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Get Stuffed

To the automat and back

A whiz through the fast food lane

It’s 1971, and just about anybody who bothers to pick up hitchhikers has Joplin or Hendrix or the Doors blasting out of their dash. Two teenaged girls from the prairies – one of them me – are wandering the streets of New York. We’re hungry but pretty tight-fisted because we’ve thumbed our way across from Vancouver with about a hundred and fifty bucks between us. So we stop and ask a local who looks like he’ll answer us, where’s a good cheap place to eat? Horn & Hardart’s he says waving his arm up the street in the direction of an ornate facade. We like art deco. Off we go.

Anybody living in New York since the beginning of time knew what a Horn & Hardart’s was and where one was. But those two prairie hippy chicks were like, forget it.

When we walked through the door we stopped dead in our tracks. Behold: a cavernous space with the three walls before us covered in row upon row of tiny glass doors mounted in frames of shiny stainless steel. The middle of the huge room was filled with small dark-coloured wooden tables and chairs that clattered and scraped on the tile floor as diners, and there were hundreds of them, came and went.

Not that we were deprived or anything, but they didn’t have anything like this in Edmonton or Regina. So it took a minute. But being the cool international travellers we were at age 19, we twigged on pretty quickly. Flip in a coin, turn, turn, turn the handle and out popped the item of your choice from behind one of the little glass doors. Ham sandwich. Macaroni and cheese (there was a "hot" section with condensation on the windows). Coconut cream pie. You name it, you got it. Plus you could see it. Everything was covered, clean, antiseptically peptic, and cheap. And delivered instantly onto your waiting tray. What more could hungry people in a hurry ask for?

Not much, reckoned Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart, who are credited by some, particularly Horn and Hardart themselves, as the team who delivered the first fast food concept.

Coffee without eggshells

Philadelphia. The late 1880s. A young Joe Horn with a thousand bucks in his pocket teamed up with a lunchroom waiter named Frank Hardart and opened a 15-seat café. Long before Starbucks was even dreamt of, they gained quite the reputation for their coffee, brewed in quite the innovative way – by drip (this was in the days when coffee shops still put eggshells in with the coffee to take out the bitter flavour). They also threw out the old stuff after 20 minutes – unheard of!

With some of the proceeds from their great café business they brought the first automat – those long banks of coin-operated compartments – from Germany in 1902. The company eventually expanded to about 180 locations throughout New York and Philadelphia. Some were automats only, like the one those two hippy chicks wandered into; some were combined with cafeterias.

No matter how iconic Horn & Hardart’s became, and, to some in the Tri-State area, remains, the concepts of "fast food" and "restaurant chains" didn’t exactly originate there.

Lunch wagons and railway cars

Country inns and white-tablecloth fine dining establishments in North America arrived with immigrants from Europe. As such, they were pretty much mirrors of European sensibilities – unhurried, reserved, classist. It took the industrial revolution and the railroad to jack up the need for good food in a hurry, or at least food in a hurry.

As urban populations boomed and more and more people were away from home at mealtime, even a fool could see that eateries catering to the masses, especially at convenient locations like railway stations, were a pretty good idea.

About 10 years before Horn and Hardart started their venture, one Frederick Harvey from England founded the first large restaurant chain in North America. Harvey Houses, which popped up along the Atchison, Topeka, Santa Fe RR, were clean, dependable and quick. The 10-minute stop for refreshments en route could actually be fulfilled.

Across urban centres in North America, lunch wagons appeared about the same time to service workers, most of whom couldn’t afford restaurants. (Think of today’s stainless-clad canteens in pick-up trucks that stop at construction sites disgorging the invariable woman in a hard hat who honks the horn incessantly to notify all and sundry of her arrival.)

The travelling lunch wagons eventually settled onto urban streets and turned into the factory-made diners with their sleek long counters, swivelling stools, gleaming white surfaces and curvilinear forms that we all love to get nostalgic over.

After the ice cream soda was invented, post-Civil War, soda fountains sprang up, giving rise to coffee shops and luncheonettes, which expanded on the soda fountain concept by offering pies and sandwiches – good food, cheap and fast.

Lunchrooms – spare, utilitarian places serving low-priced food to working people – gained some collateral. These were places where you carried your tray of food to tables and sat along a wall facing a thrumming lineup of jostling, sometimes smelly diners waiting their turn to chow down. No one stayed longer than they had to.

Lunchrooms in turn gave rise to the cafeteria, where the idea of high volumes of food delivered in a large space made economic sense and appealed to the assembly line sensibility so in vogue at the time. The idea of economy, speed and ease snowballed through stand-up restaurants and self-service restaurants, culminating under the golden arches of McDonald’s. Automobile now superseded automat.

The last Horn & Hardart’s closed in New York about 10 years ago. If you missed the legendary experience, you can still catch a glimpse of it at the Smithsonian Institution, where the original automat Horn and Hardart imported is on display. Otherwise, franchises for a Horn & Hardart’s coffee shop are available if you’ve got $29,000 US in your pocket. The continuum continues, with caramel cappuccinos superseding cheeseburgers superseding coconut cream pie.

SIDEBAR:

Take out this local legend

When Nat Bailey launched Canada's first drive-in restaurant, the White Spot, in 1928, he was running well ahead of the golden arches. His evolution to that moment also echoes the story of fast food in North America.

Nat’s mother was a cook and baker in those railway eating houses where you had 10 minutes to eat. His dad worked the carnivals.

When Nat had to help out with family income at age 12 he first sold hot dogs and popcorn at the Vancouver ball park that’s become his namesake. Eventually he transformed his 1918 Model T truck into a travelling lunch wagon, parking it at Lookout Point on SW Marine Drive. People out for a Sunday drive paid a dime for a hot dog, a nickel for an ice cream.

One customer who didn’t feel like walking over to the truck yelled out for service and the next day Nat had three energetic young people taking orders from the parked cars. Because they "hopped to it" they earned the name carhops.

Nat opened the first White Spot drive-in on Granville Street at 67 th Avenue. In a log cabin on the site, customers could see a big joint of beef roasting on a spit.

To deliver the food out to hungry diners, Nat invented a long tray, using cedar planks painted white, that could be carefully slid through the open car windows and balanced on the sills. Voila, instant dining room on wheels and another brilliant Canadian moment.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who likes the clunk a pop can makes when it drops out of a vending machine.