Lost Cafeterias of NYC

Marcia Bricker Halperin documented the waning years of New York City’s self-service dining establishments. Among the locations she photographed between 1975 and 1985 are Horn & Hardart automats and Dubrow’s, a popular family-owned chain of cafeteria-style restaurants in Manhattan and Brooklyn that closed its doors in 1985. Her work sheds light on the sense of community that Dubrow’s Cafeteria offered to an aging and assimilating Jewish population, still cognizant of their families’ immigration from European shtetls at the turn of the twentieth century yet striving to fit into contemporary American society. Taken with a twin-lens reflex and a 35mm film camera and relying on natural and available lighting, Halperin’s images include portraits of customers alone and with friends and of workers behind the counter and on the cafeteria floor. Other photographs capture the midcentury atmosphere of the eateries’ graceful and ultra-modernist interiors. It was not unusual for Dubrow’s elder clientele (which included ex-vaudeville performers and prize fighters, taxi drivers, bookies, and Holocaust survivors) to arrive dressed in lipstick, leopard pattern coats, kerchiefs, and fedoras and table hop to gossip and dine—‘kibbitz & nosh’—on gefilte fish, kasha varnishkes, or blintzes.