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New York City,
1912-1915
Reisenweber’s played a pivotal role in American popular culture during the second decade of the 20th century. While it is remembered today as the venue where jazz was introduced to a broader audience in 1917, its historical significance began earlier, during the dance craze that swept New York in 1912. It was the first restaurant to offer its patrons a dedicated space for dancing, which it vigorously promoted. The energy of this period of dramatic social change is captured in an audio slideshow featuring over ninety pieces of ephemera from 1912 to 1915. While
most of the items reflect the location on Eighth Avenue at Columbus Circle, some pieces come from the properties it
managed on Coney Island—the Brighton Beach Casino and the Shelburne Hotel—and
the Ziegfeld Follies of 1915, which it catered.
St. Paul, Minnesota
1888
In January of 1888, a group of gentlemen held a dinner at a private club in St. Paul, Minnesota to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. This wartime executive order, issued by President Lincoln, freed the slaves in the Confederacy. The menu for the event included not only the bill of fare and list of toasts but also a remarkable seating chart. This chart featured the names of participants as well as leaders who were remembered for their roles in the struggle for freedom, symbolically present in spirit.
Budapest,
1914
The departure of the steamship on September 12, 1914 was a memorable sight, as 126 American Red Cross nurses stood in their white caps and gray uniforms along the rails where the sea wind blew open their red-lined capes, creating a line of scarlet on the side of the vessel. World War I had erupted a little over a month earlier and now they, along with 30 surgeons and boxes of medical equipment, were sailing from New York on what was called a “mercy mission.” Striving to stay neutral, the United States deployed the American Red Cross to provide medical aid to both sides of the conflict in Europe. Once on board, they were organized into units that would establish military hospitals in seven locations—Paignton, England; Pau, France; Kiev, Russia; Kosel and Gleiwitz, Germany; Vienna, Austria; and Budapest, Hungary.2 A battered menu bears witness to this largely-forgotten expedition that embodied a humanitarian ideal which was ahead of its time.
New York City,
1866
The vault at Pfaffs where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse
While on the walk immediately overhead pass the myriad feet of Broadway…
—Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman went to Pfaff’s almost every night between 1858 and 1862 when working on the early editions of Leaves of Grass.2 He occasionally read one of his latest poems to the writers and artists who regularly assembled in this underground beer hall. The free-spirited and unconventional group was brought together by Henry Clapp, editor of the Saturday Press and a champion of Whitman’s work. Other habitués included actor Edwin Booth, painter Elihu Vedder, psychedelic drug pioneer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, cartoonist Thomas Nast, and humorist Artemus Ward, now regarded as America’s first stand-up comedian. And since Pfaff’s was one of the few saloons that welcomed women, Clapp’s coterie was diverse for its time. Writer Ada Clare was a charter member of this artistic clique as was Adah Isaacs Menken whose “naked lady” routine made her the highest earning actress of the era. Given the importance of Pfaff’s, I was thrilled when a menu recently came to light. My first impression was how different it looked from those that previously catered to the city’s literati. This was truly a German menu, reflecting the arrival of new attitudes and foods from Europe. Interestingly, it marked a pivotal moment in our creative past.
New York City,
1901
Booker T. Washington signed the cover of this menu from a dinner held in his honor at the Aldine Association, a New York club, in January 1901. The autograph adds a personal touch to this keepsake from what must have been an inspiring event. The dinner was hosted by The Outlook, a weekly magazine that had recently published a series of autobiographical essays by Washington. By the time of this occasion, the essays had been reworked into book form and were about to be published as Up from Slavery. In this autobiography, the renowned educator recounts his experiences as a child born into slavery during the Civil War, the challenges he faced in pursuing an education, and his efforts to establish vocational schools. Although the book enjoyed commercial success, subsequent events would soon reveal that its release had done little to ease the enduring racial prejudices held by many whites in the South.
New York City,
1949
The Limited Editions Club awarded its fifth gold metal at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in November 1949. According to the rules, the award was given to an American author of a book published during the last five years that the judges believed “most likely to attain the stature of a classic.” The previous two winners were Ernest Hemingway for “For Whom the Bell Tolls” in 1941 and E. B. White for “One Man’s Meat” in 1944. While the eight-page booklet from the presentation ceremony in 1949 does not reveal who won that year, it does contain an interesting menu from a talented writer in his own right.
1919-1929
“The Jazz Age is over,” declared novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1931, nine years after he coined the phrase. The prosperous era began in about November 1918, when the First World War ended, and continued unabated until the stock market crashed in October 1929.1 This period of cultural transformation marked the birth of modern America. Everyday life was broadly transformed by automobiles, telephones, motion pictures, radio programs, and household electricity. However, the arrival of modernity also sparked a powerful backlash. The conservative counterassault manifested itself in the anti-radical hysteria of the Red Scare, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, the ratification of National Prohibition, the passage of stricter immigration quotas, and the rise of Fundamentalism. Fifty menus reveal facets of this vast, complicated story. Some of them recall forgotten events; others provide unwitting evidence of societal issues that are with us to this day.
New York City,
1884
This comic illustration appeared on a menu from a dinner held by the Ichthyophagous Club in 1884.1 Active in New York from 1880 to 1887, this social group of prominent men dined once a year on unpopular types of seafood in order to “overcome prejudice directed towards many kinds of fish, which are rarely eaten, because their excellence is unknown.”2 The club comprised ichthyologists, who worked in the branch of zoology dealing with fishes, as well as naturalists, philanthropists, and gourmets. In fact, the seal in the cartoon is holding a bottle of Cordon Rouge champagne.
New York City,
1904
It was a bright, cloudless morning on June 15, 1904 when a sidewheel passenger steamboat named the General Slocum caught fire on the East River. Ten minutes earlier, it had departed from Lower Manhattan on an end-of-school-year trip to a picnic ground on the Long Island shore. As the steamboat passed East 97th Street, puffs of smoke started rising through the wooden floorboards. Rotten fire hoses thwarted attempts to put out the blaze; the lifeboats were tied up and inaccessible; and the life preservers were defective and of no use. One newspaper reported, it was “a spectacle of horror beyond words to express—a great vessel all in flames, sweeping forward in the sunlight, within sight of the crowded city, while her helpless, screaming hundreds were roasted alive or swallowed up in waves.” Almost all of the estimated 1,021 people who died were immigrant mothers and small children, hundreds of whom were never found. A rare menu from the General Slocum is dated the day after the disaster, one of the worst in American history.
Boston,
1852 & 1859
The Burns Club of Boston once held banquet on January 25 each year to commemorate the birth of Robert Burns. When the birthday fell on a Sunday, they celebrated the following day, as shown by this menu from the Stackpole House in 1852, two years after the club was established.
