Lunch Hour NYC - Exhibition About the History of the Fast-Paced NY Lunch at the New York Public Library

Automat, coin-operated vending machine from Horn and Hardart, the most prominent automat chain

New York Deli

New York Pretzels

Lunch Hour NYC is an ongoing exhibition at the New York Public Library in midtown Manhattan about the history of the fast-paced New York lunch. The exhibition looks back at more than a century of New York lunches, when the city’s early power brokers invented what was yet to be called “power lunch,” local charities established a 3-cent school lunch, and visitors with guidebooks thronged Times Square to eat lunch at the Automat. Drawing on materials from throughout the Library, the exhibition explores the ways in which New York City—work-obsessed, time-obsessed, and in love with ingenious new ways to make money—reinvented lunch in its own image. The exhibit continues through February 17, 2013. (Exhibition description from the NYPL website).