Today I read an article in the LA Times about Clifton's cafeteria in Downtown Los Angeles. Mark and I had lunch there years ago, before it was closed. It was dark and sad. The building has been renovated and is going to re-open at the end of the month. I shared with Mark the amazing statistic that this one cafeteria during the 1930's used to serve 15,000 meals a day.
http://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-cliftons-reopening-chef-fullilove-20150821-story.html
This reminded me of the automat. I had told the story to Mark before, but he listened politely.
One of my favorite vacation memories was a day in New York City. Dad took us for a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. It was a nickel, and he said it was the best bargain in New York. For dinner, he took us to an automat. He gave us each a handful of nickels and let us make our selections from the items in the glass windows. I had the mac and cheese. I remember Dad showed me how to take a piece of warm apple from one cubby and a scoop of ice cream from another to make pie a la mode.
Mark thought the food would not have been fresh, but I remember it being very good. The hot things were hot, and the cold things were cold. Nothing stayed in the windows very long. There was a staff behind the windows replenishing servings of classic american comfort food.
While Mark was driving in to work, he listened to NPR. It must be serendipity, because they featured a story about a new restaurant in San Francisco, a kind of automat for the digital age, called Eatsa.
He called me to tell me about it, and I looked it up online. Not quite an automat, it has a limited menu featuring quinoa. They plan to open in LA, so we will probably check it out and Mark will have to listen to my automat story again.
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/08/31/436377616/the-restaurant-with-no-visible-workers
More about Eatsa and a nice photo of an old automat as well as some more historical background.
http://www.citylab.com/navigator/2015/09/the-automation-of-the-american-lunch/403279/
I feel nostalgic about automats. And I am not the only one. I know that a wall from one of the last automats has been preserved at the Smithsonian. It is a piece of Americana from a time before drive-thru windows and fast food chains.
"America in the 1920s was characterized by levels of income disparity equivalent to today's, but rich and poor ate together at the Automat. The 1920s also saw relatively extreme levels of anti-immigration and racist sentiment, but natives and immigrants ate together at the Automat, as did people of all races. And they continued to do so, in unprecedented numbers, for roughly the next half century. The Automat was phenomenal." -Alec Shuldiner
Alec Shuldiner wrote Trapped Behind the Automat: Technological Systems and the American Restaurant, 1902-1991. This dissertation is the basis for a new documentary The Automat. Here is a link to the trailer:
http://asliceofpieproductions.com/about/
I'm looking forward to seeing The Automat when it comes out. And Mark and I will be checking out Clifton's once it opens.
