Mary E. J. Colter at Chicago’s Union Station
Much of the work architect and interior decorator Mary E. J. Colter (1859 – 1958) did for the Fred Harvey hospitality company included selecting—and sometimes designing—furnishings for their hotels and restaurants. As the company expanded into railway station concessions, so did Colter’s work.
Construction of Chicago’s Union Station was completed in 1925 at a cost of $75 million—roughly $1.4 billion today. The building’s architect was Graham, Anderson, Probst & White. Colter had previously collaborated with the firm when helping the National Park Service create a comprehensive plan for Grand Canyon National Park in 1922.
Postcard of lunchroom, c. 1923
In this station, Fred Harvey operated seven restaurants, a drug store, a cigar store, a flower shop, a perfume store, a men’s furnishings shop, a book shop, a gift and novelty shop, fruit and pastry shops, a barber shop, and a beauty shop. Mr. R. J. Raney of the Fred Harvey architecture department was credited with helping to develop the station’s commercial spaces in the terminal.
Photo of restaurant waiting room from The Hotel Monthly, June 1935.
Colter’s decoration of the Fred Harvey spaces received positive reviews. The Hotel Monthly described the waiting room to the station’s main restaurant as “one of the most charmingly furnished and decorated foyers to a restaurant that can be found in any catering establishment or hotel. The decorations were all created and supervised by Miss Mary E. J. Colter, whose genius is expressed in the decoration and furnishment of the entire Fred Harvey System of hotels and eating houses.”
Colter not only selected furniture for Fred Harvey’s restaurants in the Chicago Union Station. She also designed the uniforms worn by the shops’ clerks and by the waitresses in the Little Restaurant. Colter would later design dresses for the waitresses working in the Alvarado hotel’s cocktail lounge.
This would not be Colter’s last work in a train station. In 1937, Colter designed a restaurant and cocktail lounge in the Kansas City Union Station. In 1938, she designed a cocktail lounge in St. Louis’s Union station; and in 1939, Colter designed a restaurant and cocktail lounge in Los Angeles’s Union Station.
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Sources:
“Fred Harvey, Caterer, Chicago Union Station,” The Hotel Monthly, August 1925: 38-73.
Al Chase, “Union Station to have Seven Eating Places,” Chicago Tribune, July 21, 1925: 102.
“J. F. Huckel to Miss M. E. J. Colter” (June 8, 1927), and “J. F. Huckel to Messrs. Meem and McCormick” (June 16, 1927): MSS 790 BC, box 3, folder 6, Meem Job Files. Jere L. Krakow Fred Harvey Company Research Collection, Meem Job Files, and American Indian Oral History Collection. Center for Southwest Research & Special Collections, University of New Mexico.