The Automat: When little windows were the world by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 12-8-2002 More than a half century ago, I was eighty-sixed from a Horn & Hardart Automat. That summer I had a job in Times Square for $24 a week. I was 16, living in my first tiny furnished room in Brooklyn, and didn't have enough money even to splurge every day on the 15-cent macaroni and cheese in the Automat at Broadway and 46th St. I came up with a devious solution. Three days a week, I brought a homemade bologna sandwich in a bag to Times Square, then paid for a 10-cent cup of coffee at the Automat and sat at a table. This worked right up until that humiliating lunch hour when a beefy man in a shiny serge suit tapped me on the shoulder. "You," he said. "Out." He jerked a thumb toward the door. "And," he added loudly, "don't come back!" All of that dreadful noontime came flooding back as I wandered the other day through the wonderful exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York called "Horn & Hardart's Automat." I remembered the heads turned toward me from the other tables, peering at me as if I'd been discovered in some perverted act. I remembered slinking toward the door, out into the anonymous crowds, clutching my half-eaten baloney sandwich. I stood again in memory in the swirling crowd, watching the smoke rings billow from the Camel sign. It's hard now to explain to the young just what it felt like to drop into an Automat, but millions of New Yorkers grew up thinking those gleaming working-class restaurants would be part of their lives forever. Once there were more than 50 Automats in New York, and every one is gone. But you can glimpse their vanished glories in the exhibit at the museum (and the excellent book by Lorraine Diehl and Marianne Hardart that goes with it). If you are a certain age, your heart might tremble. There in photographs are the Art Deco facades, some with stained-glass windows by Nicola D'Ascenzo, who designed the windows for the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. There is one of the actual dolphin spouts that poured French-drip coffee into your cup. There in a glass case are some of the Horn & Hardart cups and dining utensils, survivors because the Automat used real ceramic cups, not cardboard, and real silverware, not plastic. The Horn & Hardart people so trusted their customers that a lazy Susan stood on every table, stacked with sugar and ketchup, mustard and Worcestershire sauce. There, too, is a portion of one of the walls of small glass doors that held much of the food (there were steam tables, too). The empty windows in the exhibit offer homemade doughnuts for a nickel, a sweet potato for two nickels, clam chowder for three. These, too, sparked memory. Sixty years ago, in another New York, my mother took me and my brother Tom to see the graveyard of Trinity Church, where Alexander Hamilton was buried, and then to our first visit to an Automat. The place glittered with light, like the lobby of some movie palace, the light reflecting in a dazzling way off all those small glass windows. She gave us two nickels each, and for the first time we dropped them in a slot and turned the knob. It was like magic. There before us was food we chose for ourselves. I can't remember what I picked. Almost certainly it was some kind of pie. For five more decades, I moved in and out of Automats (and eventually even returned from exile to the one on Broadway that banned me). There was an elegant Automat on Court St. in Brooklyn, where you could see certain second-level gangsters, and where I interviewed cops and lawyers while working as a young reporter. I spent a lot of time in the Automat on E. 14th St., between S. Klein's department store and Irving Place, where I'd go after a few hours hanging around with fighters in the Gramercy Gym across the street. I loved the one on 57th St., with its balcony and soaring staircases, the only Automat that seemed imported from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian empire. I learned to drink coffee at the Automat (we were tea drinkers at home), and I've never again tasted coffee so good, except in New Orleans. My favorite food was the macaroni and cheese. And at the museum, the recipe for this amazing dish is on the wall. The macaroni was rigatoni. There was a splash of Worcestershire sauce and two tablespoons of butter. In those days, nobody ever heard of cholesterol. The restaurants were studies in democracy. Tables at the Automats were usually shared with strangers; if there was an empty seat, it was yours. In Times Square, you could sit with chorus girls and lost souls; with musicians, tap-dancers, press agents and an occasional celebrity. On snowy evenings on 14th St., the Union Square repertory theater filled most of the tables: old Stalinists at one table casting death glances at Trotskyites across the room, while others murmured about Abstract Expressionism or vegetarianism or McCarthyism. All contention seemed tempered by the coffee and pumpkin pie. I never once saw a fistfight at an Automat. The true stars of each Automat were the "nickel throwers." These were women - most of them Irish - who raised cashiering to the level of performance art. They worked in Art Deco booths in the center of each cafeteria, making change. You'd lay a dollar before them, and without looking at you or the coins, they splayed out exactly 20 nickels. Never less. Never more. Exactly 20 nickels. I'd sometimes stare at them from the side, wondering how they did this, and never found an answer. It was as mysterious as watching Isaac Stern work a violin. The exhibit traces the decline and fall of the Horn & Hardart: the way veterans of World War II associated Automats with the austerities of the Depression; the growth of the suburbs; dreadful labor troubles in the 1950s and '60s, when New York was a strong union town. It's a sad tale. In the 1980s, the chain was sold in mass lots to Burger King and other fast-food chains. At the end, only one Automat remained, at 42nd St. and Third Ave., a half-block from the marvelous old Daily News building. The Daily News lives on at another location. That last Automat closed on the evening of April 8, 1991, joining the Camel sign, S. Klein, the Gramercy Gym and all those other places we thought would be here forever. The Museum of the City of New York is on Fifth Ave. at 103rd St. It's open Wednesday through Sunday. Originally published on December 8, 2002