The Automat: The Most Culturally Relevant Film For Post-Pandemic America

First-time filmmaker Lisa Hurwitz to debut her documentary later this year

“Nostalgia – it’s delicate, but potent…. In Greek, nostalgia literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”

–Don Draper in Mad Men, pitching an advertising campaign for the Kodak Carousel slide projector (circa 1965)

As I have come to appreciate in recent years, growing up in 1960s New York City was an enormous gift. It provided me with an historic perspective that today enables me to imagine the future with confidence. It was a time when the operational prowess of leading businesses was a source of national pride not shame. It was a time when technological marvels were coupled to the American dream, not American greed. For me, it was a time of cultural solidarity, the remaining days of Depression-era ethos that still united the rich and poor, men and women, caucasians and people of color, a phrase that held no currency back then. When pressed, I will agree that my memories were informed in part by nostalgia — a longing for an America that never quite was. But it’s more than that. It’s also a longing to reimagine the narrative of the American dream, with the benefit of all we have learned, both joyous and sad.

Before the pandemic, the power of that narrative has influenced my writing and my work. But after the virus and the scare spread, that narrative has taken on a special significance.

At the hospital

On February 29, I was waiting to be discharged from a three-night stay at the hospital. Earlier that day, the President told the nation that a vaccine would be developed “very quickly.” To pass the time during the discharge— this was before the COVID-scare, so it was a leisurely affair — I wrote a tribute to Joe Coulombe, the founder of Trader Joe’s who passed away the night before. In my article, I praised TJ’s for making food shopping a fun yet meaningful physical experience. I gave two other historical examples of this phenomenon. From the recent past there was Starbucks, whose former CEO Howard Schultz had dedicated his life to creating a “third place” for consumers. The idea, appropriated from sociologist Ray Oldenburg, was a place that is neither work nor home, but somewhere in between. From earlier last century was Horn and Hardart, the inventors of the American automat — a restaurant where diners could order hot and cold meals by dropping nickels into glass-and-chrome cubbies which lined entire walls — grew fast in Philadelphia and New York City during the Great Depression and several decades hence. When jotting notes on what I knew about H&H, I felt a tug on my heart. I decided to give the business more of my attention, and when I got home, I set down to work.

Operations and hygiene

I searched for articles (there were dozens), monographs (there was a PhD dissertation that several people referenced), photography, and video. It was an exhilarating walk down a virtual memory lane. But after about an hour of watching the same archival video clips and snippets from feature films (to name a few: Sadie McKee, starring Joan Crawford, 1934; That Touch of Mink, with Doris Day and Audrey Meadows, well known for having played Jackie Gleason’s wife on The Honeymooners, 1962) I began longing to see a full-length documentary. 

It was then I discovered a project in the making. Lisa Hurwitz was in the final phase of directing/producing The Automat, edited by Michael Levine and Russell Greene. What led her to pursue the project: although too young to have ever visited an H&H (the last restaurant closed in 1991) she had her own nostalgia for college cafeterias that brought people together in a single place.

To re-experience the automat, is to see and hear it, through the lens of larger selections of stills and film and people who were there the first time around, including Mel Brooks and his long-time straight man Carl Reiner, Elliott Gould, retired four-star general Colin Powell, the notorious Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and, yes, Howard Schultz. All grew up in New York City and vividly remember the H&H experiment. But Hurwitz had a second cinematic trick up her sleeve: the most comprehensive but accessible research on the operational and technological mechanics of the automat, two of the three behind-the-scenes innovations that made H&H such a success.

In her research she discovered the aforementioned dissertation, authored in 2001 by Alec Shuldiner, in partial fulfillment of the requirement of his PhD at Cornell University (he joined the project as Hurwtiz’s co-producer). Unlike most scholarly theses, Shuldiner’s was readable and relatable to the lay public. Hurwitz calls it the “bible” of automat history; it’s become the historical foundation of other creative projects including a coffee-table book by Lorraine Diehl and Marianne Hardart, an heir to the H&H enterprise.

Shuldiner’s book (I will be urging him to publish it) looks at three restaurant restaurant businesses and how they grew at the time destined for them. The first — the heart and soul of the book — is H&H. The second is White Castle, whose “white box” model of fast-food service — along with other factors — led to the demise of the automat. Finally, there is FEBO, a Dutch chain that owes a great deal of its success to the American automat, but adapted to the fast-paced life of contemporary urban professionals. More recent experiments in the US — which largely failed — came after Shuldiner’s research.

On the operations side, there were many things that did enter Shuldiner’s purview, including H&H’s forward thinking on how to distribute fresh food to 800,000 people a day through two large commissaries in New York City and Philadelphia. It was no mean feat, and H&H took great risks to achieve the economies of scale required to profitably feed so many people. But one thing that jumped out at me, in the midst of the now full-blown pandemic scare, is the automat’s attention to quality and hygiene. To lure urban diners to lunch away from home, the food and the service had to be clean. By the first decade of the 20th Century, the public had become fearful of diseases that had become part of new urban life. The founders of H&H set new standards of quality control. Each morning, executives in each city would sit around a table at the commissary, sampling what they might serve their diners that day. Was it tasty, was it safe? H&H scrubbed the restaurants clean, the chrome, glass, and spotless tables persuaded diners of H&H’s commitment to hygiene at scale. Back in the day, you could walk into any H&H and expect the same.

Technology

But from my perspective, the story of the automat gets even more interesting when looking at the technology itself. As legend has it, when one of the two founders came back from a visit to Berlin, he unpacked his idea for adopting technology for serving diners in an “automated” way. The first H&H automat was launched in 1902 on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. A decade later, H&H got its New York City premiers on Times Square, feeding the theater crowd on Broadway. But the tech behind the walls — where New Yorkers got the feeling of having walked into a giant vending machine — advanced forward with John Fritsche, H&H’s chief engineer, who evolved the automated experience at scale with innovations in how to tune the machinery to achieve greater efficiencies. The new tech design improved quality and hygiene, while shortening the time between placing the food into the cubby and receiving it on the other side.

All that said, the actual genius of the technology was more of a trick than groundbreaking science, a reality that even Marianne Hardart now admits. The illusion was that there were no human beings, with human diseases, behind the walls. But to leave the conversation there would be a disservice to the greatest utility of automat technology in early-to-mid century America: the wonder one feels when first encountering a machine that is inextricably tied to our dreams of progress. Kids ate it up, a boon for Horn & Hardart after the second World War when families began to sprout everywhere. By that point, H&H had become a destination, a must-see place, along with Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty.

My parents — who lived in the Bronx — were part of the pre-baby boom, and I arrived in the boom’s final years (to be precise, 1958, when Eisenhower was still President). I remember this: New York City itself was booming and many kids believed in science and its positive impact on the future. It was a calling, not a job. No better place to spend a morning in your Sunday best than a New York City automat. If you got up early enough in the summers of 1963 and 1964, you could take the MTA to the World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, where the almost believable sentimental ethos was that, with the aid of science, it was a “small world after all.”

Culture

If I have waxed too much nostalgically, know that it is intentional. For what makes Hurwitz’s film so moving is a thing that’s so badly needed today: a belief in a more egalitarian America, and a belief in the power of place. They have both been waning fast in the last few decades, but the pandemic is bringing them into sharp relief. We are now forced to remember a time we could physically congregate. We are also now forced to confront public officials who blithely float the idea of sacrificing seniors for “the greater good.” Regarding that pernicious line of thinking, it’s more than just a slippery slope. It’s a highway to hell where the sign posts read, “who’s next?”

No surprise that the stars of The Automat — besides the automat itself — are people who remember better days earned through decent public sacrifice because of shared hardships. As I said earlier, it was a time when the rich and the poor, women and men, whites and people of color sat side by side in beautiful art-deco buildings. They may have been fearful and biased with their dining room companions, but they sat next to them nevertheless. I was amused to hear Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Eliott Gould tell stories about artists who couldn’t even afford to eat at H&H. But the managers let them sit all day; they often had no other place to go. If you were really enterprising, and did not feel too embarrassed, you could concoct a hobo tomato soup with free hot water and H&H condiments (ketchup, sugar, salt, pepper, and crackers). I was interested to learn that Howard Schultz, a Brooklyn boy, realized instantly that his calling to become a “merchant” the moment he first walked into an H&H. But I was most moved when I heard Colin Powell and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Powell’s family in the Bronx reminded me of my own. RBG reminded me of my childhood love and respect for the courtroom, where in the best circumstances and with the best practitioners, can be the most promising egalitarian place of all.

In post-pandemic America, we want that place, we long for that place, and other civic places. But I am more realist than sentimentalist. It’s going to take a lot of soul searching in the coming months. We have the time for it now, but are just beginning to understand the tools. Hurwitz, Shuldiner and team must wait for a theatrical release, when film festivals and art houses — the ones that survive — reopen. In the meantime, there are even greater opportunities today for streaming, and I suspect this will be part of the near-term distribution mix for the film. I am fortunate to have seen a private cut of the film online, and it renders beautifully on my small laptop. It’s not even a compromise. It reminds me of a recent online meeting held by Haymarket Press (attendance 14,000+) where the topic was how citizens might orchestrate a meaningful response to “Corona Capitalism,” a phrase coined by Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine (she’s the subject of my next article). In 2020, the revolution will not be televised. But it could begin organizing online.