A Vital City

Detroit, 1940

Chrysler advertisement, 1940

Eighty-three-year old Philip Levine has been named Poet Laureate of the United States, the latest of many honors. A native of Detroit, Levine worked in various industrial jobs, including the night shift at an auto factory, an early experience that became one of the major topics of his poems. Levine’s remembers Detroit as a “vital city,” as illustrated by five menus from the spring of 1940, showing a prosperous Midwestern city hard at work and play. 

Two Unexpected Guests

New York City, 1885

Henry Irving

Having just completed his second highly-acclaimed American tour in April 1885, Henry Irving was scheduled to depart for England. Irving was one of the most celebrated English actors of the Victorian era, prompting a group of prominent men to host a farewell banquet in his honor at Delmonico’s. Those who subscribed for the dinner received an admission ticket, a menu card, and a seating chart, showing who would be there and where they would be seated. Anyone perusing the seating arrangement in advance may have been surprised to see two of the names—the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, the aging Congregationalist minister who was opposed to the theater, and twenty-six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt who left the city the previous year after experiencing a personal tragedy.