Open for Breakfast, Dinner, and Supper · Always Something Hot
818 Chestnut Street · Philadelphia · A.D. 1924
Step right up to the wall. Eighteen polished compartments, each lit warm from inside, each one holding a real hot dish ready at the drop of a coin. There is nobody to wave at, nothing to order — only the brass handle, the click, and the meal that was waiting for you all along.
In Your Coin Purse:$1.50
On Your Tray:0 dishes · 0¢ spent
Need more nickels? Step to the cashier:
¢
No compartments stocked in this section just now — please try another row.
From the Desk of the Manager
Horn & Hardart Baking Company · Philadelphia
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Hot Meals at the Drop of a Coin!
Picture, if you will: an ornate brass facade three stories tall, electric lights blazing along the cornice, a great round clock face above the doors. Inside — gleaming compartments to the ceiling, a marble floor, the steady cheerful crowd of clerks and shopgirls and bricklayers all moving in time to the soft click of nickels and the swing of small glass doors.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Friends,
I have been with the company since the Eighth Street house opened in 1902, and I will tell you something I have not yet stopped marveling at: a girl who stitches collars for nine dollars a week walks into our hall, drops a single nickel, and walks out with a plate of macaroni and cheese as good as any she could buy on Walnut Street for forty. She is fed. She is warm. She has not asked anyone's permission and she has not been hurried.
The machinery in the wall is only a wall. What we are really building — what my men polish every dawn before the doors open — is a place where a working family eats well and pays only what they have, and where the only intermediary between the soup and the spoon is a brass handle and a moment of one's own choosing.
It is, I confess, the proudest thing I have ever done.