AUTOMAT
977 Eighth Avenue between West 57th and 58th Streets
FEBRUARY 10, 1936. ABBOTT FILE 69

Automat, variant image

Irving Berlin's 1932 lyric, "Let's have another cup of coffee," immmortalized Horn & Hardart's chain of "waiterless restaurants," which served as many as 800,000 freshly prepared meals a day to customers in Philadelphia and New York during the depression. Apart from its good cheap food, the Automat's popularity was based on the gimmicky appeal of its mechanized food service and its sociable atmosphere.

Automat, file drawing

New York's most famous Automat was its first, located in Times Square, but Abbott chose to depict the restaurant at Columbus Circle, well-known as a nighttime gathering place for musicians and cabaret-goers. She photographed it from the General Motors Building across the street on the same winter day she photographed the Circle itself. The two images are complementary symbols of modern New York life.

Abbott's photograph illustrates the restaurant's mechanized character. With the sharp diagonal of coin-operated, Deco-styled windows receding indefinitely into space, the photograph shows food and its consumers on a culinary assembly line. A variant image of a man's hand placing a nickel in a slot could have served as a product advertisement.

A project researcher acquired copies of the patent drawings for the Automat, including a patent for covered containers for retaining food in heated and chilled condition, an apparatus for dispensing liquids, and a coin vending machine. The drawings present a network of tubes, wheels, conveyer belts, and coffee cups that recall the fantasies of cartoonist Rube Goldberg.

Although the Columbus Circle Automat was still open in the 1970s, most Automats gave way sooner to fast-food chains. The last New York Automat closed in 1991. In 1989, the entire block between Columbus Circle and West 57th Street on Eighth Avenue was razed for a 56-story apartment tower.

Return to the Middle West Side