GOTHAM GETS OUTDOORS
• • •
and finds ope rat ors have
already pro ~ i de d f or
their sUDlDler enjoYDle nt
v ia the coin chute route
By IRVING SHERMAN
Towering beehives of offices, crowded flats,
dingy stores as well as smart ones, and a
vast, teeming population elbowing its way
through the world's largest city-New York.
And when spring and summer come, your
New Yorker is not far behind. He gets right
out i'n the open as much as he can, and
Gotham's coinmen, taking the hint, have
gotten there first.
Our old friend, the penny arcade, is back
in full blast on the sidewalks Al Smith
made famous. Starting at old Tammany
Hall's stamping ground-Fourteenth Street
-and stretching up to Fiftieth and Broad-
way, heart of the theatrical district, the ar-
cade has dusted itself off to hold its own
with the best of 'em, from Mutoscope mov-
ies to Gypsy fortune teller, name-plate
maker, punching bag, lung-tester, and that
real old wheeze, the electric
shocker to fill the rundown
veins with juice_
But it isn't qui'te the same.
There are marble tables galore,
and here's a new contraption, a
rocket-to-the-moon, maybe. No,
the attendant, his coins jingling,
says it's a Sky-Fighter, the thing
the R.A.F. uses to talk to Hitler.
The arcade, we've been told,
is the poor man's home. By the
same token, homes for the poor
are on the increase in Gotham,
and the tendency is to give the
player a run for his money, a
bona fide thrill, a real test of
his skill. The jump from , Four-
teenth to Forty-second Street is
short, and here, sandwiched be-
tween one of Ziegfeld's old
hang-outs and Jimmy Cagney
talking out of the side of his
mouth, is something that won't let you
down. With a flea circus on one hand, and
on the other baseball's Alexander the Great
and Jack Johnson proclaiming Joe Louis is
a bum whom he could lick with one hand
if given a chance, the coin machine comes
through with a lustre and appeal all its own.
There's no barker, and none is needed. All
you do is follow the crowd and you're in.
A goodly share of Sky-Fighters are here
as a sort of piece de resistance, and just to
show there's no hard feeling, an enterpris-
ing chap named Gordon has moved in near-
by and outfitted an emporium specializing
in these devices.
On Sixth Avenue, the prodigal son come
to life, is the arcade run by Al Marin, who
matter-of-factly states he is competing with
Rockefeller - and to prove it, diagonally
across are the Center Theatre, the new
Roxy, and Rockefeller Center i'tself, with
millions of dollars of entertainment stacked
up against the little spot on the left side of
the street-and doing a solid job.
Arcades in N ew York are something-
these only sketch the whole group - but
they are not the whole story of the outdoor-
play market. Scale machines, of course, pre-
dominate in the outdoor picture, adjacent
to subway entrances, barber poles, and other
likely eye-catchers and pedestrian-pullers.
Then, numerically, follow the candy ma-
chines-sleek, competent merchandisers by
Canteen, du Grenier, Stoner, Rowe, U-Need-
A-Pak, and others. Handkerchief and per-
fume vendors traditionally still hug termi-
nals and other large centers, yet in Man-
hattan some 6000 yending machines other
than the units mentioned are registered in
outdoor spots_ Out of 16,000 games in Man-
hattan and the Bronx alone, and extending
into the southern tip of Westchester, 1500
have found outdoor spots and more are be-
i'ng placed. In Brooklyn, the register of
about 11,000 games find 1100 placed easily
for pedestrian play_
An appeal to adult taste characterizes the
outdoor coin machine location of today, in
contrast with the old idea of catching the
Upper right: Feed the d ucks! A Mills Vendor
in the Bronx Park makes it right feeding.
Above: Seventh A venue and an educational
blitzkrie g. Below: Next to the Amsterdam , an
old Zie gfe ld t heatre - coin machines pull
them in.
children. The psychology in this is charac-
teristic of the industry throughout the coun-
try. As a result a few operators have tried
their luck with gum, candy and pistachio
vendors in locations where the adolescent is
an infrequent visitor-in liquor stores, for
example- pI acing them whcre
they offer no obstruction but
where they can be easily ob-
served by the location owner. A
simple device for this purpose
is a mirror so hung that with
his back turned the owner can
watch machine and customer,
and even the machines outside,
as a precaution against undue
tampering.
Operators are more or less
unanimous that one of the rea-
sons for the increasing spread
of outdoor vending, both in
games and merchandisers, is
greater mechanical perfection.
In olden days a standard comed-
ian used to gag: "I was in the
subway this morning, when all
of a sudden a big husky guy
topples right over." And the
stooge: "What happened? Did
someone hit him?" Comedian: "No. He put
a penny in one of them gum machines and
a piece of gum came out."
No more! The machines click off like
Father Time-and your money comes back
if the merchandise is gone. So the machines
move outdoors, to stand alone, and on their
own bases.
Perha ps one of the most interesting strides
taken in outdoor vending is the machine
Mills Novelty has installed in the Bronx
Zoo-not for the visitors, but for the ani-
mals-whereby the Zoo sought to nab both
birds with a single stone.
Kind-hearted visitors have been the bane
of the park for years because what you
think a seal wants to eat and what the seal
thinks it wants are two different things.
The Bronx Zoo has lost many an animal
through the crackpots who offered the in-
habitants such tid-bits as rubber balls and
pearl buttons, and such conscientious but
misguided souls as believed lollypops and
chocolate drops were good for stomachs re-
quiring vegetables or fish . Finally a new ad-
ministration decided to do something about
the evil, and at the same time solve the
Zoo's budget problems.
The answers are the graceful, red-painted
vendors supplying bags of food for a nickel.
CO IN
MACHIN E
REVIEW
15
FOR
MAY
1941