NEW YORK—Lunch hour culture in New York City starting from 150 years ago is the focus of a free exhibition opening Friday at New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.
More than a century ago, New Yorkers began carrying pocket watches and employers introduced punch clocks. Speed, not quality, became the forefront of lunch, as well as proximity. This was especially so as merchants and other businessmen moved north, and away from their homes, to conduct business.
Culinary historian Laura Shapiro is the co-curator of the exhibition. “Lunch Hour NYC is the best kind of food story, full of familiar landmarks but with a history that’s new to most people,” she said in a release. “If you want to explore the place where food, people, and New York City come together, it has to be lunch.”
The exhibition’s website said that after the changes in society, workers could no longer easily get home for a meal at noon. “‘Quick lunch’ made it possible for them to bolt through a plate of food and get right back to making money.”
Later, starting in 1912, automats became a popular destination for workers on their lunch hour. The stores, such as Horn and Hardart, featured rows of compartments where, for a nickel, a fresh sandwich, hot dish, or dessert could be pulled out and enjoyed.
“By the 1940s there were automat restaurants all over the city,” the exhibition website said. “Children and tourists adored them, office workers depended on them, retirees gathered in them, and New Yorkers with nothing to spend on lunch stirred free ketchup into hot water and called it soup.”
When New Yorkers began moving to the suburbs, and companies opened their own cafeterias, the automats declined in popularity. The last automat was shut down in 1991.
The Lunch Hour exhibition includes a reassembled section of a Horn and Hardart automat. It also includes information and photos about the beginning of New York’s school lunch program (started in 1908)—which set the course for the nation—and the history of “some of the icons of New York lunch,” such as hot dogs, pretzels, pastrami, and Jamaican beef patties.
For more information about the exhibition, visit: http://ept.ms/L53dDU
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