Repast by Michael Lesy

Author:Michael Lesy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-09-30T04:00:00+00:00

Daily menu, Terrace Garden Restaurant, New York, 1901

One neighborhood — a food and entertainment district west of the city’s Loop, running along Halsted and West Madison Streets — served Chicago’s working poor and its underclass. A Chicago Tribune reporter wrote in 1908:

With hundreds of all night restaurants and lunchrooms and scores of nickel and dime theaters, several vaudeville and dramatic houses, and numerous dance halls, the district immediately west of the river is the liveliest in Chicago on a Saturday night . . .

Streetcars and elevated roads carry thousands of pleasure-seekers from every one of the two score nationalities which make up Chicago’s population . . . Men and women and children of all ages and descriptions seek and find their friends and acquaintances here . . . The crowds of foreign-born and native American citizens intermingle and defy all attempts at classification . . .

The restaurants and lunchrooms [of the district] are the first to arrest attention . . . They run from the five-cent quick lunchrooms to the type of restaurant where one can get a meal “as good as any one in town.” In respect to color and atmosphere, they run from [the] hobo’s den to [the] bohemian café where literature and art, poetry and philosophy are discussed in Greek and Russian . . .

In the matter of food, these restaurants vary greatly. With coffee and sinkers [donuts] as a starter, there are many places where spaghetti is all the go and garlic is the prevailing odor. Jewish chop suey and lamb a la Athens are dominant on Halsted between Harrison and Twelfth Streets . . .

Here, the young working men and women [hurry] to and from the theaters and nickelodeons. In spite of the cold [and] slushy weather, white skirts are rustling and the fluttery girl makes for the dancehall with a happy laugh . . . Penny arcades are crowded with men and children. Particularly sensational and suggestive pictures have three or four men waiting for their chance to drop a penny in the machine and see them . . . On every corner, you will find some man trying to sell you something. There, a woman will tell you your fortune for a nickel, while here, a young man . . . having had his legs cut off by a street car [sits and begs].15

An entirely separate district — a six-block Restaurant Row, east of the river, on Randolph Street, adjacent to the Loop — served an “Arabian Nights Tale” of cuisines to thousands of middle-class diners, day and night. From the Tribune in summer of 1909:

An accurate count showed that [there were] thirty-nine different eating establishments [on Randolph] between Michigan and Fifth Avenues. Six different nationalities are represented by these establishments and 27,000 diners are accommodated by them every day of the year . . .

The daily clientele of these places vary from 75 to 2,500 in number; the customers range from Chinamen with chop suey tastes to Orthodox Hebrews who touch only “koshered” meat .

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