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The Automat may have represented the pinnacle of modern convenience in a pedestrian, urban setting, but the setting of the 1950s was increasingly neither pedestrian nor urban. In the 1950s, the popular imagination, popular culture depictions, and many real people began to move to the celebrated new hybrid of the city and the country: the suburbs.
In this new suburban environment, homes were all grouped together in massive residential developments, and places of commerce, work and recreation were elsewhere - often in the adjacent cities - and certainly not within walking distance. Therefore, suburbanites were increasingly dependent on the vehicle of the American Dream: the automobile.
Fast food had to accommodate this, and the 1950s saw the explosion of stand-alone burger joints, may of which employed drive-through or drive-in models. The drive-through, where cars pass by a window, receive food, and keep going would eventually become the dominant model, but what was very popular in the '50s was the drive-in: where cars would park outside the restaurant and food was brought to customers who would eat in their cars.
This process contrasted sharply with the Automat, where one dispensed the food oneself, and could loiter in a crowded and anonymous cafeteria space at any hour of the day or night. Like everything in the suburbs, the drive-in was promoted as more 'safe,' domestic, family-oriented (can you imagine Bill Burroughs going to cop at a drive-in?). The drive-in was a visible space, at once public (cars, often convertibles, lined up alongside each other) and also extremely individual (families or groups of kids confining themselves to their own cars): a perfect example of the trend of suburbanization.
by Palmer Foley
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