Marshall Field & Company, Cloud Room Restaurant in the Chicago Municipal Airport (Midway).

In 1926 Chicago began leasing an airstrip for commercial purposes. A single cinder runway served airmail traffic. Chicago Municipal Airport was dedicated on December 12, 1927, offering mail, express, and passenger service.

Marshall Field & Company opened its Cloud Room restaurant, in the passenger terminal building of the Chicago Municipal Airport (Midway International Airport, today) on March 20, 1948. The night before the restaurant opening, Mayor Martin Kennelly was the guest of honor in the Cloud Room, a 3,600 square foot dining salon that overlooks the runways of the airport. Marshall Field & Company paid $90,000 ($1,020,000 today) to build out the second floor of the restaurant and $260,000 ($2,945,000 today) to equip it. Marshall Field & Company agreed to pay the city $2,596 or 5% of its gross business and 40% of its net profit.

NOTE: The above contract was a good deal for Marshall Field & Company with a captive audience. Between 1932 and 1961, Chicago's Midway Airport boasted the title of the "world's busiest airport." At its peak in 1959, the municipal airport served 10 million passengers.

1949 MENU TEXT AND PICTURES

Menu Cover

You will find in food and service ... the sky's the limit in the Cloud Room!

There are good reasons why this is true.

For a world on the wing, the airport is the front door to the city. Here the traveler by air gets his first, sometimes his only glimpse of Chicago. Like any conscientious citizen, Marshall Field & Company want this impression to be the best.

Fun for the young — and the young at heart!

That's why, just beneath the main control tower in the terminal building, you will find the Marshall Field & Company Cloud Room on the second floor.

It is an excellent restaurant in food and service — a showcase for Chicago. From your table in the windowed bay of the Cloud Room, you can sit and watch the drama of the skyways, the giant silvered planes that gather here from the far ends of the earth. 

Business lunch in the Cloud Room is a pleasure.

You can relax in comfort, dine to a gourmet's taste, admire the vermilion and gray decore, the shapes and shadows of Alexander Calder's mobile in brass, "Flight in Motion." 

Alexander Calder's mobile sculpture, “Brass in the Sky.”

NOTE: Alexander Calder's mobile sculpture, “Brass in the Sky,” was placed in storage. Field's installed it in the Northbrook Court store. In 2001, when Target Corporation took over Marshall Field's in 2004 the mobile was donated to the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. Subsequently, the museum auctioned off the mobile fetching $2 million in 2005 from a private collector.

If you wish, you can inspect the shining stainless steel kitchens, as up-to-date and serviceable as a DC-6. Restaurant men have come from every part of the country to see them.

View of Marshall Field's Coffee Shop on the ground level.

Quick service around the clock in the first floor Coffee Shop.

Sightseers, too, who come to watch the spectacular, real-life show from the promenades around the airport, will find a meal in the Cloud Room a fitting climax to their visit — especially since this meal takes place behind a wall of glass, one of the vantage points for viewing the coming and going of the giant airships.

The big ships pass before your eyes.

All in all, the Cloud Room is a modern, cosmopolitan dining place for the traveler, the casual visitor, and the sightseer alike. It is because we want the Cloud Room to reflect this city's spirit of hospitality and this store's effort to be of service to the community.

MARSHALL FIELD AND COMPANY ARTICLES

INDEX TO MY ILLINOIS AND CHICAGO FOOD & RESTAURANT ARTICLES.

By Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

The Lake House, Chicago's First Luxury Hotel and Fine Dining Restaurant.

The Lake House opened in 1835 as the first luxury hotel and fine dining restaurant, becoming famous for its French cooking. The hotel stood on the north side of the Chicago River on what was then the lakeshore, across the river from Fort Dearborn near where the Wrigley Building stands today.

This photograph was taken between 1857 and 1859 when the Lake House was a Hospital for the poor. The Rush Street bridge opened in 1857.

This impressive brick hotel was four stories in height plus a basement and elegantly furnished at $90,000 ($2,792,000 today). The building was surrounded by one of the only sidewalks in the town.

The men whose "Lake House Association" enterprise built the hotel and restaurant were Gurdon S. Hubbard, John Harris Kinzie (John Kinzie's son), General David S. Hunter (First Lieutenant, Fifth Infantry, Commandant of Fort Dearborn (December 14, 1830, to May 20, 1831), Dr. William Bradshaw Egan (Illinois House of Representatives (1852-1854), and Major James B. Campbell (real estate investor). 

The Lake House Hotel was the first restaurant in Chicago to serve live oysters, transported from New England by sleigh in 1838.

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I've been asked several times how fresh oysters could come from the East Coast.

First of all, oysters were kept alive on Ice while being transported. If an oyster's shell opens, they die. Dead oysters carry dangerous bacteria for humans.

Chicago's first fresh oysters were delivered in 1838 by sleigh from New Haven, Connecticut. This spurred Chicago’s earliest love affair with the oyster. By 1857, there were seven "Oyster Depots" and four "Oyster Saloons" in the city, and the population was 109,000 in 1860. Peaking in the Gilded Age of the 1890s (population of 1,001,000 in 1890) and waning with Prohibition, oyster consumption was plentiful in old Chicago. Believe it or not, ice cream parlors also served oysters because they had all that ice.

In the 1890s, express-service refrigerated train cars shipped oysters and other perishable foods around the country. The cars did not come into general use until the turn of the 20th century.

The Lake House was Chicago's first foray into fine dining and offered some East Coast imports to their well-heeled clientele. It was the first restaurant in Chicago to serve dinner in courses and to use white tablecloths, napkins, menu cards, and even toothpicks.

Michigan Street was renamed Hubbard Street (440N 1 to 299E)
CLICK THE MENU FOR A LARGER IMAGE

The first Rush Street bridge, a swing bridge, opened in 1857 (destroyed in an accident in 1863), but before then, a ferry at the Lake House, said to be "the safest and the pleasantest on the river," was free.

In the words of James Buckingham, a sophisticated British gentleman who visited in 1840, the hotel was "superior . . .  excellent . . .  Elysium (paradise)."

On November 30, 1845, a group of Scots in Chicago gathered at the Lake House to celebrate the Scottish culture and identity on Saint Andrew's Day. They formed the "Saint Andrew Society," similar to the one on the East Coast.

The Lake House was sold to the Sisters of Mercy in 1850. On February 27, 1851, the "Illinois General Hospital" was given over to the charge of the Sisters of Mercy. On June 21, 1852, the Illinois State Legislature incorporated Mercy Hospital and Mercy Orphanage. In May 1853, finding the hospital (Lake House) inadequate to accommodate the increasing number of patients, the Sisters moved the patients to a large frame building on Kenzie Street.

John Johnson and Frederick Knickerbocker purchased the Lake House building and reopened the hotel and restaurant.

A shocking calamity occurred on September 19, 1856. At about seven o'clock in the morning, the boat at the Lake House ferry capsized while crossing from the North to the South Side of the river. It was crowded with passengers, all men, and most laborers going to work. Many succeeded in swimming ashore. Others were picked up by boats. It was supposed that a large number drowned, but as only ten bodies were subsequently found, it was concluded that the fatalities were not as bad as first believed. 

The boat was not the regular ferry boat in use because the regular boat was being repaired. The substitute was the old flat scow ferry that had been used at Wells Street. It really was not fit for use. Those who crowded upon the boat in such numbers did not know its unseaworthy character. They were so impatient to cross that they took the boat out of the charge of the ferryman and left him on the shore. When the boat was a few feet from the shore, the ferryman slacked the line as a vessel approached. The coroner's verdict declared this act imprudent, but it could not have caused the accident. The over-capacity boat immediately careened because it became unbalanced as the weight shifted, and all of the passengers were thrown into the river.

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 leveled the building.

INDEX TO MY ILLINOIS AND CHICAGO FOOD & RESTAURANT ARTICLES.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.