought for a
half hour. And Josh said, well, that part sounds kind
of nice.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
It really does man to be able to just turn
it off.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Yeah, but you know, I love that city. I'm gonna
keep going back. I'm gonna 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 2 (01:49):
You need to learn four words in Spanish. I'll have
that neat.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Okay, it's not a bad idea, but I'm still gonna
go back. I'm gonna try it again. And this may
have also triggered my diverticulitis. Oh so that may be
why it's extending here in to 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
(02:16):
want to mention anything.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Well, that's what we're doing. We're doing an episode on automats.
There's nothing more newsier current than that.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
That's right, automats. And we need to give a big
shout out to a documentary called The automat By from
director Lisa Hurwitz, because it's great and I saw it
a couple of years ago and that's what inspired this episode.
But I wanted to I don't want to like write
on the heels of this great doc you know, kind
of swoop in and do a podcast episode about it.
But great documentary. It's streaming on Max. Highly recommend it.
(02:47):
She did a great job. I can't wait to see
what she does next. And it's a big help.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Here. We have another other huge shout out to give.
This is the first episode we're doing with help from
our new writer, Laura Claus.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
So, yeah, welcome aboard Laura. Laura came to us through Libya,
which is all the recommendation we needed right.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
Right exactly, and she's been great. I've been thinking, Chuck,
a lot of our writers have good nicknames. Okay, Laura
spells her last name like claw claw Son, So I
think we should call Laura doctor Claw.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Okay, I thought you're gonna say the Clauster.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
No, doctor Claw. It's an inspector, gadget reference doctor.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Oh okay, I never watched that.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
That was good. I actually have seen it. So if
you don't have cable but you have an antenna over
the air antenna. Oh yeah, 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.
(03:51):
I mean, like Beetlejuice the cartoon. There's Scooby Doo on
at six pm Eastern every day, which makes me very happy.
But they show Inspector Gadget and I was like, this
is actually a much better cartoon than I remembered.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Uh, where is this in your off grid panic room? Like,
where are you watching antenna TV?
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Oh no, I've got I've got a really high tech setup.
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 1 (04:27):
That is the Josh Clarkiest thing I've ever heard.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
It worked really well. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, So
there you go. You don't need to just stream. You
can also get free TV.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Heck yeah, man, I had free TV for many, many,
many many years.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yeah, well, you need to be watching me TV tunes.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Chuck, all right, I'll check it out. Should we talk
auto match or did you have another announcement?
Speaker 2 (04:48):
No, no, I don't have any announcements, but I do
have a question for you.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Okay, Chuck, mm hmmm?
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Have you ever eaten food?
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Right? By the way, this is gonna be a tough
one for me to get through for obvious reasons.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Yeah, because in the first paragraph I saw the words
oyster stew earlier and I almost vomited in my mouth.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Yeah. Same here, And I don't even have diverticulitis.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
I have not eaten food in three days, but I
used to eat food.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Oh nice, Okay, well, Chuck, then I think you would
have enjoyed a trip to the Automat.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
That's right, and we've been at it for six minutes,
we might as well go in and say that. The
Automat was a 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 walls filled with glass fronted compartments, and
(05:45):
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 2 (05:55):
Yeah, your oyster stew. Yeah, but you got to you
you would walk up and you 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, So you didn't even need to
be able to read to know what you wanted at
(06:18):
this at an automat. And then, like you said, you
put your money in and you get your food out,
and you go sit down. And two 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.
Because it's really important to point out the in like
(06:39):
the first third at least of the twentieth century, a
lot of people in the United States didn't have a refrigerator.
They might have had an icebox, but they certainly didn't
have anything pumping free on through it. No no cable TV,
not even over the air antennas in some cases, no
Beetlejuice the cartoon, and they also so might not even
(07:01):
have electricity in their home. So the idea of this
futuristic serve yourself out of a glass case that's lit
kind of experience was a really big deal. And what's
even more remarkable, it's so okay, you're like, Yeah, everybody
in the nineteen tens was just a yokel by definition, right,
These things lasted until the nineteen sixties, and they were
(07:24):
still viewed as these amazing places to go eat.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Yeah, I mean the last one, this is remarkable, The
very last one in New York close in ninety one. Yeah,
which is hard to believe. 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 2 (07:44):
Yeah, let's start at the beginning. That seems appropriate.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
And where else are we going to go but our
old friend Germany, Because the first automat popped up in
Berlin in eighteen ninety five, and the word automat was
just more of a general term for a ventding machine
in Germany, but it won a gold medal a couple
of years later at the Brussels World Fair. Europe kind
of got into them a little bit, and they spread
(08:08):
around Europe over the next five or so years before
making the leap to the United States.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yeah, and it took a little college try, I guess,
the first few times for to make that leap across
the Atlantic. And it was two guys, Joseph Horn and
Frank Harder, whose last names would become synonymous with automats.
In fact, depending on what city you were in, you
would probably refer to the automat as a Horn and
hard Arc. That's just like they were like the Kleenex
(08:36):
of automats essentially, right. Yeah, 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? 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, and
they decided they wanted to bring it back to the
(08:56):
United States. And like I said, it took a few
attempts for them to actually get it to work, right.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Yeah, Their first one in Philly, which was the first
one overall, was nineteen oh two, but the equipment, you know,
because it started in Europe, was in Europe, 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, and the ship sunk
in the Atlantic, so they lost all that gear. They
(09:23):
tried again, and these were victim to a warehouse fire,
but salvageble. They repaired that stuff. They got them up
and working, and they beat out their closest competitor. There
was one card Harcomb in New York that went out
of business. I think it was a little fancier. Yeah,
(09:43):
and H and H definitely leaned toward, as we'll see,
serving just sort of solid, affordable comfort food to the masses.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Yeah. And so Horn and Hard Arts automats, I think,
like you said, started in Philadelphia, and then after Harcombe
went out of business, the 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, But I guess they had
(10:14):
faith in their food. They were like, have you tried
this oyster stew? It's amazing, God of stuff saying that
and so they they hit New York I think in
nineteen twelve. By nineteen thirty two, twenty years later, they
had forty two automats in New York City, another twenty
in Philadelphia. Amazing, and H and H became the largest
(10:35):
restaurant chain in the entire United States. The United States
was big at the time.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Yeah, and this is like, uh, that's funny. By the way,
this is like during the Great Depression, like people were
going out of business right and left, and they actually
H and H thrived during the depression because again, everything
was really cheap. It was comforting stuff. As you'll see,
the coffee was great, the food was fresh and well,
(11:04):
maybe not more than anything, but additionally it was it
was it was a great place to go. They were
beautiful places. Generally, they were clean and they were safe,
and we'll get to a bunch of other ways that
they were inclusive as we go on.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
They were also known because they were clean and safe
and you could get really good coffee for a nickel.
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, and one of the
reasons why people did that was because part of the
allure of the automat was that there was no front
(11:39):
of house staff. Generally, there were no servers, there was
no matred, there was no manager. They if there was manager,
they were in the back. Yeah, 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, and so like, Automat's
kind of kind of got that reputation where you could
(12:01):
just go chill out. 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 Hardart were so successful.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Yeah, I mean that's kind of hard to believe in
a way, because they were so successful there, you would
think in the other places, like of course the obvious ones.
They went to Chicago, Boston, DC, and Detroit and some
other places. But you know, those were 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 or an idea rather from this guy
(12:33):
named Nicholas Brammel, who basically was like, you know what,
in New York, it's so dense, and they really concentrated
the restaurants around offices like in the garment district and
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. So it
(12:54):
was just so densely packed. And everyone knows how busy
New York foot traffic is around those places. And that
was at least Nicholas Brammel's take on why they took
off in New York and Philly.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
I have my own take. 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 lunch
Room Number one. I mean that's like, that's like the Cereal.
It's like a plain white box that says brand flakes
(13:25):
and just black font yeah, or beer like that beer?
Can you got me that time?
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (13:32):
I mean I kind of like the off brand stuff,
but yeah, that's definitely weirdly vague.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
That's not off brand, that's off brand awful. You want
to take a break.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
H yeah, let's take a break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Take a break so you can go throw up.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Okay, we're back. I did not throw up. I think
of good. It's been subsiding every day in the in
the afternoon and I feel fine, and then in the
morning again I'm nauseous. So that's why I think it's
a diverticulitis.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Man, that is awful. Are you going to be able
to record tomorrow?
Speaker 1 (14:33):
We'll see right, No, I'll be okay, I'll be fine.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Good. I'm gonna do a lot of studying after this, okay, kid,
all right.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
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 it was a very clean place. They prided themselves,
at least in the in the heyday decades, they did
go downhill and you know, kind of fall into a
little bit of shabbiness, but in the heyday they were
known as being really, really really clean, safe places. And
(15:03):
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 had to be in there
with your husband, or they just served men like businessmen.
So a woman could go in by yourself, children could
go in and it wasn't like a seedy thing. Families
could feel safe and like they were in a clean
place with good food. And also a lot of these
(15:25):
were really really beautiful restaurants on the inside.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
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,
And like you said, they are gorgeous. They were Art Deco,
which was the trend at the time, beautiful, and they
would have some of them had like two story facades.
(15:51):
There's a lot of marble, stained glass, bronze everywhere. They
had big windows that led in tons of light. 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. You
would put your nickel in this cool little dispenser and
(16:12):
the coffee came out of like an italianate dolphin's mouth.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
That it's a beautiful like I would love to find
one of those on eBay just there there. Oh you
can buy those? How much are they?
Speaker 2 (16:25):
I didn't see, but I'll get you one just just
as a present for recording today. How about that?
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Well, I think in the I mean it's been a
while since it's seen the doc, but I think there
was someone that is getting like the automat machines too
and collecting in the.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Oh wow, nice, pretty cool, kind of like the MERV
Griffin set. They just found them out back of a
Burger King. What you remember in Seinfeld when Cramer the
old MERV Griffin set and he started hosting the MERV
Griffin Show in his apartment.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
That's right, Burger King will come back again in this episode,
believe it or not.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
That's right. 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, like really fresh. I couldn't think of a
non offensive way to put it, but it was a
really fresh take on food.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Yeah. I think it was as fresh as food could
be for that format.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Let's say that the coffee was super fresh, like after
twenty minutes, they would throw the coffee out and put
new coffee in the food they did not sell the
next day. And if you're thinking, 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 a little
bit of genius here is they had three different day
(17:41):
old shops in lower income neighborhoods in New York. So
the next day they would sell the food there at
a discount. 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.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Day, yeah, or two and a half cents. Yeah, and
you can find it.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
I'll eat a pie for a week, So I'm fine
with that.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
For sure, as long as it hasn't fallen on the
street in public, for sure. And they were also known
for that really good coffee, right that came out of
dolphin's mouths. So at the time, if you were in America,
the coffee you drank and this is the I don't know,
the nineteen tens, it was boiled, yeah, and there was
(18:25):
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.
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. Well, Horn and Hardart
(18:45):
had a different take. They had a French drip, right,
which is still mixed, pretty good coffee, but at the
time you had to go to New Orleans to get
coffee like that, and Horn and Heartart serving the stuff
in New York and Philadelphia at all of the sixty
plus automats for a nickel and every twenty minutes they
throw out the old coffee and bring in fresh stuff.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
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 thirty eight years.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Yeah, and I did the math. In nineteen twelve, which
is when they hit New York, and nickel was worth
a dollar sixty today. By nineteen fifty it was worth
sixty four cents. So they started definitely losing money over
time on that coffee.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
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 ten cents. Because their slots
took nickels and their sales dropped a lot, from seventy
million cups a year to forty five million, they still
came out on top revenue wise, if you do the math.
But I remember watching the documentary and they were talking
(19:53):
about this. I've wondered and I haven't found my way
to wrap my head around how to actually do this topic.
But something about change like coins and how they established
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? Like there's something there,
(20:15):
but I'm just not quite sure how to frame it.
So maybe somebody could help me with that.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Maybe we could tie it into the idea that I
had about why everything is so much more expensive now,
even really maybe speaking than it used to be.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Yeah, because I mean the idea of like 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 they could do.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
But even still, even doubling the price from a nickel
to a dime in nineteen fifties money that was still
twenty or so cents less than what they were getting
for in nineteen twelve, Yeah, 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. Yeah, so that's
(21:03):
what they had to deal with. But like you said,
even still they came out on top revenue wise. 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.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, they also sold a lot of pie, and I
do remember this from the dock. Pie was a very
big deal at H and H in nineteen sixty four.
Here's a pretty fun stat They sold an average of
eight hundred and twenty two pieces of pie in New
York City between eight and eleven am. And there are
(21:37):
some people who said, 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, 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 2 (21:52):
Right, pancakes with apples on them?
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Yeah, exactly. But at the autumat you could just do it,
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, uh.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Yeah, I think everybody, yeah, because they were pretty proper
back then too, you.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Know, pie for breakfast.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
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, 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 1 (22:29):
Uh yeah, because it's a dessert. It's a little weird.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
First.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
I like the idea, but it is a dessert.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
You can make the case that almost all breakfast foods
are desserts in the United States. Man, have you heard
of like I hop.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
So after your steak dinner you can get a bacon,
egg and cheese biscuit exactly.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
I would that sounds good, although I don't like biscuits
very much as a sandwich. I like a biscuity on
its own, like say cracker barrel. If you get biscuits
and honey, okay, really good. But if you take that biscuit,
cut it in half and put anything like a a
cheese or something on them, like this is grody. Give
me an English muffin, make it a mist Wow.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Okay, never knew that. All right, still getting to know
each other after all these years. All right, So let's
talk a little bit about the nickel throwers. Because if
you're gonna require a bunch of nickels, you're gonna have
to have a bunch of nickels. And you don't often
come in with a bunch of nickels as a consumer.
So they had change people. They were women, basically. They
(23:34):
called them nickel throwers. Yeah, and they just sat there
all day long shoving nickels across the counter, just like
when I would go to the ninety nine cent movie
when I was a kid. They had a big stack
of tickets and a big stack of pennies and they
would just shove it back to you in the window,
and it was always a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
I thought, that's funny. So I guess they decided that
that ninety nine cent price really brought people in more
than a one dollar movie would. Huh maybe.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
And I'm curious how much they would lose in a
year on those pennies.
Speaker 2 (24:06):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
You know.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
One of the things though, Chuck, did you see I
guess in the documentary the nickel throwers and like the bubble,
the glass bubble, Yeah, fronted things that they said and
they look like fortune tellers.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah, it's pretty funny, but it was part of.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
That whole ornate look to everything, like its just the
whole Most of those places were really.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Pretty Yeah, absolutely, and you know, like you said, it
conveyed a sense of the future. Like kids loved it
for that reason because they were it was like being
in the Jetsons or something. But kids also loved it
because that gave him 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 2 (24:44):
You got to read that Neil Simon quote.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
It's great Neil Simon. I take issue with this quote
or the end of it. Oh you okay, 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, 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.
(25:08):
That was a lesson in financial dealings that not even
two years at the Wharton School could buy today.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Maybe you look there, you think that hyperbolic. Yeah, that's
probably so, but it is a pretty great quote for
it's very sweet. So one of the things though, is,
including people like Neil Simon and other people who were
interviewed in the Automat documentary, people tend to remember the
food as like good, and it's entirely possible it was
(25:39):
for a while. But the older, 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 that the food was actually good toward
the end. And we can't really say because again, the
last one closed in nineteen ninety one, and I'm guessing
by the time that one.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Closed it's probably wasn't too good.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Right, You shouldn't really compare the food in general over
the course of the history of the automat to that
last one. But I'm guessing it was probably pretty decent
for a while based on some of the stuff I'm reading.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
I bet it was pretty good, if for no other
reason than in the nineteen twenties and thirties and forties
and fifties, they use real food, right, and real ingredients,
and it wasn't like it is today. So I just
think by virtue of that, it was probably not bad.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
You know. 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. Literally,
it was a facade of food that seemed to be
mysteriously conjured out of nowhere, possibly by robots.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
Yeah, and that was one of the selling points that,
you know, another piece of pie on a tiny plate
would pop into that window when one went out. It's
not like it just stayed empty. I guess if they
ran out of pie, it would or they'd probably put
you know, something else in there. But they had a
huge actually a few different central commissaries in the city
(27:05):
where they would make all the stuff. They would ship
it over there, and they had tons and tons and
tons of worker bees behind the scenes doing all that stuff.
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. It was
(27:26):
just a bunch of people plating stuff up and putting
it in the drum to put in the window.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
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. 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 pull the lever correct.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
I don't remember if there was a lever, but that
sounds about.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Right, or like you pulled the like you were buying
cigarettes as a kid when you were fourteen in a
coin operated machine, that kind of lever what I'm talking about, right.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Well, I didn't like you did, but sure I saw
the bad kids doing that exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
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 stew or what have you from inside, 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, and then there would be an open
(28:27):
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.
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 backwood notice that that one was empty. But
(28:49):
suffice to say, however the food came out, there was
a way to see in the rear that that compartment
needed refilling. And one of the things Horn and Hardart
was known for was 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
(29:10):
steak wasn't getting jiggly. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
I'm struggling.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
I know you're doing it on a purpose. It's all fun.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
That last part was purpose.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
For a while there they didn't have hot windows. They
just had the cold windows, so the hot food was
served from a steam table. But it was not too
long until they had the hot windows and the cold windows,
or the hot cases. Probably how they treated their workers
is a matter of debate. They struck a couple of times.
Nineteen thirty seven they struck. They had three thousand employees
(29:47):
at the time. That failed. That organizing effort did not hold.
Then again in nineteen fifty two they struck again, and
eventually New York State Supreme Court Justice Melvin Barash was
one of the people trying to organize at the time
in nineteen fifty two and in nineteen ninety one he
said the conditions were straight out of the nineteenth century.
(30:09):
That effort failed other people. If you watch the documentary,
the son of the president of the company said, no,
it was great. We had company picnics and Christmas parties
and like every it was really really really.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Great that I loved the workers, Yeah, exactly. There was
also an actor named Apache Ramos, who is best known
for playing one of the orphans in The Warriors, but
also is lesser known as having managed the Fat Boys
in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Oh the Warriors. That Warriors.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Yeah, like, come out and play a patchie ramos.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
Okay, I'll have to check that guy out.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Oh man, he had a magnificent afro in that in
that movie.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Yep, I totally know exactly the guy.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Yeah what a great Yeah. But he also managed the
Fat Boy like the Fat Boys are back, uh huh.
In the eighties, he worked at an automatic and so
did his grandmother. I'm assuming one or the other got
the other one the job. But he remembered that the
horn and Hardart would throw holiday parties for the workers
children around like Christmas time. Oh man, can you imagine
(31:19):
how beautiful those places looked when they were decorated for
Christmas parties in like the fifties and sixties. Like I
if 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 1 (31:33):
Yeah, yeah, for sure. This reminds me of a childhood
trauma that I suffered because growing up, my sister had
a best friend whose father worked for Craft Foods and
they had a big craft like 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
(31:56):
year they had the big Coca Cola picnic thing. I
had nobody an never got to go in. Every single
year I had to watch Scott and Michelle go to
the craft event in the coc event.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
Man, that's terrible.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Yeah, it just it still sticks with me after all
these years.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Your friend Richie was like, well, my dad owns the
tire shop. So you come to that. We don't really
have a party, but we stand around.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Should we take another break? Yeah, all right, we'll take
another break and talk about the inclusivity of the automat
right after this.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Okay, Chuck, just before we took a break, you nailed
it up on the head. You said, we're talking about
the inclusivity of the automatic and in particular the horn
and Harder automat, which again they were synonymous with automats.
(33:09):
They were one of the earliest chain restaurants in the
United States to integrate, not discriminate against their clientele, not
just you know, like unescorted women, God forbid, but also
racially speaking, economically speaking, like like whoever came to a
horn and hard are automat to eat was treated equally
(33:32):
and that was huge. I mean we're talking starting in
the nineteen tens. Yeah, that was an enormous deal. And
that's something that I mean, my hat's off to them
for that.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Yeah, for sure. They had a motto which would serve
everybody and serve everybody in the same way, which is
a great quote. 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 automat on forty second straight, forty Sive Street.
I never even thought about the fact that I'm a
(34:02):
black kid. Should I go into horn and hardart? Is
it okay to go to the automat? 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. You never knew what you'd run
into in an automat.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Yeah, that's pretty cool. 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. You didn't
really have to be able to read or speak English,
and you could still get a good meal of boysters too.
(34:40):
I can't wait to see what Aaron Cooper does with this.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Yeah. They were also known for their celebrity fans. They
had those one very famous Esquire spread. Of course, this
is for Esquire, so it was all set up. But
in nineteen fifty one, Audrey Hepburn was a photograph for Esquire.
So cute shopping at an automat, very cute. But in
(35:02):
the documentary Reiner and Brooks, you know, Carl Reiner and
mel Brooks loved the automat and they talked with great
adoration about their childhood of going to those restaurants.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Yeah, and James Dean his favorite big beans in the
world were horn and hard arts big.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Beans, James bean more like, that's right.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
He really knew what he was talking about too. That's
how he died in that car accident. He was eating
some big beans at the time and lost control of
the steering wheel. God, that's not true, everybody. We did
a short stuff on it, so, yeah, exactly, don't at me.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
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. The nineteen
sixties is when that started, although they were still like
a huge deal culturally. You know, everyone knew about the
automat 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
(35:58):
New York, you would go to an auto that just
for that experience.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
Right, Like how like when we were kids, you went
to that city's like hard rock cafe to get the.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Yeah sure remember that, oh man, totally Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
You wear with your Panama Jack sunglasses and everybody at
home would be like, you had a great summer obviously.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Oh yeah, my band did one gig at the hard
Rock Cafe here in Atlanta one time.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
Wow, wed they put your guitar up under a glass case?
Speaker 1 (36:23):
They did.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
It'd be pretty sweet.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
But the sixties is where things really started to struggle,
even though they were again still popular culturally. Stockholders were
involved by that point obviously, just revenues started dropping. The
suburbs was a big cause of it. You know, when
people started moving out to the suburbs, offices and office
(36:46):
complexes started getting built in the suburbs, and people started
shopping at malls in the suburbs, and there were fewer
and fewer people just you know, walking around New York
doing things like shopping and going to their office. So
it it started to sort of slowly drop and slowly
drop until they got a little weird with some of
their ideas.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Right, yeah, 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
inn in nineteen sixty six. I mean, I'm sure people
would have gone crazy for that in nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
Not a wild restroom. That's every restroom in New York City.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
There's like a ton of potted plants and a tiger
in there.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Right. They also tried to beer garden, They tried the
roller skate waiters thing. They tried entered you know, live
bands and dancing and stuff like that. But eventually Horn
and Hardert looked at each other and they said, well
this has clearly seen its best days. The silver lining
is as we are sitting on a bunch of really
(37:48):
valuable real estate.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
I know, like forty buildings in Manhattan.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Yeah, so they don't feel too bad.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
They were doing okay, no, but instead of selling them,
they said, hey, I've got an idea. Let's remove the
automat and put burger Kings in instead. They have franchises,
So that's where you would have gotten your old automat
cases is in the back of a burger King.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
I was just about to improvise one of those terrible, terrible, terrible,
terrible Burger King commercial songs.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
That's that's one of the big drawbacks to watching Me
Trevy tunes.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Oh oh, is that on there too?
Speaker 2 (38:21):
There's this one Burger King that keeps playing over and
over and over again. I had to hit myself in
the knee with the hammer to get it out of
my head.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
Well, is this whole new campaign with a guy that's singing, Yeah,
that can't sing.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Don't don't do it. No, no, no, that's like my oysters too.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
Well, I guess I won't do a song right now.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
Actually I know exactly why now we're even exactly so yeah,
I guess you can. Just if you can mute the
the the TV fast enough, then you can keep watching
me TV tunes.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Yeah, yeah, all right, So burger Kings went in, Automats
were going downhill. Another thing that happened was as they
started going downhill, a different kind of shopper started coming
in there. People that were itinerant, to people that were unhoused,
people that were vagrants and just sort of coming through
(39:14):
town who knew that they could hang out there for
that nickel cup of coffee for hours and hours and hours.
And when that starts happening, families stopped 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 2 (39:31):
No, in those same families, they're like, Oh, let's go
down to the automat step in and they're like, oh,
it's ced here, So they stopped coming in, which just
reinforced the ability of the homeless population to hang out.
And Horn and hard Art. Horn and hard Art's whole
thing was serve everybody, and serve everybody the same way.
So as far as I ever saw, they weren't exactly
rousing vagrants who were hanging out drinking like a cup
(39:53):
of coffee. And it just was basically the same story
as the inner city in the United States in the
sixties and seventies. They once the suburbs rose and everybody
moved out of there, and the neighborhoods and the communities
that did survive had US interstates built right through their neighborhoods.
(40:14):
Things just took a turn for the worse, and the
automat was not immune to that whole thing.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Yeah. Another big part of that is, like these this
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. Once business drops and
you're not cooking, you're not needing to cook as much.
All of a sudden, your the economy of scale isn't
(40:41):
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 2 (40:49):
Yep. So the other thing too is it's it's interesting
and I think it's kind of appropriate that Horn and
Hardart got into fast food franchises because the automat kind
of helped lay the foundation for that. But rather than
hundreds of different dishes, which is apparently what Horn and
hard are offered at each of their automats, you know,
(41:11):
fast food has like ten and like yess, you can
have it your way, but really you can have it
your way choosing from these five ingredients or whatever. And
there were much like downscale like surroundings. It was just
like the Automat's vision with all of the glitz and
idealism removed from it. Then you have fast food franchises.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Yeah, basically that last one that closed in ninety one.
It was the last one starting in nineteen seventy seven
at two hundred East forty second Street. So right there,
you know, sort of your time square. Sure, and it
lasted fourteen years on its own as a nostalgia piece
basically before becoming a gap.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
That's right, it's the gap.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
What else?
Speaker 2 (42:01):
So, like you said, if you went to New York,
like you go to the Empire State Building, you might
go see a Broadway play and you would go eat
it in an automat. That's just how iconic it was, right.
It popped up like anytime you're trying to get across
how New York your your movie was like, there would
be a scene in an automat or something like that. Yeah.
(42:22):
Francis Ford Coppola apparently directed a movie in the sixties
that featured an automat called Automat Now then showed up
and I'm kidding it showed upga it Now I'm a
little slow dog. Hey, I think you're doing magnificent for
considering what you've been through the last couple of days.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
Man, I've been through apocalypse now.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Bugs Bunny went to an automat and the hair grows
in Manhattan.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
That's right. What the flintstones? They even had a flintstone
automat in a nineteen sixty two episode.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
And there's a book that I think I've heard of,
but I'd never read from the mixed up files of
this is Basil E. Frank Weiler.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
That sounds familiar.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
Well, the thing that sounds familiar to me is that
these kids hide out living in the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Oh, that's the Royal Tanne Bombs that's.
Speaker 2 (43:16):
Yeah, I guarantee homage to that then. Yeah. But anyway,
in this children's book, these kids are runaways and they
live in MAT That's the Met, right. The Met isn't
the opera house, it's the art museum.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the Met.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
Yeah, okay, right, Well, one of the things that they
do is they feed themselves by going to the automat.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
Oh that's fun. And I did not know he totally Yeah,
let's call him homage. You're kinder than I am.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
Oh yeah, Wes Anderson does not rip stuff off. He
lovingly pays homage to it.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
That's right, that's right. Pat Boone tried his version of
the automat called the Dino Matt in nineteen sixty two,
which was frozen food that was then microwave. That did
not work out too well, that's supprising. 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 2 (44:08):
My favorite was the Andy Matt.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Yeah, what's up with that?
Speaker 2 (44:12):
Andy Warhol. This is just what an artist he was.
He could just talk about it. He just mention something
in passing and people are still talking about it fifty
years later. But he said that he was going to
come up with the chain of Andy Matts, which are
like automats, but instead of having to go get your
food from a case, you would sit down on like
a red mohair banquette and order through a pneumatic tube
(44:36):
and you would order frozen food and champagne. That's what
he was going to offer at the Andy Matt.
Speaker 1 (44:42):
Oh, that's funny, but that never happened at all, right,
just an idea.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
No, I didn't, but there's some people who are trying
to revive it.
Speaker 1 (44:49):
Yeah, I mean there are things like this. I mean
Japan has stuff like this, right.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
They have what's called katain zushi.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Okay, what's that.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
It's the sushi that comes around in a conveyor belt.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
Now, but they I've seen little windows as well of things.
It may not be hot food, maybe it's other things.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
Yeah, I'm sure that they do. I remember going to
Toledo Hospital visit my mom when she's at work, and
they had basically auto sandwiches Like I always just thought
it was like a like a vending machine, a vending machine. Yeah,
but they know it was an automat basically. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
There's a place in Brooklyn called the Brooklyn Dumpling Shop.
I think there are like twelve of them and here
in Canada and they I just looked up a picture
of them, and they they had these little automat kind
of like cubbies that you order through an app like
a locker system. 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
(45:43):
you like a cheeseburger or a pizza like but made
to order, so like you can say what kind of
pizza you want and it'll it's just got this machine
inside it'll, you know, load it up with whatever and
then bake it and then it spits it out in
fifteen minutes or whatever. So things kind of like this
but not not truly automat stuff.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
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, right, And the pizza machines like, yeah, yeah, sure, sure,
definitely not.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
And then they have a hidden camera on you, right
and spit out a picture of you going, ah.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
Yeah, yeah, damn it, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (46:21):
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. So hopefully that.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
That makes me feel good about the effect I have
on you.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
Yeah, just a little josh, a little side cup of
oyster stew. I'm back on my feet again.
Speaker 2 (46:37):
There you go. 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 1 (46:48):
That's right, this is short and sweet. This is kind
of fun because it's a this is coming out tomorrow
and it's a correction on an episode that was just
out awesome. So maybe for a change we won't get
like four hundred emails from crafters.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
Okay, oh yeah, hey guys, are the.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
High Times episode In Martha Stewart, hodgepodge is a big
jumble of things that don't go together. Modgepodge is the
craft supply. Just don't want you to embarrass yourselves at
the craft store. That is from Kelly.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
Modgepodge is what you use to glue together a big
jumble of things that don't go together.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (47:21):
That's a great Kelly. Thank you, and to the other
thousand of you who wrote in. It's nice to know
that there are people out there still using modgepodge.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
It's fun.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
Yeah, I mean it's fun to say, and it's got
a cute label too.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
Yeah, magpodge is really a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
I enjoy it for sure. And we heard from Martha
Stewart too. She said, yes, I have Modgepodge laying around.
Think Jerry got in touch with there and asked, that's right. Well,
if you want to be like who Kelly? If you
want to be like Kelly and right in to gently
correct us, we love that kind of thing. You can
send it via email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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