Kibbitz & Nosh: NYC's Vanishing Cafeterias Photographs By Marcia Bricker Halperin​

“Kibbitz & Nosh: New York City’s Vanishing Cafeterias,” an exhibition of over 25 photographs by Marcia Bricker Halperin, documents the waning years of New York City’s self-service dining establishments. Among the locations photographs 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. Halperin’s black-and-white photographs recall some of Hopper’s most iconic oil paintings and both artists capture figures at popular eateries in isolated contemplation or private social interaction. As Hopper’s canvases from the 1920s to ‘50s suggest, midcentury New York was stippled by restaurants offering low-priced food and beverage. Their growth coincided with swelling immigration, an expanding middle class and workforce, and the upward independence and evolving roles for women. Kibbitz & Nosh also sheds light on the sense of community that Dubrow's 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. Members free; Adults $10; Senior $8; Students $6; children under 12 free