NYPL Point: Lunch Hour NYC

This edition of Point draws from The New York Public Library’s Lunch Hour NYC exhibition (June 2012 – February 2013) to look back at more than a century of lunches: when New York’s early power brokers invented what was yet to be called “power lunch,” when local charities established a three- cent school lunch, and when visitors with guidebooks thronged Times Square to eat lunch at the Automat. Food is a mirror on ourselves: it reflects the people who cook it and the people who eat it. Work-obsessed, time-obsessed, and in love with ingenious new ways to make money, the city reinvented lunch in its own image.