If you search for Bickford's in Google Books, you will come up with a lot of references to the Beats, bookies, drug addicts and pushers who hung out out at some of the many locations throughout the city. The one on Fordham Road near the Grand Concourse in the Bronx was where neighborhood bookie Joe Jalop held court, teaching his teenage acolytes how to bet. While the places attracted colorful patrons, most of the crowd were just average Joe's looking for a cheap meal or a late night cup of coffee and piece of pie, maybe after the bars and clubs had closed. Cops were as likely to be among the customers as the offbeat and criminal.
Some Bickford's were white-tiled cafeterias and the company also had a smaller chain of company-owned Bick's, small coffee shops with counters and stools like in the famous Nighthawks painting. Because the Bickford's were cafeterias, people were able to linger at tables and argue politics, score hits, write poetry or take bets for hours, trying to avoid the attention of the managers. Because they were open all night, they attracted the city's night owls, including the city's gay crowd who would stop in after hitting the bars. New York was more of an all-night town then than it is now, truly the city that never sleeps.
Bickford's had sprung up and proliferated in New York in the '20s and they flourished through much of the '50s. They were going strong in 1946. A haunting image from Utopia Parkway, the biography of Joseph Cornell, is of the shy, diffident artist sitting in the Bickford's in Flushing by himself with a cherry pie and a book. The lonely cosmopolitans with few close family or community ties were among the most faithful patrons.
Like other similar places, Bickford's faded away during the '60s and '70s as the nighttime business dwindled and fast food joints proliferated. The number of locations in the city dipped from 48 spread through Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens in 1960 to 2 in 1980. The last two closed in 1982.