“It’s Automatic”

[Zippy, March 7, 2018.]

Today’s Zippy, “It’s Automatic,” channels a postcard explanation of what to do in a Horn & Hardart Automat. In 2017 Zippy himself was patronizing an Automat.

I have a dim memory of sitting in an Automat with my friend Aldo Carrasco, sometime in the early 1980s, having cake and coffee. Or pie and coffee. Or something. The Automat felt as depressing as hell. I don’t think I knew enough then to appreciate the place.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard) : Automat beverage section : New York, 1964: Automat : One more Automat

The Automat on TCM

Lisa Hurwitz’s documentary The Automat (2021) airs on TCM, November 22, in the company of several movies with Automat scenes. The Automat is also now streaming at HBO Max.

The documentary is deep nostalgia, and it makes me feel grateful to have eaten at the Automat, even if only once, even if it was only coffee and a piece of cake or pie, even if the place was wildly depressing — nearly empty, with a few old people sitting alone at tables.

Related reading
All OCA Automat posts (Pinboard)

[The documentary cites the rise of Chock full o’Nuts as one factor in the Automat’s decline and fall.]

The last Automat

[Zippy, March 4, 2019.]

The Automat appears again and again in Zippy. Here, type automat into the search box and you’ll see. Today’s strip repurposes art from a 2014 visit to the Dingburg Automat.

I have a vague memory of sitting in an Automat with a friend in the 1980s. And I have a vague nostalgia for the Automat. The Automat appears in a handful of OCA posts.

How to Automat

Let Richard Conte and Coleen Gray demonstrate:

[From The Sleeping City (dir. George Sherman, 1950). Click any image for a larger view.]

Much of The Sleeping City was filmed at Bellevue Hospital, so I think it’s safe to assume that the setting here is a genuine Automat. Note the array of extras: salt and pepper, sugar, ketchup, mustard (I think), and honey or syrup.

Here’s a spectacular compilation of the Automat on film. It’s missing the scene from That Girl in which Ann Marie (Marlo Thomas) makes ketchup soup in an Automat. But was that a real Automat?

In its heyday, the Automat was all over New York. Advertisements in the 1940 Manhattan telephone directory announce forty-five cafeterias and thirty-two retail shops: “Take home Pies, Cakes, Breads, Rolls, Cooked Foods same as served at Automats. ‘Less Work for Mother.’”

*

Here, thanks to a thoughtful reader, is a menu of sorts in photos. The roll Ann Marie eats indeed resembles the top-right rolls in the first photo.

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All OCA Automat posts

Joan Crawford at the Automat

From Sadie McKee (dir. Clarence Brown, 1934). Alone in the city and down on her luck, Sadie (Joan Crawford) visits the Automat. Click any image for a larger view.

[Unless you have the free time and financial wherewithal to track down an original, this is as close as you’ll ever get to an Automat coffee spigot.]

[Coffee cost a nickel.]

[And the twin spigots dispensed both coffee and cream.]

[Civilization = cup and saucer.]

[I like that lettering. And I like the pedestals. I think that they were still around when I made what I remember as my one and only visit to an Automat, in the early 1980s with my friend Aldo Carrasco.]

This scene comes to a bitter end: Sadie sees a half-eaten piece of pie — food! — and the man who’s leaving it behind crushes out his cigarette in it. Is he nasty, or merely oblivious? Hard to say.


Related reading
All OCA Automat posts (Pinboard)

One more Automat

[“Horn & Harda[r]t’s Automat sign blacked out re New York City’s ‘browned out’ or dimmed lights, a wartime defensive measure against enemy attack.” Photograph by Andreas Feininger. New York, New York, 1943. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Other Automat posts
Automat beverage section
“Lunch Hour NYC”
New York, 1964: Automat

Zippy Automat

[Zippy, July 28, 2017.]

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Automat, a 1964 guidebook entry
Automat beverage section
Automat sign, 1943

Telegram (Easy Living)

A telegram, as seen in Easy Living (dir. Mitchell Leisen, 1937). You either find this sort of thing inspired and funny or you don’t. I do. Easy Living has a great Automat scene with Jean Arthur and Ray Milland. The screenplay is by Preston Sturges.

Thanks to Paul Harrington for recommending this film.

Related posts
Automat beverage section
How to send telegrams
“Lunch Hour NYC”
New York, 1964: Automat
One more Automat

[725 West 112th Street? Somewhere in the Hudson River.]

Automat, archived

[Horn & Hardart Automat Cafeteria. From the NYC Municipal Archives Online Gallery. Click for a larger view.]

There it is, or was, at 1557 Broadway. Convicted Woman, playing next door, was released on January 31, 1940. The Diamond Horseshoe, Billy Rose’s nightclub, advertised on the barely readable sign, could be found in the basement of the Paramount Hotel, around the corner on West 46th.

The Automat appears in a handful of OCA posts. This one has a great photograph of a the Automat sign.

Automat beverage section

[“1725 Broadway — New beverage section open to public. Sept. 19, 1949.” From the New York Public Library Digital Gallery. Click for a larger view.]

“For two nickels, a cup of coffee comes spurting from the mouth of an engaging beast, the likes of which Linnaeus never saw”: Harold H. Hart’s Hart’s Guide to New York City (New York: Hart Publishing, 1964). I’m guessing that nothing had changed between 1949 and 1964. A 1914 Automat advertisement (also from the NYPL) shows the same kind of beast at work.

Related posts
“Lunch Hour NYC”
New York, 1964: Automat

[I remember eating at the Automat in childhood. But what? All I can remember is using coins.]

An Automat documentary

The Automat, a documentary film, directed by Lisa Hurwitz. With Mel Brooks, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Colin Powell, and other fans. Here’s the trailer.

Someday, I hope.

Related reading
All OCA Automat posts

An Automat simulacrum

Mister 880 (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1950) (“a swell story,” says I) has a fun scene in an “Automat” (apparently a recreation on a soundstage). Click any image for a much larger view.

[Petty counterfeiter “Skipper” Miller (Edmund Gwenn) cashes in a bill for a handful of nickels. Notice the sloped trays, which enable the nickel thrower to do her work with no danger of coins going astray.]

[Secret Service agent Steve Buchanan (Burt Lancaster) scopes out the joint.]

[Skipper gets a candybar. Notice the condiments on the tray: syrup and honey (?), or oil and vinegar (?), salt, pepper, sugar, ketchup.]

As Liz Lemon would say, I want to go to there.

Related reading
All OCA Automat posts (Pinboard) : EXchange names on screen (From this film)

Roast Turkey 8 Nickels

Bit-part actor Nancy Lane (Sylvia Sidney) is in the Automat: her tray has soup, bread, and a cup of coffee. What’s she eyeing? From Thirty Day Princess (dir. Marion Gering, 1934).

[Click either image for a larger view.]

It’s “Roast Turkey 8 Nickels,” a drumstick with a paper frill and all the trimmings. Lacking the nickels, Nancy bangs on the door, extracts the plate, and realizes she’s been spotted. But not by an Automat employee — by two men searching for someone to impersonate Princess Catterina of Taronia, on a goodwill tour but now down with the mumps. Nancy of course is a dead ringer for the princess — Sidney plays both roles.

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Automat redux?

The Washington Post wonders if COVID might revive Automat-style dining.

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All OCA Automat posts (Pinboard)

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, DVD, HBO Max, TCM, YouTube.]

The Glass Key (dir. Stuart Heisler, 1942). Gangsters and politicians compete for power in an unnamed American city. I like all the principals — Brian Donlevy, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake — but I didn’t like the movie, which mixes gangsters and politicians with an improbable love story. I appreciated two unusually vulgar moments of spitting: once on a carpeted floor, once into a sink after toothbrushing (you don’t see much of that in ’40s movies). Look for Margaret Hayes (the lonely seductress of The Blackboard Jungle) as a lonely seductress. ★★ (CC)

*

City of Fear (dir. Irving Lerner, 1959). I’d think of it as a low-key Kiss Me Deadly. Here “the great whatsit” is a container of Cobalt-60 in the hands of an escaped con (Vince Edwards) who thinks he’s holding a million dollars’ worth of heroin. Much attention to police procedure and technology, with Lyle Talbot, some interchangeable detectives, and Geiger counters. Cinematography by Lucien Ballard, editing by Robert Lawrence, and a score by Jerry Goldsmith add considerable value to a predictable story. ★★★ (YT)

*

Dust Be My Destiny (dir. Lewis Seiler, 1939). Good Warner Brothers stuff that looks forward to They Live by Night. John Garfield and Priscilla Lane play a couple on the run: he’s a fugitive who didn’t kill the boss at a work farm; she’s the boss’s daughter. As one would expect, the movie’s sympathies are with the runaways. Henry Armetta adds considerable humanity to the story as a café owner who’s willing to protect a young couple from the law. ★★★ (CC)

*

The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946). I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t watched it not to fall for the claim that it’s a tidy, sentimentalized story of homecoming from the Second World War. To the contrary: the movie presents the struggles of returning veterans with great frankness and pathos, examining alcoholism, infidelity, fear of intimacy, meager employment opportunities, physical disability, and post-traumatic stress. Every time I watch I notice a detail I’ve missed: this time it was drugstore clerk Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) ducking as a toy plane flies through the store and Peggy Stephenson (Teresa Wright) catches it. The plane provides a nice way for Fred and Peggy to meet cute, but now I wonder if we’re meant to see Fred’s response as that of a bombardier who’s seen one too many enemy planes coming at him. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Seconds (dir. John Frankenheimer, 1966). This extraordinary film, which we’d never heard of until Elaine noticed it at the Criterion Channel, is unmistakably from the director of The Manchurian Candidate. Briefly: a mysterious company has developed procedures to allow tired, disaffected middle-aged men to fake their deaths and gain new (second) lives, with new faces, new fingerprints, and new identities. It’s the American male dream of freedom from responsibility, as described by a company executive: “In short, you are alone in the world, absolved of all responsibility except to your own interest.” Starring Rock Hudson and Salome Jens, and filmed in sinister black and white by James Wong Howe. ★★★★ (CC)

[A bit of lore: Seconds is the movie that freaked out Brian Wilson when he entered a showing late and heard a character say “Come in, Mr. Wilson.”]

*

Y tu mamá también (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2001). It’s like an Almodóvar movie with another director. A great road movie, with Julio and Tenoch, two male adolescents (Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna) inviting an attractive young married woman, Luisa (Maribel Verdú), on a trip to Boca del Cielo (Heaven’s Mouth), a non-existent beach (Luisa’s husband is away). The three protagonists test the boundaries of friendship and sexuality, with moments of awkward intimacy, pleasure, and recrimination. Watching the movie a second time, I understand the narrator’s role more clearly: he’s an all-knowing voice that sees the present moment in a much larger context, and I’m afraid that’s all I can say. ★★★★ (DVD)

*

Beyond This Place, aka Web of Evidence (dir. Jack Cardiff, 1959). A father-son romp in a park, then a scene from Liverpool during the Blitz, and then twenty years later, the boy of that first scene, Paul Mathry (Van Johnson), has returned to Liverpool from the States. And the question to answer: what became of his father Patrick (Bernard Lee, 007’s “M”)? A darkly quiet story of research and love, both familial and romantic. Lee and Vera Miles (as Lena Anderson) turn in great performances. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Night People (dir. Nunnally Johnson, 1954). A GI is kidnapped from postwar Berlin and held to be traded for two West Berliners — and I can’t help but think of Brittney Griner’s plight. The plot becomes tricky, but I found little excitement or suspense in its unfolding. Gregory Peck and Broderick Crawford are one-dimensional here: Peck as the mumbly lieutenant colonel in charge of the American zone; Broderick Crawford as the GI’s angry well-connected father. The title is misleading: there’s little noir in this CinemaScope production. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Automat (dir. Lisa Hurwitz, 2021). Long before its invention, the slogan “All Are Welcome” might have served as the motto of Horn and Hardart’s Automats, which served wonderful food to all comers for a handful of nickels. This deeply appreciative non-ironic documentary tells the story of the Automat’s rise and fall, as urbanites left for the suburbs and the restaurants grew emptier at dinnertime and on weekends. With a fine array of nostalgic eaters, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Colin Powell, and Mel Brooks, who describes the restaurants as “insane centers of paradise.” I ate at an Automat just once, in the 1980s, with my friend Aldo Carrasco, probably after a visit to the Gotham Book Mart, probably just pie and coffee — and I didn’t know enough to appreciate the place (which was, I admit, depressing), and now I wish I had had a meal, including creamed spinach. ★★★★ (HBO)


*

The Tattered Dress (dir. Jack Arnold, 1957). James Blane (Jeff Chandler), a “New York lawyer” known for representing mobsters, comes to a Nevada town to defend a wealthy man charged with murdering the star athlete with whom his wife was having an affair. When the jury votes for acquittal, the local sheriff (Jack Carson), a friend of the murdered man, decides to exact revenge. Chandler does well as a suave servant of wealth, and Elaine Stewart as the philandering spouse adds more than a touch of lurid glamor. But the real star of the movie is Jack Carson, playing against type, and his easy cheerfulness marks his character as a true sociopath. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Screaming Mimi (dir. Gerd Oswald, 1958). Anita Ekberg stars as a dancer under the spell of a mad psychiatrist. We see her solo act, with ropes and chains and much writhing, twice, in a club called the El Madhouse, run by Gypsy Rose Lee. Nothing about this film makes sense: the background music is recycled from Leonard Bernstein’s score for On the Waterfront, and the Red Norvo Trio, another El Madhouse act, billed as a trio, is in fact a quartet. Preposterous film noir, with a star added for Burnett Guffey’s excellent cinematography. ★★ (YT)

*

The Long Haul (dir. Ken Hughes, 1957). Post-WWII Liverpool, with Victor Mature as Harry Miller, an American ex-serviceman driving long-distance truck routes for his British wife’s uncle. Harry’s wife Connie (Gene Anderson) is cold and critical, and Harry falls into a relationship with Lynn (Diana Dors), the girlfriend of Joe Easy (Patrick Allen), the Johnny Friendly-like head of a trucking company and criminal enterprise. A long sequence devoted to getting a truckload of stolen furs across dangerous terrain is as suspenseful in its own way as the struggles in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear. Mature and Dors are terrific, the one conflicted, the other desperate, in a movie that is, finally, in unexpected ways, about loss and betrayal and forgiveness. ★★★★ (YT)

Related reading
All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)

An Automat ad

A ghost ad in the Garment District.

Related reading
All OCA Automat posts (Pinboard)

Some Automats

[155 W. 33rd Street, 250 W. 42nd Street, 611 W. 181st Street, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click any image for a much, much, much larger view.]

There are thirty-eight Horn and Hardart Automats in the 1940 Manhattan telephone directory. This has been some of them.

Related reading
All OCA Automat posts : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[“There are thirty-eight”: I’m channeling The Naked City and Naked City. There were also eighteen Horn and Hardart retail outlets in Manhattan, one Automat and two retail outlets in Brooklyn, eight retail outlets in the Bronx, and “some” (three) retail outlets in Queens.]

Ratner’s (Naked City)

[“The Face of the Enemy,” Naked City, January 3, 1962.]

I like the awning: “1½ HOUR FREE PARKING.” Very practical: two hours would be way too much for a meal.

Ratner’s was a celebrated dairy restaurant. That is, no meat:


[From Harold H. Hart’s Hart’s Guide to New York City (New York: Hart Publishing, 1964).]

The theater next door was to become the Fillmore East. Here’s a photograph of worlds colliding, or merging.

There are eight million screenshots in the naked city. This has been one of them.

Also from Hart’s Guide
Automat
Chock full o’Nuts
Greenwich Village and coffee house
King Karol Records and The Record Hunter
Le Steak de Paris
Mayflower Coffee Shop(pe)
Minetta Tavern and Monkey Bar
Schrafft’s

New York in fifty objects

From the New York Times, a history of New York in fifty objects. No I♥NY logo, no subway token, but many welcome choices, including the Anthora and the Automat.

September 25, 2012: The Times has added fifteen more, including the subway token.

EXchange names on screen

[From Mister 880 (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1950). Click for a larger view.]

I always like seeing a page from a telephone book filling the screen. I think of it as a reality effect.

The Secret Service did indeed have offices at 90 Church Street, which is still a federal building.

Related reading
All OCA EXchange name posts (Pinboard) : An Automat simulacrum (From this film)