Tag Archives: 1930s

May 19, 2010 · 8:44 pm

Between courses: dining with reds

In July of 1928 the Communist Party in the United States opened a public cafeteria on the ground floor of their headquarters in New York City, home also to The Daily Worker. The headquarters, known as the Workers’ Centre, was at 26-28 Union Square East and also contained a cooperative barber shop in which the barbers did not accept tips.

The restaurant was called Proletcos Cooperative Cafeteria. Proletcos was said to be a name created by a garment worker who combined the first two syllables of PROLETarian with the CO of cooperative, then added an S.

It’s not surprising that Communists would select a cafeteria as their preferred format for a restaurant. There is something socialistic about cafeterias, with their self-service and no-tipping customs. They were widely adopted in industrial plants and among working women’s organizations of the 1890s. Two home economists created a chain of cooperative cafeterias in NYC in 1920, called Our Cooperative Cafeterias, which dispersed an annual rebate to customers who were members. Evidently it was unrelated to the Communists’ project. Proletcos, whose prices were about average for a cafeteria, gave a 10% discount to its 600 shareholders. Its workers were guaranteed an 8-hour day and good working conditions.

Proletcos was enlarged in November of 1928 and was able to serve nearly 6,000 meals a day. Artist Hugo Gellert, a lifelong Marxist and co-founder of The New Masses magazine, created a mural for the expanded and refurbished restaurant in which sturdy workers and Communist heros such as Sacco and Vanzetti, John Reed, and Vladimir Lenin, all 10 feet tall, loomed over the dining room (pictured). According to a story in the New Yorker, the cafeteria was quite up to date, with tile floors, brass railings, and modern light fixtures.

The cafeteria had a short life lasting only a couple of years in which it served workers, many of them from the garment district, along with students who liked to hang out, drink coffee, and discuss the issues of the times. It evidently came to an end in 1930 when the CP moved its headquarters from Union Square to East 13th Street.

© Jan Whitaker, 2010

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February 26, 2010 · 8:20 pm

Righting civil wrongs in restaurants

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro NC (pictured) which set off a wave of similar protests across the South and turned the tide against segregated eating facilities. But these were far from the first such actions. Integration of American eating places came about from a patchwork of regulations that sometimes successfully impeded discrimination and by the courageous actions of individuals and groups, black and white, who negotiated with, sued, picketed, and physically occupied restaurants beginning in the 1870s.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which offered the strongest protection against discrimination in restaurants up to then, was neither sudden nor was it evidence of the steady march of progress. A federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 was repealed by the Supreme Court just eight years later, after which Southern states enacted separate accommodations laws (Jim Crow), while other states passed or amended civil rights acts.

Few state civil rights laws covered eating facilities, the most controversial area of public accommodations. White public opinion was strongly against blacks and whites eating together in restaurants. Segregationist sentiment grew stronger around the turn of the last century and again in the World War I period when many black Americans migrated North for jobs. Blacks lodged relatively few protests because the odds of winning in court were poor. Also, anyone brave enough to challenge discrimination needed enough social stature to refute the accusation of simply being a low-class ruffian. By the “Catch-22″ logic that long prevailed, any black person who went into a white-only restaurant was considered of poor character since proper black people knew better than to go where they were not wanted.

The following are examples of challenges against racism in restaurants that nevertheless occurred in the 20th century before passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

1926 Organized by a cook, the black staff of an Alice Foote MacDougall tea room in NYC unites behind a black waitress discharged for serving a black customer. They all walk out, forcing MacDougall to change her policy.

1929 The president of the United Colored Socialist party is accosted by a waitress as he and a black associate enter the Mills Restaurant in Cleveland. Restricted to a table on the mezzanine, they are treated hatefully and a hefty service charge is added to their bill. They win in court after refusing to give up despite six postponements.

1935 Black activists test a new PA civil rights law in Philadelphia, leading to the arrest of four employees at Horn & Hardart’s Automat who seat five white parties while two black people stand by and wait for an hour. At Stouffer’s three black patrons receive their meals smothered in salt. The manager asserts that all Stouffer’s meals are “highly seasoned.”

1936 After two black New Yorkers are refused service at a restaurant in Bel Air MD, 17 bus loads of fellow (but white) WPA workers en route to a Washington conference protest. The demonstration is peaceful yet 40 state police armed with machine guns and tear gas arrive and arrest the two blacks.

1943 Howard University students sit-in at a “white trade only” eatery in DC, a city in which few restaurants are open to people of color including the cafeteria in the Department of Justice.

1943 The newly formed Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) initiates a sit-in at the Jack Spratt café in Chicago where one of CORE’s founders, executive director James Farmer (pictured in 1965), had been treated rudely the previous year.

1946 The United Packinghouse Workers union (CIO) files charges against Hackney’s Seafood restaurant in Atlantic City on behalf of two black delegates refused admittance and files false-arrest charges against the police department which arrested protesting union picketers.

1947 After 11 bias suits against Bullock’s department store in Los Angeles fail to alter the store’s discrimination policy, CORE initiates sit-ins in the store’s tea room. Several white bystanders join the protest by informing waitresses they will wait to be served after the black patrons.

1951 Long-time civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell (pictured), in her late 80s and using a cane, joins picketers in front of Washington DC’s Hecht’s department store, which does not permit its many black customers to use its cafeteria. The store changes its policy in 1952.

1958 Dime store lunch counters are integrated in Louisville KY after unpublicized sit-ins, but other restaurants continue to refuse to serve blacks.

1960 Martin Luther King is among the 51 protesters arrested at the famed Magnolia Room at Rich’s Department store in Atlanta. A few months later the store changes its policy.

1964 As passage of the bill nears in the House, Ku Klux Klan members sit-in at a Krystal Hamburger stand in Atlanta to prevent SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) members from occupying it.

Read more about discrimination in American restaurants.

© Jan Whitaker, 2010

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December 3, 2009 · 10:36 pm

With haute cuisine for all: Longchamps

Staked by his brother-in-law, gambler Arnold Rothstein, Henry Lustig expanded from the wholesale produce business into restaurants in 1919. His first location, at 78th and Madison Avenue, was a property that belonged to Arnold. By 1924 he had two more restaurants, one conveniently near Saks Fifth Avenue. An advertisement informed “Madame or Mademoiselle” that at Longchamps they would find light French dishes as well as “soothing quiet, faultless service and a typically ‘Continental’ cuisine” that was above average “yet … not expensive.” While not exactly cheap, Longchamps was considered easily affordable by the middle-class.

The chain continued to grow rapidly after the repeal of Prohibition when it hired top modernist decorators and architects to give it ultra-sophisticated chic. With the assistance of German-born artist and designer Winold Reiss and architects Louis Allen Abramson and Ely Jacques Kahn, New York City gained some of its most glamorous restaurant interiors of the period. Reiss showed considerable talent in disguising irregular spaces with mirrors and murals, multiple levels, dramatic lighting, and flashy staircases that lured people cheerfully downward to dine below ground (see his interior sketch and menu cover below). From 1935 to 1940 Longchamps opened seven new restaurants, including two on Broadway, one at Lexington and 42nd Street, and one in the Empire State Building.

Cocktail bars were no small part of the slick 1930s Longchamps formula. The chain’s ninth unit at Madison and 59th Street, a site vacated by Reuben’s, had a long oval bar stationed above floor level in the middle of the dining room. With 50 bartenders staffing the bar, the restaurant itself seated 950 diners. When it opened in 1935 a Longchamps advertisement immodestly called it “The Outstanding Restaurant Creation of the Century.” Architectural critic Lewis Mumford found its red, black, gold, and yellow color scheme — carried out even on chair backs and table tops — overdone, but he sensed that his was a minority opinion and he was almost certainly right. Among others, it soon became a meeting place for James Beard and his old friends from Oregon.

During the war Longchamps’ did a booming business. Lustig, it turned out, was siphoning off cash as fast as he could and keeping two sets of books, one for him and one for the IRS. Keep in mind that he owned racehorses and had named his restaurants after a famous Paris racetrack. The game was up in 1946 when he was handed a bill for delinquent taxes and fines of more than $10M and sentenced to four years in federal prison. Nine restaurants, along with a good stock of wine (the Times Square unit alone was said to have 120,000 bottles in the cellar), miscellaneous pieces of Manhattan real estate, and the chain’s bakery, catering business, ice cream plant, candy factory, and commissary, then passed into the hands of a syndicate which owned the Exchange Buffet.

In 1952 a Longchamps was opened in Washington, D.C., becoming one of the few downtown restaurants in that city that served Afro-American patrons. About this time another Longchamps opened in the Claridge apartments on Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square. In 1959 the chain was acquired by Jan Mitchell, owner since 1950 of the old Lüchow’s. He revealed that the chain, which consisted of twelve red and gold restaurants, a poorly trained kitchen staff, and a diminishing patronage, had been losing money for the past five years but that he could revive it as he had done with Lüchow’s. Under his ownership the New York units began offering guests the dietary concoction Metracal in their cocktail lounges, as well as free glasses of wine and corn on the cob with their meal. After a couple of years the chain was in the black.

In 1967 Mitchell sold it to the Riese brothers, who owned the Childs restaurants and, with new corporation president Larry Ellman, were in the process of buying up classic New York restaurants – Cavanagh’s in 1968, Lüchow’s in 1969, and others. In 1969 the old Longchamps were mostly turned into steakhouse theme restaurants. The restaurant at Madison and 59th, though, was renamed the Orangerie, dedicated to “hedonistic New Yorkers,” and given a “festive mood of Monte Carlo.” Its $8.75 prix fixe dinner came with free wine, “Unique La ‘Tall’ Salade,” and after-dinner coffee with Grand Marnier. In 1971 a single Longchamps operated under that name, at Third Avenue and 65th Street, but I doubt it had anything in common with the classic Longchamps of the 1930s. The holding company “Longchamps, Inc.” vanished in 1975.

© Jan Whitaker, 2009

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October 16, 2009 · 8:09 pm

You want cheese with that?

pattymelt60sLAIt seems as though almost all of history’s food forces have cooperated to give cheese top billing in restaurant meals today. Only one cheesy custom failed to catch on, that of finishing a meal with cheese and fruit as was done in small French and Italian restaurants in the later 19th century. Craig Claiborne argued in 1965 that even the best New York restaurants didn’t know how to handle the cheese course. They had poor selections which tended to be old, overripe, or served too cold. One restaurant admitted their chef was in the habit of popping cheese straight from the fridge into the oven to soften it. Restaurateurs that Claiborne interviewed insisted that Americans didn’t like cheese after a meal. I’d agree that most prefer their after-dinner cheese in the form of cheesecake.

pumpernikscheesecake352Cheese has been a staple food in American eating places probably since the first tavern opened. Regular meals were served only at stated hours but hungry customers could get cheese and crackers at the bar whatever the hour. For “Gentlemen en’passant,” the Union Coffee House in Boston promised in 1785 that it could always furnish the basics of life: oysters, English cheese, and London Porter. Across the river in Cambridge, the renowned Othello Pollard, aka “the Prince of Creams,” specialized in epicurean cheesecakes in 1805. By the 1850s, English chop houses in the East were famous for their Welsh rarebits, while pie came with a wedge of cheese just about everywhere.

When Germans immigrated to America in the 1850s and 1860s they brought their fondness for Limburger, often ridiculed in the press. The Italians introduced grated Parmesan for pasta dishes, as well as risotto, macaroni and cheese, and cheese-filled ravioli. In the late 19th century cheese became a standard item at “free lunch” counters in saloons, and many allegedly exhibited a solitary dried-up cheese sandwich as proof of their status as genuine restaurants during anti-saloon crackdowns in the early 20th century. In the 1920s toasted cheese sandwiches of all varieties became luncheonette favorites.

cheeseburger1960Cheeseburgers were a product of the fast food industry of the 1920s, claimed as inventions by both the Rite Spot of Southern California and the Little Tavern of Louisville. Strange there aren’t thousands of other contenders because what was there to invent, really? Cheeseburgers were strongly associated with Southern California before WWII — Bob’s Big Boy of LA introduced cheeseburgers in 1937. Another step forward came in the 1930s when a bill was introduced in the Wisconsin legislature requiring restaurants and cafes to serve 2/3 oz. of Wisconsin cheese with every meal costing 25 cents or more. In the same decade Kraft Cheese was among major food producers providing restaurants with standardized recipe cards.

pizzahutpizzaIt was after WWII that cheese spread its melted gooeyness everywhere — on pizza, hamburgers, Mexican dishes, and pasta, until today, well … just picture TV advertisements for TGI Friday and Olive Garden. Mass-produced cheesecake made its restaurant debut around 1950. McDonald’s introduced cheeseburgers in 1960. In the 1970s vegetarian and health food restaurants fell in love with dishes such as 7-cheese meatless lasagna, cheese-stuffed cauliflower, and cheese-smothered veggies on brown rice. From 1960 to 1978 annual cheese consumption doubled from 8.3 to 17.4 pounds per capita. Now we each eat close to 34 pounds of cheese a year, mainly on pizza and hamburgers.

© Jan Whitaker, 2009

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