A Depression Era Icon
Horn & Hardart boomed during the Depression, opening Automats in Brooklyn and Bronx as well as expanding in Manhattan. The new Automats had a sleek Art Deco motif. The epitome was the pink terracotta extravaganza that opened in 1934 on W. 57th St, New York's version of Rue de la Paix, lined with art galleries and exclusive boutiques.
While Horn & Hardart went after the fashionable crowd on W. 57th, the Automats were also a place for the down-and-out. Business was up 50 percent in the two years after the 1929 stock market crash. In the 1930s, families with little expendable income scraped together their nickels to take the kids to the Automat as a special treat. People with no jobs and little money took temporary refuge from the streets. People with no money made tomato soup from the ketchup or lemonade from the lemon wedges set out for ice tea. Sometimes one of them would swipe uneaten food from deserted plates. In one infamous episode from the era, a bag lady died after eating a half-eaten poppy seed roll. Unfortunately for her, the previous diner had been a financially ruined man who had poked a hole in the roll and filled it with cyanide. In her haste to nab free eats, she had failed to notice his corpse at the men's room door. Ironically it turned out she had thousands of dollars stashed in a bank account.
The presence of the poor did not keep out affluent families. Even celebrities patronized the restaurants, It was a top tourist attraction. The Automat became an icon of the era, celebrated in song, movies, comic strips, newspaper columns. short stories and novels. A Moss Hart musical of 1932, "Face the Music," featured two scenes set in an Automat in which a chorus of the formerly affluent sang the Irving Berlin tunes "Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee" and "Lunching at the Automat."