Horn & Hardart kicked off the fast-food revolution from Center City on this week in Philly history
Joe Horn and Bavarian Frank Hardart opened their first “Automat” on Chestnut Street on June 9, 1902. The chain had more than 165 locations at its peak.
At the turn of the 20th century, Philadelphia opened Pandora’s lunch box.
A young and ambitious Philly native, and his older and more-experienced partner, led the United States into the fast-food era from a storefront at 818 Chestnut St.
Their approach appealed to this new, faster-paced society, and looked toward the future.
Joe Horn, all of 27 and flush with money from his widowed mama, realized his dream and started his own restaurant. He placed a newspaper ad asking for experienced help, and 38-year-old Bavarian Frank Hardart, who had worked in kitchens in New Orleans and up and down the East Coast, answered:
“I’m your man.”
The first Horn & Hardart location, a tiny luncheonette at 39 S. 13th St. across from Wanamakers department store, opened three days before Christmas in 1888. Hardart cooked it up, and Horn dished it out.
Its success spurred them to open more lunchrooms around the city, and to build a central commissary where nearly all the food was prepared before it was shipped to their other locations, ensuring uniform quality and recipes, creating a streamlined supply chain, and keeping costs low. They would incorporate themselves as the Horn & Hardart Baking Co.
As their company grew, the duo became enthralled by a new machine. The Swiss-designed concept, manufactured in Germany, was based on the premise of delivering food automatically. We would recognize it as a kind of primitive vending machine.
And with this innovation they opened their first “Automat” in Center City on June 9, 1902.
The machine, essentially a bank of little windows, was filled from the back by staffers with sandwiches and desserts. The customer in front thumbed a nickel or two into the slot, and lifted the glass window to retrieve their meal.
At its peak in the late 1950s and early ’60s, the chain counted more than 165 locations — Automats, cafeterias, and retail food shops in two major cities: Philadelphia and New York.
Eventually hamburger drive-ins and drive-throughs as well as other leaps in fast-food franchising became the norm, and Horn & Hardart couldn’t keep up.
“Fast food has peaked,” Joe Lichtenstein, who briefly rescued the company in the late 1980s, told the Daily News in 1987. “How many times can a guy eat a hamburger?”
While his prediction for the industry as a whole was grossly incorrect, this attitude led to the rest of the company folding by 1991.
In recognition of the restaurant’s place in U.S. food history, a 35-foot piece of the original Horn & Hardart Automat on Chestnut Street is housed today in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.