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Old 11-17-2022, 10:18 AM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hefe View Post
...

I guess a few were still around when I was a teen but they were almost invisible in the age of fast-food burgers. They disappeared quietly, like the lightning bugs we used see back then too but no more.
I never saw an automat but lightning bugs are still around. Did you move?

I love it when friends from California come to visit and see lightning bugs for the first time. My one friend was so delighted, dancing among them and calling them little fairies.
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Old 11-17-2022, 10:50 AM
 
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I'll never forget my first lightning bugs - seen on the same trip I first saw the automats in NYC. They weren't in New York though. I think we first saw them in the South on the way up to New York.
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Old 11-17-2022, 11:10 AM
 
Location: NYC, CHI, UK
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Thundarr457 View Post
I loved the Automat. It was one of the high points of visiting NYC after we moved away. I remember getting two dollars worth of nickles. It was so clean and had marble bases and chrome doors on the compartments. I remember the cinnamon swirl pastries were to die for. I also remember Chock Full O Nuts coffee shops with those cream cheese and nut bread sandwiches, mmmm.
There's still a Chock Full O Nuts in Brooklyn which serves the cream cheese and date nut bread sandwiches.

Sadly, I missed out on the Automat, even though I would come to NYC in the 80s, the last one closed in the early 90s. Had I seen it, even if I didn't eat there, I would definitely have gone inside to check it out. They tried to open one in the East Village in the mid-2000s but it didn't last for long.
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Old 11-17-2022, 12:10 PM
 
Location: NYC
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Originally Posted by KaraG View Post
I never saw an automat but lightning bugs are still around. Did you move?

I love it when friends from California come to visit and see lightning bugs for the first time. My one friend was so delighted, dancing among them and calling them little fairies.
We moved from Queens to just over the city line to a suburb in 1960 and on a summer evening lightning bugs were a thing that delighted me as a city kid. 10 years later you would rarely see any most summers, maybe some in a park area.

When I visited my family in recent years, who were now in another LI outer 'burbs county about an hour's drive from the city limits, it was rare to see but the occasional lightning bug in the backyard, nothing like the population of them in the early 1960's. Bumblebees too...

A similar thing seems to be the amount of snowfall here during winters. In the 1950s-60's snow would regularly hide much of a parked car, even before the plows came through and buried them again. Now big snow dumps in the city are rare. I remember 2 big blizzards in the mid-90's but other than those not much more than the occasional snow storm with several inches, not feet of accumulation.

We talked about this before the consciousness of climate change was commonplace, but now in the last 10 years winters have become so weak here compared to the past that it's really just a few weeks from mid-January through February that we get anything more than token snowfalls, rare for a White Christmas in recent years.


Back to topic, in my Queens neighborhood the Walgreens is in an older building (the neighborhood was built up from the 1920s and largely mid-1930s) and I noticed that the building facade had this old ornamentation on the top: mermaids, shells, Neptune, etc... and a unique crown design. And I've noticed that here and there in a couple of other places around the city as well.

Turns out that these were a chain of Childs' Cafeterias, a contemporary and competitor for H&H Automats in NYC, but they were the first chain restaurant to expand nationally in the US, 125 restaurants in about 30 metro areas at the peak. Their gimmick was having a cook flip pancakes in the window facing the streets. They declined after WWII but apparently a few held on through the 1950's, very similar to the Automats.
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Old 11-17-2022, 04:58 PM
 
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We need more cafeterias, IMO. The closest thing around here is the Golden Buffet and, although I like, it has a tarnished reputation among more "discerning" palates.
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Old 11-17-2022, 05:33 PM
 
Location: Los Angeles
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Originally Posted by TamaraSavannah View Post
Oh, you mean like in "That Touch of Mink" where Richard Deacon was in charge? That kind of place? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056575/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
One of my favorite movies. Her's the automat scene (scroll forward a bit).


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTqjO-dHTmE
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Old 11-17-2022, 11:39 PM
 
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I remember them well. They were only in Philly and NYC. I used to get the jello. It had whipped cream which was something that my mother did not put on "her" jello. It was a treat for me. My father, a coffee addict, had to stop in one of them (or he'd go to Chock Full O' Nuts) to get his coffee fix. We'd go after attending the theater. By the time, I was born, they were already in decline. Their heyday was around 1940s. The food was delicious but we didn't eat out much. They were fairly cheap and like the description in the HBO documentary, you'd see bums and women with mink coats in the same place. It's kind of sad that most people in this country did not have this experience. In those days, these types of places, even fast food places, were regional. People on the west coast and mid-west had McDonalds and other hamburger joints that New Yorkers did not have.

FWIW, I LOVE those Chock Full O'Nuts date nut and cream cheese sandwiches. Another NYC regional favorite. They have gotten much smaller.

I watched the HBO documentary and it was sad to see Colin Powell and Carl Reiner.
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Old 11-18-2022, 12:48 AM
 
Location: Spain
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You can get so much stuff at a supermarket deli and fridge cases now, what's the point?
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Old 11-18-2022, 08:43 AM
 
Location: NYC-LBI-PHL
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My aunt would take me all sorts of places as a child. Sometimes to the automat. She would give me some nickels and I could get anything I chose. I always got the macaroni and cheese. Maybe a sandwich or some soup and pie or cake for dessert. I remember she would get coffee that was dispensed from a tube in the mouth of a brass lion head mounted on the wall next to the food windows.

They had a small takeout booth by the front doors where you could get food to take home. Pies, cakes, I think they had whole roasted chickens IIRC. No windows or nickels there. You paid the clerk who made change.

When I went back in the 70s as an adult Horn & Hardart was on the way out. A lot of empty tables. Too many sad looking people with just a bowl of soup or a cup of coffee. A lot of the little food windows had no food in them.

If an automat opened today it would be a different experience. No nickels and a new menu. It would have to cater to today's tastes. Asian food, Mexican food, Italian food, Indian food, vegan, etc.

Last edited by 5-all; 11-18-2022 at 09:06 AM..
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Old 11-18-2022, 08:48 AM
 
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Does anyone have a photo link to the outdoor automats of the mid-1960's? That's how I remember the one I saw in person.
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